I read a lot of non-fiction in addition to genre fiction, and I consider myself a lifelong student of history as well as being well-versed in current events. Non-fiction books should always be fact-checked. What about fiction books? And who’s responsible for the fact-checking?

Ultimately publishers and authors are both responsible for fact-checking. Both share the royalties for their books. Publishers often say it’s the responsibility of the authors, that they don’t have the staff to do it. The authors do?

I used to comment on current events in this blog. In those blog posts, I was both publisher and author. Fact-checking was on me. I don’t have any staff, but I fact-checked a lot. It took a lot of time. That’s why I stopped writing those op-ed-style posts. I can commiserate with authors and publishers. It takes time to fact-check. But it must be done.

So much for non-fiction where there’s no doubt that fact-checking is necessary. But what about fiction? A lot of it, especially historical fiction, takes historical events and builds a story around them. From Fred Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, even mystery and thriller novels use historical facts to give human substance to a story. Forsyth’s facts about the Algerian war were few but correct; Brown’s were invented, not by him, but by others, hoaxes he bought into. Forsyth’s were never questioned, probably because he was a journalist who believed in facts. Brown’s only sin probably was swallowing a bunch of inventive hearsay, and that was only discovered after his book was published.

I’m not even going to discuss more recent and egregious circumstances that have scandalized the reading and writing public. Some authors and publishers have taken a lot of heat, to say the least. Of course, if neither one fact-checks, who will? Politicians are often fact-checked by the media, and occasionally the media checks books to. But with thousands of books published every month, checking every book is as likely as my inventing antigravity.

What can readers and writers do? The important actions are vigilance and skepticism. Both readers and writers can practice those.

When I wrote Son of Thunder (see below), I was skeptical about many events, especially dating from the time of St. John the Divine. I had the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli express some of that skepticism. But I portrayed both the “facts” that I could find, often checking multiple sources. I also tied them together with legend and my own storytelling, a common procedure in historical fiction. But, like Dan Brown, I might later learn there are unintentional gaffes. Historians are welcome to point them out to me; so are readers. I’ll acknowledge that new information, first in this this blog and then in any following editions of the book.

Fact-checking is especially important for the science and technology used to underpin sci-fi. For example, I have a gaffe in common with Andy Weir, author of The Martian. His storm at the beginning of that novel couldn’t do the damage because of the low atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet; the shuttle landing in my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion is equally improbable. We both misrepresent the Martian atmosphere. In Rembrandt’s Angel, I described a BMW as a British motorcar. I knew better—it’s German, of course—but I had been reading analysis of BREXIT’s consequences. One was the that BMW parts, many made in the UK, might have to be made elsewhere when UK leaves it. In the book, BREXIT has already occurred, so that might end up being a gaffe too!

The farther we go forward in time and the farther we go back, the less we’re certain about facts. The former is often extrapolation, the wilder the time lapse. The latter is due to legend being confused with history and just the lack of hard facts. Readers and the media can keep authors and publishers honest; and authors and publishers must police themselves the best they can. That’s all hard to do with the number of books that are published every year!

***

Comments are always welcome.

Son of Thunder. Art detective Esther Brookstone, now retired from Scotland Yard, becomes obsessed with finding St. John the Divine’s tomb using directions left by the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Esther’s search, the disciple’s missionary travels, and Botticelli’s trip to the Middle East make for three travel stories that all come together in one surprising climax. Esther’s paramour, Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden, has problems with arms dealers, but he multitasks by trying to keep Esther focused and out of danger. The reader can also learn how their romance progresses, as well as travel back in time to discover a bit about Esther’s past with MI6 during the Cold War. Available in print and ebook versions at Amazon and the publisher, Penmore Press, as well as in ebook versions at Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.). Or visit your favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

People often know I’m an author after they know I’m an avid reader—for one thing, I present myself that way. In polite conversation, somewhat rare in this politically charged environment, we often turn to culture, usually a safe topic. After chatting about movies and musicals—often not blockbusters, by the way, because I rarely see them—we often move on to books. Then comes the pat on the arm and the statement, “You must read….”

Here’s why I hate that expression: it reflects the business model of the NY Times Book Review. Out of curiosity, I sometimes look at a book review there. I all too often say, “This plot [and or characters] doesn’t [don’t] resonate with me.” Maybe these are just thoughts where I’m subconsciously wreaking revenge against the many agents who expressed something like this in their many rejections! But the books in that Review have gone through an extensive acquisition and editing process, so they must be better than other books, right? Wrong!

I’ve studied all that the Times will acknowledge about the way they select books for their Review. (I’m not talking about ads. The Times will take anyone’s money.) Even my old POD, Xlibris, has those—their authors paying exorbitant fees to have their books appear among a few dozen. Ugh! The Times’s selection formula suffers from the fatal flaw of American Idol and other audience participation mega-events: “voters” in this case are book buyers, but only ones selected by the Times who frequent a sampling of bookstores. How can a big city newspaper afford a secret and obscure sampling technique that supposedly determines a book that’s worthwhile to read. It can’t because they don’t have the staff for that. Their Review comes down to telling the American public “You must read…” without a damn thing to back it up.

Of course, the NY Times Review is just a toady of the Big Five publishing conglomerates, most of them located in Manhattan. I’m not against the paper in general, but “All the news that’s fit to print” doesn’t apply to books, and makes the Review ignoreable in my mind’s eye. I actually take pride in rarely reading books they recommend that the reading public should read. I’ve never paid attention to pop contests from American Idol and Dancing with the Stars to the Times’s book editors and their arcane sampling techniques. I’ll determine which books I want tor read, thank you.

To be fair, the Review isn’t the only culprit in this business. Amazon tries to force books down my throat, presumably based on my previous buying history, but they only use keywords and have never read the books. I also don’t trust those stacks in bookstores announcing “Books Selected by our Employees.” Why take anyone’s word for your book buying? You can browse in a bookstore and read cover material and peek inside. Even Amazon formalizes this a bit. Readers have all the tools that are needed to be educated book buyers. They don’t need anyone telling them what to read.

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Did you miss this post-apocalyptic thriller. Ex-USN and LA County Sheriff’s forensics diver emerges from a dive to find all her colleagues dead. She had to survive in this world, one of death and destruction. But maybe the remnants of the US government are more dangerous than the lack of food and water and feral humans? Available in ebook and print and ebook format at Amazon and the publisher, Black Opal Books, as well as in ebook format at Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) Also available at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them to order it).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Don’t cripple it by trying to write it in a month! Even the venerable NY Times (yes, the newspaper that often has its names attached to “bestseller” in some arcane and suspicious indication of quality) bought into NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month.” The challenge (and it belies the name a bit): Write a novel in a month. The best I can say about that nonsense is that it might motivate someone to get started writing. The worst? Continue on.

Most of you know I’ve written a few novels. I’ve never written one in a month! I’ve never met or corresponded with a serious writer who says she or he did this. It’s just not done. Maybe a short story or possibly a novella, but never a novel. While dependent on genre, a novel is a creation of at least fifty or more kwords (that’s 50,000 words—most are longer) that are not randomly placed on the page. Monkeys couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s plays; they can’t write novels either, because they’re much longer.

Of course, “serious writer” are two words to emphasize here. It took Michelangelo two years to sculpt David, the novel-equivalent in Renaissance art, chiseling away one chip at a time, even though he was an energetic twenty-year-old. I’m not pretending to compare genre fiction to that magnificent statue in the Uzzi, but no one can write a novel in a month. “Only 2000 words per day,” you say. Yeah, anyone can type 2000 words per day, but is anything of quality produced? Maybe you think that you just need to get the words down and afterwards you can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse (adages like that shouldn’t be in your novel, by the way, unless one of your characters uses them in dialogue…a character trait exhibited by some people).

Even if you’re a pantser like me, which gets you going after you have some idea about plot and characters, writing a novel in one month isn’t equivalent to just typing 2000 words per day!  (You don’t know what pantser means? One decision you have to make is whether to be a pantser or a plotter. The Times’s article focuses on writing software that almost enforces the latter, which can be more time consuming. I’m not going to debate the merits of either one. And did they count the time for the learning curve you have to climb to use the software?)

For some novels, I’m more “in the zone” in my writing than with others. I can type long stretches of prose almost semiconsciously as if the characters were whispering their own stories in my ear. That might produce days where I add up to 10 kwords to a novel. Those days are exceptional, and that zoned-out state often leads to prose requiring a lot of content editing.

“Oh, I don’t have to content edit. I can do that at the end. Or I’ll leave it to the editor.” Poor editor! If I were an editor, I’d refuse to edit a novel written so poorly that it’s an illogical mishmash of random thoughts, but you can work anyway you want to. Just remember: Content editing is only the first step in editing. Copy editing comes next before you even should contemplate submitting your one-month miracle. And there’s a lot more after that. And leaving all editing to the end can make your life miserable.

I guess my main problem with NaNoWriMo is that it trivializes the novel-writing process. Its hypothesis is that everyone has a novel in them, and they just have to dedicate some focused time to get it written. It’s not that easy, folks! While it can be a lot of fun, there’s a lot of mind-sweat and skills involved in writing, novel writing in particular.

So go ahead and try to write your novel, but do it at your own pace, enjoying the process, that uplifting feeling of creation. Just don’t put artificial constraints on yourself by joining in NaNoWriMo. If your novel is any good, you’ll have plenty of time to fret with schedules and deadlines afterwards!

***

Comments are always welcome.

Son of Thunder. Art Detective Esther Brookstone has a new obsession. Recently retired from Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Division, she becomes obsessed with finding the tomb of St. John the Divine following directions left in the frame of a painting by Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Three parallel stories from three different eras—St. John’s clandestine missionary work, Botticelli’s own search for the tomb accompanied by his parish priest, and Esther’s search—all come together at the end.

Here’s one reviewer’s summary of the novel:

“Moore’s deft interweaving of history, religion, fable and fact makes for a fascinating read, highly recommended for readers who favor a thriller that makes them think beyond the page.”– Barbara Bamberger Scott, in her Feathered Quill review.

Available in print and ebook format at the publisher, Penmore Press, and Amazon, as well as in ebook format at Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.). You can also find it in you favorite local bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

As I was watching PBS’s “Shakespeare Uncovered” analysis of Hamlet a while ago, I realized how much that play has influenced writers. Revenge is a common plot device, and often, like in Hamlet, it doesn’t turn out well for the avenger. Hamlet’s moralistic dilemma so aptly portrayed by Shakespeare (for example, Hamlet can kill his uncle in one scene, but refrains from doing so when the uncle is praying, thinking that will send his father’s assassin to heaven instead of hell). But in other works, protagonists handle similar moralistic dilemmas well, so, even if the antagonist is killed, readers feel s/he deserves it.

Examples of the play’s influence abound. For example, this might be something we’ve missed about Star Wars in the first three movies of the series: Luke Skywalker is Hamlet; Darth Vader is the evil uncle, even though he’s really Luke’s father; and Obi-Wan has the role of Hamlet’s father (a ghost after Vader slays him). And Luke is avenging the slaughter of his aunt and uncle by Vader’s troopers. I for one would have never come up with that interpretation without that PBS show! (Of course, Star Wars also borrowed a lot from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov.)

I also realized after that PBS show that Hamlet has influenced me, in my own Rogue Planet and A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games, for example. Mind you, the last time I read Hamlet was long ago in a Shakespeare course I took as an undergrad at UCSB. But I now realize my unconscious played a trick on me, at least in those two books.

Rogue Planet features the son of a murdered king who must save his people from a brutal and oppressive theocracy. The role of the uncle in Hamlet is assumed by the religious leader (any similarities to current and similar 21^st century theocrats are intentional, of course).

In Mind Games, and also in a sci-fi context, a young girl assumes the role of Hamlet who strives to find her adopted father’s murderer. The antagonist, who’s not known at the beginning (a break with Hamlet because it’s a YA sci-fi mystery), plays the role of the evil uncle.

All these examples are variations on Willy’s famous play about assassination and revenge. And my analysis of these examples (you probably can think of many others) never would have occurred without that PBS show. Thank you, PBS and the foundations who sponsor the series!

***

Comments are always welcome!

Son of Thunder. This sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel from Penmore Press has Esther Brookstone in trouble again. She become obsessed with finding the tomb of St. John using directions she finds in the frame of a painting by Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Three parallel stories occur—the first about St. John’s missionary work (first century), Botticelli’s own hunt for the tomb (Renaissance), and Esther’s search (twenty-first century). They are all brought together by the end of the novel. Available in print and ebook format at Amazon and the publisher and ebook format at Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.). Also available at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them to order it).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

H A P P Y   H A L L O W E E N!

There will be ghosts and goblins cruising around your neighborhoods tonight. Please be careful. And, if you’re adults heading off to a party, be responsible: Don’t drink and drive.

***

I was already a mature adult when computers, computing, and the internet came into being and began to dominate our lives. I remember that “blog” originally was an abbreviation for “bio log.” They often took the form of someone going through their waking day, describing everything that happened, maybe even with a videocam—in other words, some narcissist wanting to make public the boring details of her or his existence. Now you’ll find the narcissists on Facebook or Twitter (the most extreme one is on Twitter). And then people complain they’re losing their privacy!

Now “blog” is defined as “a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.” Hence this is a “blog post,” i.e. one of those updates. But I thought it would be fun to show how my writing and reading days are organized most days. I think that’s what it means to be a full-time writer…emphasis on full-time. I might be wrong, though, so please comment. And there’s nothing wrong with being a part-time writer. Been there; done that.

6 a.m. Our usual wake-up time. (We’re morning people.) News goes on, NY Times is brought in, and we eat breakfast, usually with two mugs of coffee and cereal. Boring stuff mostly, but I get ideas from the news and the Times, and the two mugs of java are necessary to jumpstart my writing batteries (occasionally three).

8 a.m. Email, answering what’s not spam, especially authors, editors, and publishers; maybe a bit of social media; a few posts to Facebook and Twitter.

10 a.m. Maybe writing some short fiction or blog posts.

12 a.m. Lunch—usually a sandwich, with soup added in the winter.

1 p.m. “Serious writing” starts, i.e. working on a story…if not before. Will it become a short story, novella, or novel? I don’t care during the writing, and I don’t worry about word count until I’m done. If there’s no WIP, I start a new one after consulting my notes. I might have to do some research for settings, which include both space and time. That might require reading Science News, or the online Wikipedia or Britannica (often to check Wikipedia), or using Google.

2:30 p.m. My batteries might be getting low. If not, I keep going; otherwise, back to email and social media. I don’t add more java because I wouldn’t sleep. Editors, publishers, and reviewers keep me awake enough. Marketing stresses me out.

3:30 p.m. Batteries are definitely drained by then. News—CNN at first, then local, then national—and dinner. I’m sometimes cooking (barbecuing); otherwise my wife is.

7:00 p.m. Email check on my Kindle. Nothing going on? I read, unless there’s something worthwhile on TV (rare, and mostly on PBS). Earl Grey Tea or two fingers of Jameson. No java. R&R is the key.

10:00 p.m. Bed.

Rinse and repeat the next day.

(more…)

Screenplays—who’s writing them? I’ve often said in these blog pages that many good movies are adaptations of a good book into a screenplay. They can also come from screenplays where the author(s) are good at storytelling. But can a screenplay be written by someone who can’t write?

Apparently—and those screenplays often lead to bad movies, ones without much of a plot and with characters who seem to be wooden caricatures of humanity. And a movie is often just an audiovisual spectacle without themes or substance.

Film is a complicated media. The two hours of a typical movie hinders good storytelling in general. How do you shoehorn a good story into two hours? I can’t do it. I wouldn’t even try. When I see a movie where it’s been done, I’m amazed. Most of the time I see failures.

Maybe short stories lead to better movies? Most of the Phillip K. Dick stories that were made into movies—Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, and so forth—came from shorts. Compare those original Star Trek episodes to the drivel in Star Trek: The Next Generation and those of the other TV shows in the franchise. Guess what? Most of those original episodes were based on short stories written by real sci-fi writers—Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, and so forth—or by Gene Roddenberry, who had good storytelling skills. Sure Kirk was an atypical, womanizing captain, while Jean Luc was more sedate, commanding his Number One as a true ship’s captain. But those first episodes were great. Ellison’s “The City on the Edge of Forever” is a classic.

The other night I rewatched King Solomon’s Mines, starring that Dr. Kildare guy and a giggly, silly Sharon Stone. It was a bumbling farce that never captured the wonder that I had reading the original novel, one that predated Indiana Jones by decades—Indy owes more to the book than that movie, although I’ll have to admit some of that old score often sounded like John Williams’s.

Is it worse to start with a good story and ruin it by turning it into a terrible screenplay (let’s not mention what often gets left on the cutting room floor) than just writing a bad screenplay to begin with? I don’t know. But I often wonder if screenwriters have the skills to tell a good story. The results are so often disappointing.

Or maybe the directors just want to destroy a screenplay that tells a good story? Some of them—I’m thinking of the legion that just likes to blow things up—probably wouldn’t know a good story if it bit them in the butt. Hollywood should confront these questions…and maybe those directors.

And then we can ask if the moviegoers care. Do they want a good story? Or do they just want an audiovisual spectacle—raunchy sex and violence in gory detail? Movies are dramas, after all. Would you go to a play that has no plot or interesting characters? Why do they write screenplays and make movies that have none?

Maybe I’m asking too much? Movie making is a business, and as long as customers are willing to pay to see movies, everything’s okay. Right? If I apply that same logic to books, we’ll see readers not caring about plot and characters in their fiction reading, yet still buying such stories. That could happen too. Hopefully I’m not around to see it…or meet those readers.

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Did you miss this? Ex-USN and forensics diver for the LA County Sheriff’s Department Penny Castro surfaces from a dive for a body only to find death all around her.  Follow her adventures—her struggles to survive and create an adopted family–in this post-apocalyptic thriller brought to you by Black Opal Books. Available in print and ebook format at Amazon or the publisher’s website, and in ebook format at Smashwords and all their affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lenders (Overdrive, etc.).  Also available at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Both authors and publishers seem to be afraid of serious themes in these days of political correctness and fear of something controversial that internet trolls attack. The #MeToo and anti-cultural appropriation troops strike fear in everyone about saying anything that might set them off. Anti-vaxers even resort to calling new vaccine laws racist. Everyone has a cause, and many are fanatic about their causes. My two main causes are gun and climate control. 90% of Americans want reasonable gun control, and climate change threatens everyone’s children and grandchildren, so you would think that those causes are not only bipartisan, they’re universal concerns. Think again!

As a consequence, it seems hard to find a well written book with some red meat in it these days. Okay, vegans and vegetarians will probably come after me for using that metaphor. Change it to “…with some serious topics in it….” I’m not talking about political things necessarily. Something like my novella “Fascist Tango” would be attacked mercilessly if I made it into a novel and sold it, but any sane person knows both the extreme left and right can both become fascist—just consider Maduro’s Venezuela and Pinochet’s Chile. No, I’m speaking in general about themes that appear in the national dialogue, or even worldwide.

By avoiding serious themes, books become bland. Orwell’s 1984 or Koestler’s Darkness at Noon could never be published today…or, if they were published, they’d be relegated to the bottom of the pile of books Amazon promotes. If a book has good vs. evil, it’s all light and darkness with no gray, reminding me more of The Perils of Pauline than serious and complex storytelling. Romance sells; cozy mysteries sell, focus on “cozy” meaning not controversial. Sci-fi sells if it reduces to space opera; fantasy succeeds if it’s something like Star Wars or Game of Thrones—there be dragons over yonder, but they’re not all that bad…and they know smoking can affect their health.

It all reduces to supply and demand, of course. Econ 101. There are few readers remaining who want fiction with serious themes. Maybe it’s because they live a reality where they’re bombarded with serious themes every waking hour, or relive them in their nightmares. They don’t want to read about them in the books they buy. They want escape from all that—comfort food, not exciting taste challenges.

These are over-generalizations, of course, observations about the average in the distribution of reading behavior. There are still tails for that statistical distribution, often determined by niche books, but do the tails lead to bestsellers? I conjecture that happens so rarely that I use the NY Times Book Review to filter out books I do NOT want to read. And I’m proud to say I haven’t read one book nominated for the National Book Award—they all look like pablum, and I’m not Oliver asking for more porridge.

A book can be exceptional for many reasons. It can’t be exceptional by trying to please everyone, though. That leads to blandness. Such books might entertain, but they don’t stick in my mind as being exceptional. Fun to read? Maybe. Exceptional? No way. It’s as if authors and publishers are participating in the “small talk” Eliza Doolittle must master in My Fair Lady—inoffensive jibber-jabber that doesn’t qualify as intelligent speech.

Where will it all end? Perhaps we won’t need the soma from Brave New World. Perhaps Bradbury’s book burners in Fahrenheit 451 won’t be needed either. Blasé books will rule the day—they mostly do that already—and then books will disappear, killing something that makes us human…good storytelling. Everyone will be happy, happy, happy discussing nothing. I don’t see it ending well, but that’s just my opinion. What’s yours?

***

Comments are always welcome.

Son of Thunder. What’s unusual about this book? It’s the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel. It features Esther Brookstone, now retired from Scotland Yard, who is now obsessed with finding St. John the Divine’s tomb using directions left by the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Esther’s search, the disciple’s missionary travels, and Botticelli’s trip to the Middle East make for three travel stories that all come together in one surprising climax.

Esther’s paramour, Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden, has problems with arms dealers, but he multitasks by trying to keep Esther focused and out of danger. The reader can also learn how their romance progresses, as well as travel back in time to discover a bit about Esther’s past with MI6 during the Cold War.

History, archaeology, romance, religion, and art make for a tasty stew in this moving, moralistic mystery/thriller novel published by Penmore Press. Available in print and ebook formats at Amazon and from the publisher, and in ebook format at Smashwords and the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lenders (Overdrive, etc.). Also available at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

After I have a manuscript (MS) ready—a first draft if you like, although my first draft is my last because I content edit as I go—I self-edit, which is copy editing done before I ever send the MS to editors and beta-readers. (There are additional editing steps if I submit the MS to a publisher.) For my self-editing, I think algorithmically. I know my own gaffes fairly well, so I search for them.

A lot of those gaffes can be called excess baggage. While they’re reflections of my bad writing habits, I’ve often noted them in other authors’ works as well. You’ll see what I mean by “excess baggage” after some examples.

the [search on “the “—note the space; you don’t want to find “there,’ for example] This article is often unnecessary, especially before plurals and collective nouns. By searching for it, I can immediately determine whether it’s essential. If not, I kill it. I often do this at the end of my self-editing, because I overuse “the” (my Spanish influencing my English). Try it. I’m always surprised at how many times it’s superfluous in my prose.

very [search on “ very ”] I’m lazy, and often use this overused adverb to create a superlative. Sometimes I have to do that, but many times a perfectly good superlative exists.

thing Here I’m talking about using the word alone. Try to find something more specific.

stuff Same comment.

anyway(s) People often overuse this in ordinary speech, so it can be a character’s quirk. Don’t overuse it in prose.

because I tend to overuse this too, because I try to restrict my use of “since” to time (a logical quirk that I believe makes sense). Maybe someone can point out an alternative that’s not “since.” The solution I often use is to make two independent clauses, especially when I’m writing a hard-boiled mystery.

then Often not needed, even in a series of actions occurring one after the other. In “if…, then” constructions, “then” is often superfluous too…except for mathematicians.

even Often used to create some kind of superlative-conditional construction, and it’s often superfluous too. Alternate “even though” with “although,” or simply “though,” for variety.

hue Looking for a synonym for “color”? Don’t overuse this one.

incredible Overused in dialogue and prose. Other words can be used.

sudden(ly) When I find these in my prose, I know I’m being lazy. There are alternatives—abrupt(ly, for example—although be careful with overusing those –ly adverbs (you can search on “ly “ too).

just Often added for emphasis, but often not needed.

almost Don’t overuse. There are alternates like “approximate” and “about.” Mix them up.

real I don’t like to see superlatives created with this, in my prose or anyone else’s. “Real crazy” in dialogue is okay if it’s a character quirk, though.

seem Often overused. There are alternates, and don’t use it for “appear,” especially if you’re writing about visualization.

appear The flip side: Minimize the use of this to replace “seem.”

quite Often used by Brits to create a superlative, but it’s quite superfluous…or use the superlative.

felt Often used for “thought,” “believed,” or “perceived”—in my case, my being lazy. I try to replace it with body language where possible, as part of the general tactic of show-don’t-tell.

up, down [search for “up “ and “down “] Often redundant.  “Down to the waterhole” is only appropriate if the waterhole is downhill, not if it’s a pub.

out [search for “out “] This is often redundant too.

out of Replace with “from” where possible.

joint collaboration [search for “joint”] Joint is often redundant…unless it describes that pub.

make corrections Just use “correct” unless those corrections are special cookies you’re baking for me.

activity Often redundant, as in “sports activity.”

whether or not The “or not” is redundant.

mostly unique This is just wrong. “Unique” can have no modifiers—kill the “mostly.”

prohibited altogether This is just wrong again—kill the “altogether.”

vast difference, vast wasteland Kill the “vast.”

for the purpose of Ugh! Use “in order to” or just “to.”

(more…)

You’ve seen it in movies: Some action scene or a murder starts things off in a mystery or thriller film, or a heated verbal battle between two lovers that makes you wonder why they’re together in a rom-com. Then on the screen some words like “two weeks earlier” or “a year ago” appear. The film industry didn’t event this—it’s been used in books for a long time.

Such scenes are the “hook” that writing tutors talk about ad infinitum. They make the moviegoer or reader ask, “Why is this happening?” Depending on the quality of the hook, the viewer or reader wants to find out the answer to that question because the hook is completely lacking it. The answer comes later in the story and breaks the timeline when it does.

The use of a hook plus subsequent break in the timeline has been used for a long time, but not too long. Christie didn’t use it. She often built up to murder and then Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would step in and figure out who did the foul deed. Same for H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novels that would be called thrillers nowadays. His Alan Quatermain stories, for example, unlike their Indiana Jones descendants, built up the story from the beginning. Indy’s hooks often have nothing to do with the main story, although that snake phobia in a book might appear as a prologue.

That technique is effective too. A murder occurred long ago and became a cold case, only to be solved years later. A thriller can begin with an event from the main character’s childhood or far past. There has to be a connection to the “present day,” of course, and it still has to be an effective hook that’s there for a reason. But the break in the timeline between that hook and “present day” could be many years…or eons in the case of sci-fi and fantasy.

This can be confusing to readers like the first hook plus timeline break mentioned, so writers have to clarify things. Words like “two weeks later” or “a year later” are now appropriate. In both cases, the writer wants the reader to say, “Why is this occurring?” or something similar, and not “This is confusing, so to hell with it!”

And switching into the new timeline, that is, returning to the book’s present, shouldn’t derail the train either. The prose flow should seem natural and inevitable. The reader must be smoothly carried from the hook to the new point in time. Writers can use phrases like I mentioned, isolated at the beginning of the chapter dealing with the present, after the chapter heading, or they can simply appear at the beginning of the first sentence in the chapter. The publisher or author might have a preference in how this is handled, but it must be handled.

The hook doesn’t have to be accompanied by a break in the timeline, of course. That’s the least confusing for a reader, but it might not be as effective. Can the hook be a prologue? Maybe, but I prefer it to be part of the first chapter, unless the events are far in the past, when your choice becomes a coin toss (warning: many readers and reviewers don’t like prologues).

I probably have examples of all these techniques in my novels. They can also be used to make short fiction more interesting. The basic idea is to grab the reader with the initial prose, maybe even the first few words. “Call me Ishmael” doesn’t satisfy readers nowadays (it has never satisfied me). The lesson I have learned during my many years of writing is the one I’m trying to convey: Storytelling exists in both space and time, and the reader must always place the reader in the proper location for both.

Honing our writing skills is a continuous process.

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Did you miss this? Ex-USN and forensics diver for the LA County Sheriff’s Department Penny Castro surfaces from a dive for a body only to find death all around her.  Follow her adventures—her struggles to survive and create an adopted family–in this post-apocalyptic thriller brought to you by Black Opal Books. Available in print and ebook format at Amazon or the publisher’s website, and in ebook format at Smashwords and all their affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lenders (Overdrive, etc.). Also available at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask for it.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Whether writers are self- or traditionally published, they’ll probably be spending a lot of time on their computer. While there might be a few who still write manuscripts longhand, nowadays it’s hard to be a complete Luddite.

My writing life has been a history of resistance to the computer, though. I never wrote an MS (manuscript) longhand, but I certainly made lots of notes for my storytelling on a lot of media that didn’t involve computers—napkins, post-its, backs of takeout menus, and so forth. I still make notes, of course, but I now transcribe them into MS Word files. And early on, if I sketched out story ideas or wrote some short fiction, I did it on my mother’s Remington or later on my Olympia electric. All that activity served as R&R from intense courses that today would be categorized as STEM in high school and math and physics at the college level. I’d made the decision to work on something in science and technology because I couldn’t imagine making a living as a writer (I still can’t, but we all know a few who can).

In those days, computers were either for business (COBOL) or science and technology (FORTRAN); it was also a punch-card era. I wouldn’t even have had access to a computer if I hadn’t worked part-time during my college years and full-time in the summer with an R&D organization. And no word processing on computers was done back then, only later on Wang machines especially designed for that (I wrote my thesis on one!).

My first very own word processing software was on a Color Computer. The only thing I remember about it was that it was all text with no special fonts, primitive software compared to MS Word, which, even when it first came out, tried to do everything. Laser printers didn’t exist either; my first printer was a dot-matrix beast best described today as a doorstop.

Time-travel now with me to the present day. We submit our manuscripts as email attachments, we receive edits as an email attachment, we check our masterpiece’s voyage to become a published book online, and we promote and market our books online. Even if we do some of those old-fashioned promo events like book signings or book fairs, we set those up on online. I can’t imagine how a modern author can avoid owning a computer and using the internet. Even Stephen King is on Twitter.

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