WHEN THE WORDS WON'T COME

Are you there?  Wanting to write, 

but not being able to put one word after another?

FOCUS

Do you have a clear idea of what is going on in your scene and where it is going 

and how it advances your story in the direction you want?

Perhaps you lost that focus in thinking of that great scene you're going to write 3 scenes from now.  

Go back a page to see if you lost your footing there.


CHANNEL

Pretend you are your protagonist and explaining to a stranger what is going on in this scene and why it is so important.  

If you discover it is not that earth-shaking, does it even need to be in your novel?

Pretend you are your antagonist and fuming or bragging to an associate about what is going on and why it angers or delights you.


NEVER RACE WHEN YOUR CAR'S BATTERY IS LOW


Write at your peak energy time whenever that time is.   

If morning is your time, better one page written then than trying to squeeze prose from a drained muse.  

Late hours your time to howl?  Squirrel yourself away from phone, TV, and email -- and WRITE!


PICK A LETTER

At random pick a letter and 

then in the next 60 seconds write as many words starting with that letter as you can.  

It starts you focusing and putting words on paper.


CLICHE MUCH?

In 120 seconds time write as many cliches as occur to you.  

Then, in the next 2 minutes re-state each cliche in as original a way as you can.  

You will amuse yourself and free up your muse.


RADIO ANNOUNCE

Go out to your backyard or look out your front window.  

Describe to an imaginary listening audience what you see in the most entertaining way.  

Does that cloud look like Miley atop her wrecking ball, but better looking?

Set a timer for 10 minutes and describe away, going for the heart or the laugh.  

That lame squirrel trying to pick up a walnut.  The puppy seemingly unaware its elusive quarry is its own tail.

Go for the exact color of the grass, the elusive quality to the robin's song.  The almost velvet feel to the spring breeze.


MAKE ANY SENSE TO YOU?

Conjure up a strong memory from your storehouse.  Then, write a sentence each of every sense you can remember from that time.

Listen to Mark Twain remembering Hawaii:

"For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear;

I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack;

I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the splashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago."


Weren't you there for a moment? Didn't you catch, not just the physical touch of the islands, but the spiritual one as well?


Listen to McCord speaking of Amsterdam from BURNT OFFERINGS:

 
"For the thing that I had become, Amsterdam was a wild mix of scents and sounds:

the tolling church bells that played snatches of hymns or Beethoven to mark the dying of the hour;

the smell of vanilla drifting off the stack of waffles as I walked by the cafes; barrel organs pumping happily off in the distance;

hearing a gaggle of laughing girls singing around a piano as I strolled by a bordello;

watching a lone professor on a park bench, closing his eyes, as he listened to the music of Sweelinck on a 17th century organ in the Oude Kerk.

But the lawman in me found other more disturbing sensations: the wave of cloyingly sweet cannabis that hit me as soon as I stepped off the train into the station;

the mewing of the drug addicts who had stumbled my way, begging for the price of just one more fix;

the fine smell of aged vomit rising from off the cobblestones as I had made my way along desperate prostitutes, past their prime,

but with no other way to make a living on the street of Stormsteeg;

the silent hollow-eyed girls staring at me from the windows on Molensteeg,

awkwardly bumping and grinding in an attempt to lure me in and keep their pimps from beating the hell out of them for poor sales.

After all, waterfront property costs to keep."

ABOVE ALL SIT DOWN AND WRITE EVEN 

IF IT BUT ONE SENTENCE.

I hope this has helped in some small way.

THE PARTY'S OVER

Cats are adorable, but I love puppies.

To a pup, they all share this cute behavior:

they will inhale the food from their bowl, tottle away, stiffen, 

and then come back to see if food has magically grown in their bowl.

Each time what is empty remains empty.


Same with Self-Publishing:  

THE PARTY'S OVER

Aaron Shephard  Aaron Shephard’s Publishing Blog states that self-publishing authors find themselves in an ocean of such books.

Self publishing is still a money machine—but nowadays, that’s mostly for Amazon, not authors.

Every book sells fewer copies, but the aggregate number of copies sold increases.

A relatively fixed amount of consumer dollars is being spread over a continually increasing number of books.

As the numbers of self-published author inflate, the individual author receives less and less, while Amazon happily rakes the profits in.

THEN WHY BOTHER?

TREASURE IN THE THRIFT SHOP principle:

Nation-wide there are a lot of readers.  We are approaching the holidays.  People will receive Kindles as gifts.

(And there are a lot of different kinds of affordable Kindles out there.)

Those new Kindle readers will start to read even more than they once did.

(It is a proven fact that once you receive a Kindle, you start to read even more since it is so convenient to bring everywhere)

You make your work affordable, and some will experiment with your novel if you avoid this fatal scenario:

You write 50 pages in a weekend, slap together a Microsoft Paint cover, and upload it to KDP without editing, price it at 99c, and promptly move on to the next book.

 Rinse. Repeat.

Your books will likely tank. You will see diminishing returns.


I LIKE IT! WHERE'S ANOTHER?

T. Powell Coltrin
 http://journalingwoman.blogspot.com/2014/10/reading-fever.html

wrote of having a student confess that she loved reading but would not read a book unless it was part of a series ... 

one hopefully with at least four books already written.


John D. MacDonald, creator of the popular Travis McGee mystery series, 

persuaded his publisher to print the first three books four months apart, garnering an audience.

The beauty of eBooks is that they stay on the shelf forever.  Print books get rotated off book shelves within months.

You have a back-list of books in a series?  

Give the first one away for FREE for a time and then move it to 99 cents permanently. 

America is a wide nation with lots of readers.  You will not be sorry.


SORRY, MISS NANO:

Yes, you will have to read a lot ... read great authors whether they write your genre or not.  

Or ... shudder ...

Literary Fiction.

See how skilled authors draw readers into the real world when most out there want to escape it.

And yes, you will have to write a lot ...
   
but not sludge prose.  

You have to learn to get up each day and pound out two pages of prose that you would be proud to have Hemingway read.


MORE THAN BEAUTY

Beautiful prose is all well and good, but each page of your novel must be RIVETING.

Is your heroine going to slash that long razor across her wrist or toss that plugged in radio into the baby's bath?

As a counselor, I have walked into both scenarios.  

Human anguish can so easily reach CRITICAL MASS.

As Victor says:
"The world is full of broken people.  Yet the tragedy is not they are broken, but that so few are mended."


THE SAD TRUTH

NOTHING WORKS LIKE IT DID IN THE PAST.

We are behaving like that little puppy going back to routines that worked in the past 

but less and less as more self-published authors take the plunge.

Aren't you tired of the seemingly non-stop Used Car Salesmanship on Twitter, FB, and on the blogs you visit?

Cover Reveals, Book Blog Tours, Contests (let's bribe our way onto the Amazon Top Selling Lists.)

Hey, I think so little of my new book that I am giving it away for FREE!

FREE is good for a limited time for the first in a series of books you've written.  But what costs you little you tend to value little.

What am I saying?

BE EMILY DICKINSON

Write because you love to create images and worlds.  If people discover you, fine.  But write because you love it.

Put your work out there.  

Be discreet and courteous.  Help your fellow struggling writers.  

Build that Back-List, placing yourself in a strategic position should lightning strike.

But know that it probably never will.

I'M LEAVING

Come follow me to Milo James Fowler's blog:
http://milojamesfowler.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/historical-fantasy-guest-post-by-roland-yeomans/

where I talk about how to lend realism to historical fantasy 

and why I choose some historical figures and not others.

I tell what draws me to a historical event to write of it.

Don't let his visitor count sag because of me!

Since his Wordpress site is geared to readers and
 not comments ...

Come back here and let me know what you think.

I would hate to feel I was singing to an empty house!

Thanks for having me, Milo!

A GHOST OF GOD_ revised

So many different kinds of death hunted us this Christmas Eve all through the French Quarter, I would’ve gotten a headache trying to count them all –

If I already hadn’t had one – to go along with the broken ribs, fingers, and nose.

I looked over at Alice, my ghoul friend. The very sight of her made me smile sadly. The night was somehow better. Oh, the fear was still there.

We were going to die.

But seeing her love for me in her eerie eyes said the impossible was possible.

Her ability to turn to mist had been ripped from her by DayStar – but not her love for me or mine for her.

There were some things Darkness could not steal from you -- you had to throw them away yourself.

And I was holding onto her love with both bruised hands.

She sobbed softly, "Our first Christmas together is our last."

I had taken as many blows for her as I could. Wasn’t that what Love did? Sacrifice for the one loved?

My heart ached at the thought of all Alice meant to me, and I knew that love did more, was more.

Love was a magic garment, spun of a fabric so thin that it couldn't be seen, yet so strong that even my mother, Death, could not tear it,

A cloak that could not be frayed by use, that brought warmth into what is often an unbearably cold world - but at times love could also be as heavy as chain mail.

Bearing the mantle of love on those occasions, when it was a sacred weight, made it more precious. While in better times, it caught the wind in its sleeves like wings and lifted you.

Murmuring a prayer for forgiveness, Alice had buried the statue of the Madonna and taken its shawl. I had done the same with the statue of Joseph, taking its robe and hood.

We kneeled beside the wooden manger in the St. Louis Cathedral’s courtyard Nativity Scene.

Right in plain sight of the slowly sniffing and scouting horrors prowling for us.

I didn’t even know some of the monsters hunting us. I knew enough to know Alice and I were goners.

Winged Gahe. Starved Amal. Scaled Soyoko. And the ghosts, given flesh, fangs, and claws by DayStar, of all the people Alice had eaten and I had killed in self-defense over the years.

I stiffened at the tolling in the distance. I heard the bells, ringing their familiar, mocking refrain:

PEACE ON EARTH. GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN.

In despair, I bowed my head.

‘There is no peace on earth! God is only a ghost wind tonight. Hate is god now, and the strong worship at its feet. The innocent die. The helpless cry out. Does anybody hear them?’

The night winds became soft words: ‘You kneel on holy ground and dare to ask that? And you, of all living, should know the reality of ghosts.'

I felt my hair ruffled by icy fingers.  'Besides, you heard the cries.  You helped. Have you ever considered what Power brought you where Need existed?'

I looked up. A stern priest, a book of prayers or some such in his hands. Alice went as pale as I had ever seen her.

"Pere Antoine!"

He spoke in razored whispers. "For my sins in the Inquisition I am bound to this plane. So Friar Antonio de Sedella is now who I am."

I saw the self-hate in his eyes. I saw the same look in Alice's.

The world is filled with broken people.

The tragedy wasn't that people were broken. The world breaks most of us. The tragedy was that so few were mended. But if we are loved, we become stronger at the broken places.

I looked to the horrors so near. Though Pere Antoine and Alice had spoken low, the creatures had stiffened. To speak again would be to bring them to us.

None of us can ever save himself. We are the means of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others can we lift ourselves out of the darkness into the light.

Why not die, letting Pere Antoine know that I believed in him even when he no longer could?

I shook my head and whispered back. "No, before Katrina, you helped me. You’ve helped others before and since."

The winged Gahe spun at my words, and I blurted out, "With my last words, I say you don’t deserve to be bound here. You are Pere Antoine!"

So many horrors rushed us that I got sick to my stomach. I edged in front of Alice to take the brunt of the charge. This was going to hurt so bad.

Pere Antoine’s ghost eyes grew wet, and he cocked his head as if listening to words only he could hear, and he gestured, speaking loud :

"This is Holy Ground!"

The Shadowlanders must’ve forgotten that in their lust for our deaths. It bought them their own.

Pere Antoine, the prayer book tumbling to the grass, slapped both hands on the shoulders of Alice and me.

A warm tingle cascaded through me. Reality smeared in spirals of fiery, golden stardust as if God were wiping clean a chalkboard.

Sand not grass was suddenly beneath our knees. Cutting through me was a cold wind that can only be birthed in the desert.

The manger scene was now real.

A young man and a younger woman were looking sheer love at the cooing baby. Outside the stable, high in the night sky, rippled sounds that only angels could sing.

My bones were transformed into trilling tuning forks.

Pere Antoine kneeled beside me.

"God is not dead, nor does He sleep. No matter how dark, He always sees you. You are a part of His Heart and thus never alone. Because of their very natures, the wrong shall fail, and those who trust prevail."

The baby locked eyes with mine. Eyes clear and echoing with strange wisdom and delight, murmuring that while most of my life I had felt loved by no one, there had been One who always had.

Pere Antoine whispered.

"He wanted you and Alice to have a ‘down home’ Christmas."

The baby laughed a chiming sound of icicles dancing.

Alice reached over and squeezed my hand. "I was wrong, Victor. Our first Christmas together is THE first Christmas."

And impossible thought it was, the French Quarter bells rang all around us:


PEACE ON EARTH. GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN.
***

If you enjoyed this early Christmas tale, you can buy the audiobook of BRING ME THE HEAD OF McCORD:
http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Bring-Me-the-Head-of-McCord-Audiobook/B00NHUX5KM/

You can listen to it plus 6 other tales of mine, including a chapter from

HIBBS, THE CUB WITH NO CLUE!

 

HAPPY THANKS-TAKING

I studied Dyami ... 

the Whites here in New Orleans called him Captain McCord ... among less cordial names.

I flicked my eyes to Mesmer, the fabled cat who owned this French Quarter restaurant.  

I wondered what Dyami saw when he looked at her.  Being the last Lakota shaman, I saw something ... someone quite different.

Dyami cleared his throat, "Wolf Howl, I know you don't celebrate Thanksgiving ...."

"Thanks-Taking," I corrected.  

"The Indians gave those Pilgrims food to keep from starving, and afterwards, the Whites thanked every tribe they met by taking everything from them they wanted: 

land, children, a future."

Dyami sighed, 

"Long before the White Man arrived, the Delaware warred with the Iriquois; the Crow with the Cree, the Navajo with the Hopi ...."

"Oh, yes," I said, "let us talk of the Hopi, who graciously welcomed the Spanish explorer, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, and aided him on his way."

Mesmer growled low in her throat, matching my mood, 

"And in gratitude, the Spanish occupiers enslaved the Hopi populace, compelling them to endure forced labor and hand over goods and crops."

Dyami shook his head. 

"I wanted to bring you here to thank you for all you did for me and New Orleans, not ...."

I shook my own head.  "I did not do it for the Great White Father, but for those young girls you placed under my protection."

{Check out END OF DAYS: Buy the Kindle for $2 and get the audio for just $2!
 http://www.amazon.com/END-OF-DAYS-ROLAND-YEOMANS-ebook/dp/B0082ZJD08 }

Dyami said, "I will get Bush to call off his dogs for all you did."

I laughed without humor.  "He hunts you now."

"I'll think of a way."

I nodded, "I know you will try, but ...."

A hollow-eyed white man burst into the restaurant, waving a poorly maintained automatic.  "I want all your money!"

It hit him then that despite the smell of food from the kitchen, there was only me, Dyami, and a cat to rob.

"Well, shit!" he eloquently said.

I looked to Dyami, "Like all white men, he thinks a gun in the hand means the world by the tail."

"That gun's pointed right at you, Injun!"

I studied this white man, trying to decide just how painful to make his dying.

Dyami was looking out the swinging door and sighed, "Wolf Howl, he has a frightened wife and hungry daughter out there."

I sighed, "Life conspires to take away all my joy."

I met the man's uncertain eyes.  "I tell you what: I will buy that poorly kept gun of yours for a thousand dollars."

"W-What?"

I gestured with my fingers, turning the silverware in front of me to gold-ware.  "It is yours ... on one condition."

"Wh-What condition?"

"That you bring your family in here to share our food."

My words seemed to hit him like a fist, and he looked miserable.  

"I ain't never done anything like this before but Katrina's put us out on the streets. I was at my wit's end."

I thought that had not been a long trail but kept that to myself.

He softly, hesitantly placed the gun on the table, and I slid the gold utensils to him.

The White Man tucked them quickly into his pockets.  "W-Why are you feeding my family after what I tried to do?"

I flicked my eyes to Dyami.  "Tradition."

As the man rushed out to gather his wife and child, Dyami smiled sadly at me and said what I could not bring myself to, 

"Happy Thanksgiving."
***

For more of Wolf Howl, read THE LAST SHAMAN:
http://www.amazon.com/LAST-SHAMAN-ROLAND-YEOMANS-ebook/dp/B00534OEL4/

TO WHAT INNER MUSIC DO YOU WRITE? Neil Gaiman, Sam McCord, & Thea Gilmore

NEIL GAIMAN
He wrote AMERICAN GODS and is somewhat of a literary demigod himself ...

at least to me. And I owe him two debts:

1.) THEA GILMORE:

His blog introduced me to her and her, at that time, latest album, LIEJACKER, with her incomparable song, THE ICARUS WIND.

2.) FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE:

By the time of AMERICAN GODS, I had already written RITES OF PASSAGE and ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM.

But his AMERICAN GODS with its Gothic horror, dark fantasy, age-old legend, ancient mythology, and biblical allegory in modern-day settings

gave me hope that there was room for my mixing ancient myth with the Old West of Louis Lamour.

Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS has been hailed as a myth for the modern world,

exploring with sophistication, complexity, and evocative prose the meaning of what it means to be human in an often inhuman world.

SAM McCORD:
As I wandered in enforced exile from my home during Hurrricanes Rita and Katrina,

Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS sparked the thought

of how my undead Texas Ranger, Sam McCord, of the 1850's would fare in the New Orleans of Katrina.

And it made me wonder how the supernatural world he had come to know would have changed with the times.

All of this made me think to ask all of you,

my blog friends,

what music inspires you as you write?

What author(s) sparked you into writing a novel or into writing as a means of creation?

I'd like to know.
***
Here's Thea doing a tribute to AMERICAN GODS in her EVEN GODS DO:

Shakespeare's STAR WARS!

Verily, a New Hope

History is about to be rewritten. George Lucas didn't write the script for Star Wars. He is a thief and a scoundrel and a hack. 

It's time to announce the truth: 

George Lucas ripped the entire thing off of a hereto unpublished manuscript written by none other than William Shakespeare. 

Come join us and wallow in the joy that is William Shakespeare's Star Wars.

Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas' epic Star Wars

 (he really did write it, ya know) 

in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. 

William Shakespeare's Star Wars is the saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age. 

Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare's greatest plays, and this audio proves it! 

William Shakespeare's Star Wars - 

'tis a tale told by fretful droids, full of faithful Wookiees and fearsome Stormtroopers, signifying . . . pretty much everything. 

The audiobook is a hoot, especially Darth Vader's soliloquies!

Listen to the free sample on its Audible's page:
http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/William-Shakespeares-Star-Wars-Audiobook/B00E3C43YK/