Window Star

Window Star
By S. Arthur Yates


Resplendent, they appear.
Strangers, unwelcome.

Polite, always polite.
Strangers, unwelcome.

Details few, words hollow.
Strangers, unwelcome.

Notification - complete.
Strangers, unwelcome.

The drape, arrives later.
Strangers, unwelcome.

Blue star to gold.

Strangers
Unwelcome



(A blue star is placed in the window when a loved one goes to war. If they are missing in action (MIA), the star is changed to silver. If they are killed in action (KIA), it is changed to gold.)

Kathy Shay's Blog Post

Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse. Some things a writer does are a little of both. Whenever I’m in a situation, invariably I think about how I can use it in my writing. I’m in a grocery store line and I see a really pretty woman or a cute guy and think—they could be in my book. I’ll have to remember her haircut. Or I’m watching TV and a police procedural will have an interesting twist, and I write it down to remember it for a suspense I’m plotting. Right now, being mother-of-the-bride-to-be is consuming a great deal of my time. I savored each step of getting the dress, finding flowers and the myriad of other details that lead up to a wedding. But I couldn’t help myself make mental notes about the feeling a bride’s mom has about her child taking such a big step, how the gown shimmered on my daughter, how fun and bridesmaids’ dresses are, each a different color.

This was no clearer to me than when I was in New York City about two weeks ago. My friend and I went down to see THE CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON starring Chris Noth (THE GOOD WIFE) and Kieffer Sutherland (24). While we were there, we also saw a musical, ate in wonderful restaurants and had a lot of girl-time. For the first play, we were waiting in a roped off area where the stars come out to sign autographs. Two bouncers stood inside the ropes looking big and beefy, and a NYC cop was trying to keep the women out of the streets so cars and busses could go by. He was very gracious saying, “All you beautiful women have to go up on the sidewalk.” My friend waited in anticipation for autographs. At one point she was making her way to the front of the crowd and said, “Come on, don’t you want to be up close?” I shook my head thinking, “No, I want to talk to the cop.” I wondered if he liked being on this duty or did it get old? What shift did he prefer? Did he have someone to go home to?

For most writers, everything’s material. Good or bad, we can always use it in a book!
Thanks!
Kathy Shay

Voice

Voice is what keeps readers connected to your character. It establishes who they are without having to resort to "telling." For example, you can write: I'm terrified of spiders. Or you can write: Can't stand those wiggly-waggly eight-legged misfits creeping out of corners and dangling by a sticky thread in one's unsuspecting face.

Which person's story would you rather read?

One person in our group who has mastered voice is Lisa Scott. It may be because of her experience as a voice-over narrator. I've often noticed that actors and voice talent specialists have an edge over those who haven't read dialogue out loud for a hobby or a living. They wouldn't be successful at their job if they couldn't grasp the emotion behind the words. And that's what we do when we write using voice: we try to grasp the emotion.

Here are three ways to say the same thing using three different voices:

Ain't nobody seen Miss Polly, not since school let out that swelterin' June day. Guess Wendell was the last one to set eyes on her. Says she was sweatin' like a pig in front of a carvin' knife.

It happened on the hottest day in June. Me and Darlene stormed out of the school, giggling over something that no longer seems important. We had no idea goofy old Wendell would be the last one to set eyes on Polly McGraw. If we had even one bit of sense, we would've kept our eye on her, too. Because after she marched out of the classroom, she was never seen again.

Darlene and I joined the throng of students piling out the school's yawning door into Mother Nature's oven. My face was slick with sweat by the time we reached the waiting bus. Wendell was there, too, face red as a chili pepper. "Did you see Polly?" he asked. We shook our heads. "Just wondering." He shrugged. "She didn't look so good." At the time we hadn't thought it odd. But when she went missing, we began to wonder.

Each character has their own unique voice. We can picture what kind of person each one is, even though we have only read one paragraph of the story.

I challenge anyone who reads this to develop their character's unique voice. First, second, or close third...it doesn't matter. If you don't have a strong voice, you'll lose the reader.

Try putting yourself in the shoes of a beloved character. Harry Potter. Jane Eyre. Claire Huxtable (my personal favorite!). Television or novel character, it doesn't matter. Now write a paragraph using their voice. How would they talk? Think? Act? The more you practice using different characters, the more natural it will become to write in their voice.

And it never hurts to take an acting class.

An Editor's Wish List

I have presented the information in the distant past to the LCRW membership on what every editor looks for in a submission. I tweaked it a bit for today's blog. Hope it helps you.

The High Concept

I spent a very long time trying to figure this one out, attending every editor/agent roundtable available, asking for examples. Nada. Until I heard agent Jessica Faust speak at the New England Romance Writers conference and a light bulb went off inside my brain: The high concept, in a very few sentences, sums up the crux of the story. Here are some 'ah ha' examples I have found at www.RTBookreviews.com:

Julia Knight's fantasy romance, Ilfayne's Bane, [Samhain Publishing, Ltd.]: “He destroyed a continent. Dethroned a god. Now she will destroy him.”

Monica Burns' historical erotic romance, Mirage, [also Samhain].: “An ancient prophecy. A sheikh's passion. One woman ignites the flame that fulfills them both.”

Irene Hannon's contemporary romantic suspense, Fatal Judgment, [Revell Books]: “Jake Taylor's assignment is straightforward. His relationship with Judge Liz Michaels isn't. They have a past. But if he fails, they may not have a future.”

As you can see; it doesn't give me any plot details, however it does tell me what I'll be getting myself into.

The Hook

I am not only an editor, I am first a reader. If the first few lines don't grab me; or the last line of a scene or chapter fails to capture my interest and imagination, the story probably won't work for me. For some authors 'hooking' is as natural as breathing; others struggle, however, that's where a good editor comes into the picture. Here are some hooks which made me sit up and take notice:

Nora Roberts' beginning hook for Montana Sky: “Being dead didn't make Jack Mercy less of a son of a bitch.”

Rick Riordan's beginning hook for The Lost Hero: “Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.”

Margo Hoornstra's end of scene hook for Glad Tidings: “What kind of woman buries her husband in the afternoon then sleeps with his best friend that night?”

Debra Webb's ending scene hook for Traceless: Note: hero Clint Austin has just been released from prison after serving time for murder. “There wouldn't be much in the way of financial assets waiting for him back home. But he would have full access to the one thing that he wanted nearly more than his next breath . . . .The people who had stolen his life.”

Memorable Characters

I read Leon Uris' Mila 18 when I was fourteen years old. Every couple years I go back to visit the entire cast of characters. The same goes for Kathleen Woodiweiss' Shanna and A Rose in Winter. These are the keeper books on my night stand. The secret to creating great characters is to give them a few warts. Then throw them into the deep end of the pool but make sure you put a few hidden traps beneath the surface of the water.

Examples:

Brenda Leigh Johnson, a Georgia peach transplanted to LAPD in TNT's The Closer. She may be beautiful and built, but her subordinates choke on her thick southern drawl; she dresses out of Volunteers of America; and she's tenacious as Hong Kong flu.

Harry Potter, the wizard raised as a muggle with a weird looking scar on his forehead. JK Rowlings tossed him into the deep end of the pool known as Diagon Alley, later Hogwarts and the fun began.

Eve Dallas, [JD Robb's futuristic In Death series], the street smart homicide detective with the social skills of a rattlesnake confronts the prime murder suspect, a man with a one word name, more money than God, better looking than some lapsed Irish angel. Eventually he woos her with a rare steak and a sack of coffee beans.

It takes Parker Evans, [Sandra Brown's Envy], a wheelchair-bound hero twenty years to exact revenge on his college room-mate by deliberately seducing the roomie's unwitting wife. “Did I stutter?” still makes me laugh out loud. This story keeps the reader on the edge from start to finish.

Cash Boudreaux, [Sandra Brown's Slow Heat in Heaven] revels in the image of local bad boy, occasionally inciting violence, has good reason to want revenge against the richest family in town.

Just a smidge about secondary characters: they support the hero and heroine, often provide comic relief, occasionally serve as a red herring. Make each one different from each other as well as the hero or heroine. If they all sound the same why should I bother to read the book?

The Setting

Must be as vivid as any of the main characters and, in my opinion, becomes a character of its own. Examples: Innocence, Mississippi [Nora Roberts' Carnal Innocence] if chock full of murder, depravity and humor; Nohmensville aka No Man's Land [Captain Marvelous] actually should have been named no woman's land due to it's apathy, bigotry and ignorance; Lunacy, Alaska [Nora Roberts' Northern Lights] features its own set of 'lunatics'. And let's not forget Hogwarts. Do you see how the names, while unique, describe the flavor and aura of the settings?

Goals, Motivation & Conflict

Every thing I know about GMC was learned at the knee of one of my heroes Debra Dixon who wrote the book [literally] on this topic. In short, the hero and heroine must have a goal [ie what do they want/need to accomplish?]. It needs to be logical and realistic. Likewise, their motivation for accomplishing these goals must be logical, realistic, and understandable to the reader—as in 'yeah, if that happened to me as a kid, I'd shoot for that goal, too.

The really good stories put the hero's goals in direct opposition to what the heroine wants and that's called CONFLICT.

Now . . . conflict comes in two forms, internal and external. External is usually pretty easy: it's an external force [such as the approaching hurricane in Eileen Dreyer's Sinners and Saints which hampers the heroine's search for her missing sister. In Captain Marvelous the hero is trying to identify the killers of immigrant women and bring them to justice. He is thwarted at every step by complacency, bigotry and apathy from the towns people and a less than sterling police department. External conflict is supposed to be a bitch for the hero and heroine. Thwarting bad guys, disease, pestilence, and the apocalypse is no easy feat. But . . . as Sister John Thomas used to say, 'adversity builds character'.

Internal conflict is what gets authors every time. This is the demon inside the hero and heroine which prevents them from accomplishing their goals AND should be directly tied to their motivation and goals. In My Name is Nell, the heroine is a woman working the program of Alcoholics Anonymous while managing a home and raising her children without much help from a toxic mother and sister. She meets, then falls in love with a widower. Neither was looking for romance; it just happened. Now take a guess as to the circumstances which caused the deaths of the hero's wife and child. Go on, take a guess. That's conflict with a capital C.

In Debra Webb's Traceless, Clint Austin served time in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Emily Wallace, the star witness against Clint has not been able to move past what happened to her best friend, and vows to make him pay for his crimes all over again.

Words to the wise: Conflict cannot be resolved with a five minute conversation between all interested parties. It is something so strong, so powerful, the reader must believe these two people will never ever stay together.

Common problems that come across my desk:

Failure to follow submission guidelines: after you pick the publishing house you want to submit to, commit their rules to memory AND FOLLOW THEM TO THE LETTER. This includes submitting a mystery to a publisher who only releases romance [or vice versa].

Errors in spelling, punctuation, formatting: Use spell check; take a basic technical English writing course and practice on your computer program to learn how to set margins, line spacing, and indents. Fancy fonts do not impress me, nor do quotations at the beginning of each chapter.

Point of View: some editors only accept two POVs. I personally don't mind more than the usual two, but I don't want to dislocate a cervical vertebrae while reading a manuscript.

Telling instead of showing: this takes some practice but it can be mastered. Don't tell me the hero's pissed at the heroine, show me.

Frothy, repetitious prose. As I have occasionally informed the authors involved with the Class of '85 series for TWRP, “Hauling out the hedge clippers makes me cranky.” Tell me what you want to say in simple declarative sentences. Learn the purpose, and proper use of, commas and semi-colons.

Too much sexual attraction too early: there is a reason why we call it sexual tension. Giving it all up by page 10 is not tension; it's risky and dangerous behavior, not to mention unhealthy. There is a reason why we keep our zippers in a locked, upright position. It makes readers keep turning pages. Unless it's hot fudge, less is always better. Always.

good luck

Kat/Kathy

Speculative Fiction

The other night I was reading (on my Kindle) Delia Sherman's delightful short story Wizard's Apprentice.

It is the story of an evil wizard living in Dahoe, Maine. It even says so on the sign hanging outside his shop:
"Evil Wizard Books
Z. Smallbone, Prop"

Part way through the story, a runaway breaks into the bookstore, blah, blah, blah. Eventually the wizard hands the intruder his business card. The card says:

"Evil Wizard Books
Zachariah Smallbone, Porprietor
Arcana, Alchemy, Animal Transformations
Speculative Fiction
Monday-Saturday. By Chance and by Appointment"

Did you notice that in the list of evil things the wizard will do, Speculative Fictions is so bad it gets its own line? Don’t get me wrong, I love that line. I laughed out loud when I read it. Yet, I couldn’t help but think that the best humor has an element of truth.

I don’t know how speculative fiction got to be the ugly step-child of writing, yet just the mention of it will cause a nerve paralyzing eye-roll. (I'm waiting for the day when my mother’s warning that “you’re face will stick that way” comes true.: “What happened to your face?” “Oh, some fool mentioned fantasy. Didn’t even look to see who might overhear.”)

“I don’t read fantasy. I just don’t understand it” If you haven’t said it, you’ve at least heard it.

People, almost everything Disney does and has done for over sixty years is fantasy: “Cinderella”, “Beauty and the Beast”. And, PLEASE give me a piece of the action Disney rakes in at its theme parks.

The stories you read to your children, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” “Jack and the Beanstalk” “Little Red Riding Hood” – speculative fiction.

Please don’t try telling me you didn’t watch any of the Star Wars movies because they were science fiction. And don’t kid yourself, “Pirates of the Caribbean” is fantasy. (I will grant that any movie staring Johnny Depp is a must watch.)

“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” is science fiction. So is “The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I know you know the stories and suspect you liked them.

If you try telling yourself you don’t love everything Pixar does, I will call you a liar to your face. It is all speculative fictions.

(And, don’t get me started on that Romance you’re reading. IT’S A FANTASY.)

I’m not asking to be at the top of your reading list, but when it’s time for the family photo, may I please come out from behind the tree.

I Don't Write Paranormal...Right?

So I'm sitting at the computer, editing my next novel (even though I haven't even sold the last two I worked on for what seemed like endless hours, weeks, years) and I just don't want to continue working on it.

It's not that the story is dull, lacks plot and conflict, or has banal characters. Nope. If that were the case, it would be a simple chuck everything and begin anew. Instead the problem is I started a novel a year (two years?) ago, and I can't get it out of my head.

Anyone else have this problem?

I reread it (I'd stopped writing it at page 56 last fall) and I'm still very drawn to it. I want to know what will happen next. I want to make it bigger, better. The problem? It's a paranormal.

I don't write paranormal.

At least, I don't usually write paranormal. It's sneaked up on me in the past...when I was fifteen I wrote an entire novel based on the Salem witch trials. I still have it. And I've written bits and pieces of stories with a supernatural element over the years since. But I've never much enjoyed reading paranormal because it seemed too farfetched to me. Ghosts? C'mon. Vampires? Puh-lease. Wolves that walk and talk, stalking and yet falling in love with their prey? Ridiculous. Nonsense, all of it.

And yet I'm curious about this story that keeps cranking the gears in my head. I suppose if I keep returning to a story I didn't think I was serious about writing, I should reconsider its place on my mental priority list. Maybe oil up those gears and keep going. I am, after all, the CEO of my company. I can do what I want within the limits of my capabilities.

Today I will work on the paranormal. Today I will enjoy myself and fall into the story and see where it takes me. Tomorrow I may discover I'm not cut out for the paranormal and maybe then I can pick up on the edits of the story I'd been working on for hours, weeks, years.

Or maybe this CEO will move this unfinished story up on the priority list so I can see how it ends. I don't write paranormal, so it should be interesting.

Write What You Know

Having attended a number of writers conferences over the years, I've had the privilege to sit in on any number of workshops, the Craft Tract being a personal favorite. One which stood out the loudest came when Nora Roberts told the audience, 'write what you know.'

Coming from one of my writing heroes, the advice made sense―except I wondered how I, as a nurse [then] could ever turn a doctor into a hero. If you don't know where someone had their hands last, well . . . not an appealing thought as far as I was concerned.

Then came the day when I heard Tess Gerritsen speak at a New Jersey Romance Writers conference. She spoke about how her roots in writing dated back to her medical residency days in the ICU and observing what the nurses―whom she spoke of with great respect and affection―were reading: category romances. Wow. A physician who spoke of nurses with respect. I had to read one of her books. Let me tell you, after devouring “The Apprentice”, I was hooked. Tess Gerritsen writes what she knows!

As a teenager, living in a very rural area with little to do and no way to get anywhere, I read anything I could get my hands on. I discovered a book by Frank G. Slaughter in my parents' library, a Civil War story about a female spy and a male battle surgeon. Very bloody, lots of spilled guts, gore and suffering. Right up the alley of a fourteen year old with an over-active imagination and way too much time on her hands. Thoroughly hooked, I proceeded to sign out every one of his books from the school library as well as the library in a neighboring town. It wasn't until I later that I learned Mister Slaughter was actually a medical doctor. This man had the ability to put me in the moment of a battlefield hospital scene, suffering right along with the physician and his patients. One of Dr. Slaughter's contemporary novels, “Daybreak” featured the trials and tribulations of a physician working in the mental health system prior to the advent of effective anti-psychotic medications when pre-frontal lobotomies and electroshock therapy were considered last ditch efforts to treat intractable psychiatric problems. Very chilling stuff for this young woman who was about to head off for three years of nursing school in―you guessed it―a state psychiatric facility. By the end of my schooling, I'd passed more Thorazine and Mellaril than any ten nursing students―and no fresh lobotomies, thank you very much.

As a young wife with a graduate student husband and two small kids, money was tight. I lucked out when I discovered a second-hand book store which stocked copies of Robert K. Tannenbaum's legal thrillers featuring Assistant District Attorneys Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi. With each book I learned about the steps in the legal process, evidence that can degrade over time or be lost by dumb luck or stupid accident, “eye witnesses” who don't see everything, and a how-to manual for criminals who want to beat the system. It came as no surprise when I learned this man spent many years in the Manhattan DA's office, prosecuting the worst of the worst. Writing with a sharp wit and biting sarcasm, after more than thirty years, Mr. Tannenbaum's books continue to hold my interest. Another instance of writing what one knows.

Lastly, I'd like to blow the horn for one of my nursing as well as writer heroes: Eileen Dreyer. After many years in category romance [writing as Kathleen Korbel], Eileen―an experienced ER nurse―was called up to the big leagues with a series of medical thrillers set in and around St. Louis, Missouri. Invariably her heroines are nurses with advanced training [such as Eileen herself] in forensic evidence collection, death examinations, and critical incident management. Using gut-busting humor, Eileen makes the everyday come to life and answers the question, “What if?”

In closing, I challenge any author to look at their everyday life and incorporate something they find there into his/her writing. Okay, so maybe you don't have an exciting job which includes passing bed pans or inserting suppositories, but do you have a volunteer job you really love, something that gives back ten times more than what you put in? I have a friend who volunteers at a soup kitchen, another takes calls on a domestic violence crisis line, a third takes an AA meeting into the county jail every week.

Do you have an Aunt Helen [like me] who retired from the Navy Nurse Corps at the rank of Lieutenant Commander after serving in World War II and Korea? Do you have religious connections you might tap for a secondary character? I know an author who pumped her priest uncle for the scoop on how to get around the priest-penitent privilege and the sanctity of the confessional―and yes, under certain circumstances, it can be done.

Where do you live or go for a vacation? Can that be turned into a setting so vivid readers want to move there? I am currently working with an author who set her story in the Adirondack Mountains―and believe me, she nailed it.

What turns you on? How do you fill all those empty hours in your life? Do you attend festivals or state fairs? How about protest marches? I edited a September 2010 release for a Wild Rose Press anthology which featured a protest march that turned into a riot. The author was a veteran of protests from back in the 80's and 90's; it was clear she knew what she was talking about. The description spoke to me as an editor as well as a woman.

As an editor and a reader, I have developed a second sense for what rings true and what comes from someone who took the easy way out when it came to doing his or her homework―and not all were unpublished. Do not depend on legal whodunits on the big screen or mystery illness of the week on TV for accuracy. If you want to know which shows portray accurate situations, ask someone who's already in The Biz. I myself DO NOT EVER EVER watch any of the “CSI” shows, “House”, “ER”, “Law and Order, SVU”. The shows earning the highest ratings do not always consider the truth because they would lose viewers.