Review: Cracked by Eliza Crewe

Hello, folks! I am happy to post a review for YA Report and even happier that "Cracked" by Eliza Crewe is a distinctly Christian book:

Cracked, Book One of the Soul Eaters Series by Eliza Crewe, is a Christian urban fantasy where the fight against good and evil is quite literal. Meda, our antihero protagonist, begins the novel as a soul eater on the run after having lost her only connection to the human world. During one of her feedings, she attracts the attention of both the Demons and the Templars, two sides in a war that she didn’t even know existed. When teen Templar Chi mistakes her for a hapless human victim, Meda decides to roll with it and return with him to Templar head quarters, where she hopes to learn more about her own powers and the powers that be. Her arrival tips the war off balance and soon she must chose sides. No matter what she chooses, her life will be in danger.

To read the rest of the review, visit the YA Report column at:
http://bryanthomasschmidt.net/sffwrtcht/2013/11/27/ya-report-cracked-by-eliza-crewe/

If you're wondering about the gap between this and my last YA Report review, the reason is mostly bad luck. There was a rush of wonderful books released in the beginning of the year, and I'm sure there's been some great releases since my last review, but I haven't seen any of them until now. I have received several automated ARCs that were sequels to books I didn't like. If you ever have a book to recommend, shoot me an email at mr.mulington.the.3rd(at)gmail.com

Happy Thanksgiving, every one!

Daily Writing Schedule

I had to change my daily writing schedule.

That's not the reason you haven't heard from me on here. I've been beta reading a novel and, if you follow me on facebook or twitter, you'll see the reviews I've been doing for Tangent Online.

But some of you may have also noticed a change in the season: school started! No, I'm not going to college (whew). I babysit a grade schooler beginning at 6am every school morning. Over the summer, my children have generally been waking up from 6:30-7:00am and going to bed at 8:30pm and I have been going to bed at 10pm, leaving me about an hour to write in the evenings. There's not a lot of wiggle room in that kind of schedule. So, I started setting my alarm for 5:50am with the plan to do my writing while the older child does a quiet activity.

Does that sound insane to you? I used to have to get up even earlier when my oldest child was 1yo and decided that waiting for the sun to rise is for underachievers. Was that fun? NOPE. I'm what most people would consider a morning person, who, left to my own devices, wakes up around 9am. Waking up 3-4hrs earlier still sounds insane to me, and the idea of having the clarity of mind to write sounds laughable.

Thankfully, it's worked out better than I had feared. This schedule is still not my first choice and I "sleep in" on the weekend, but most school days I get 45 minutes or so to write and I usually get to bed at a decent time. I'm not as sleepy as I feared I would be, which I attribute to getting dressed immediately and nibbling on something while I open my project. Switching to the netbook also frightened me, but the small keyboard hilariously matches my child-like hands and the equally hilarious slow processing power greatly reduces internet temptations. So, I think the trade off has been about equal. If I could get the kiddos to sleep until 7 every morning instead of randomly, that would make me very happy with my writing time.

Not that I wouldn't switch back to writing in the evening, in an instant! At what age do kids start putting themselves to bed?

Guest Blog - The Editing Process for Self Pub

Guest Blog by Lauren Harris of Ink-Stained Scribe and Pendragon Variety Podcast. Find her on goodreads, facebook, and twitter, too!

Confession: I’m a grammar nerd. That may not shock anyone--I mean, this is a post about editing. Then again, not all writers are pedantic about punctuation. I am. In fact, I’m so picky about proper semicolon usage that I legit got an eye twitch reading a poorly-punctuated article this week.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I’m perfect. My friend Abbie, author of The Guild of the Cowry Catchers, once mentioned that fans of her books constantly send her emails to point out flaws in spelling or punctuation, and I know from experience that even her first drafts are fairly clean.

Copy editing is the second most important step of preparing your manuscript for self-publishing, because readers are honestly looking for any reason not to buy your book (and often, blocked writers and artists are looking for any evidence that they are somehow superior, though they have not yet sent their work out into the world, and correcting someone else’s work scratches that itch). Mostly, though, it’s because people have shit to do. Read a book with a careless comma-splice in the second paragraph? Ain’t nobody got time for that. At least, not the folks who buy your books on Amazon.

Now you’re probably wondering what the most important step is (or what I think it is, since I’m not exactly the arbiter of Indie Press Quality Control). It’s having a fantastic story/book.

Don’t roll your eyes because you’ve heard that before--we’re still talking about editing here. Part of having a fantastic story or book is the messy, painful process of delivering your brain-baby onto the page (eww). Like a baby, you’re going to be pretty protective of it for a while. You may want to show it to everyone, but if you do show your folks the product of your head-womb (how’s that for a kenning?), they sure as Loki’s got shiny gold horns better say only good things.

Because your baby is vulnerable.

Because you’re one cup of coffee short of a postpartum meltdown and not quite ready to hear that it’s wrinkly, red, squinty, stinky, and there’s a penis-shaped birthmark on the back of your thought-baby’s head. Or maybe it’s not a baby at all. Maybe you wanted a sci-fi baby and ended up with a changeling dystopian-horror baby without legs.

Whatever. Put your baby in a drawer.*

One of the great things about indie pub is having complete creative control, but you probably want to have complete creative control over something that sells enough copies to construct a scale replica of Gondor in your local park. I mean, I do. For your baby to grow into that kind of mass-appeal monster, you’ve got to operate on it Dr. Frankenstein-style (but this is the 21^st Century, so get a second opinion). Before you gnash your teeth about selling out, I am not talking about writing for the market or for what’s popular. I’m talking about finding the core of awesome in your story and helping it achieve its full potential.

For that, you need the developmental edit. A developmental edit (also sometimes called a substantive or substantial edit) is content editing--it focuses on things like structure, worldbuilding, character, style, theme, pacing, and other macro-level issues. In other words, this is the type of editing where a beta reader or paid professional clears their throat and says, “Hey look, your baby isn’t a sci-fi baby, but it is already a really cool dystopian-horror baby, you just have to give it legs and get a hat to cover up that penis-shaped birthmark.”

Not every story needs developmental editing. Sometimes we end up with stories that leap from our brains like Athena, gray-eyed, fully-formed and dressed in shiny, shiny armor. Chances are, though, if you’ve written a longer story, your brain baby looks a little more like Hephaestus.

In a moment, I’ll go over a few ways to go about getting a developmental edit, but first I’m going to share with you why this was such an important stage for me in the process of working on EXORCISING AARON NGUYEN.

After writing the first draft, I shared it with a few critique partners in my local group, who had a few comments, but didn’t have a ton to say about it one way or the other. Something nagged at me, because I knew I was missing some crucial element that kept it from being a great story.

I sent the manuscript to my friend Ian, who is a published author and a really stellar beta reader. He gave me back about half a page of comments, but it was one criticism in particular that really hit the nail on the head: I had set up a murder mystery, and I hadn’t delivered one. I made that bit too easy.

Partly, that was because I was resistant to writing mystery. I hadn't really read mystery unless you counted Harry Potter or my early years reading The Boxcar Children, so I hadn’t felt qualified to write it. Problem was, he was absolutely right--the murder mystery element of my story was weak, and that flaw in structure kept the story from being all it could. So I did some brainstorming with my writing group and realized that, in order to really make the story awesome, I had to rewrite most of it.

I’m so glad I did. I went from having a story I was okay with to a story I really adore, and that edit not only fixed the issue of the mystery, it helped me come up with a few characters who articulated the theme of the story more profoundly in my second draft.

After finishing the second draft, I was on twitter and ended up winning an edit from Alice M. (@notveryalice), who was new to YA, but a very keen eye and even more of a grammar goose-stepper than me. She helped me focus my characters and clarify the worldbuilding.

So how do you go about getting a developmental edit? Like almost everything, it requires some combination of time (yours or other people’s) and money. Here’s how the combination falls:

• Hire an editor ($$$$, a little time, big reward)
• Get a critique partner (free, lots of time if you’re swapping work, no enforced time-limit, reward depends on beta reader)
• Edit it yourself (free, but the most time-consuming option, results depend on your closeness to the material and how good of an editor you are)

This last one can be done in a number of ways, but if you’re going to do it, I recommend using Holly Lisle’s “How to Revise Your Novel” course. I know she’s closed the course, but you can still purchase the lessons as ebooks. They were extraordinarily helpful to me in learning about structure and spotting the problems in my own work.

The final advice I have for editing your manuscript is to read it out loud, for an audience if possible. You will hear all sorts of things when you read your own work carefully, and it can be beneficial to read your own dialog and see if it sounds like something a person might actually say. Harrison Ford once famously told George Lucas, “You can write that shit, George, but you can’t say it.”

I’m a narrator and voice actress as well as a writer, and it’s amazing the number of typos, misspellings, and sentence-rearrangement artifacts get left in published work. I’ve found loads in the books I’ve narrated, and a good number of them in my own work as I read it out loud.

So, when your head-baby has languished in a drawer for a few weeks, give it another look over and see if you notice anything that needs a little surgery, then get some content feedback from a beta-reader, an editor, a course, or the voices in your head. Once you’re happy with your baby’s basic form, have it copy edited (again, this can be hired out, begged, or done yourself, but if you do it yourself, I recommend reading it backwards sentence-by-sentence). Then read that baby out-loud, give it it’s final Dr. Frankenstein nip-tuck and send it out into the world to terrorize the locals.

Oh, yeah. And I’m supposed to do that promotion thing. Read my YA Paranormal novella, EXORCISING AARON NGUYEN. You will laugh at least once, though hopefully not at a wayward comma.

Find EXORCISING AARON NGUYEN at:

Amazon
Smashwords

Pendragon Variety: In Memory of Dragons - Live at Amazon!

You can now find our ebook at:

Amazon

Smashwords

Goodreads

Blurb:

Pendragon Variety presents "In Memory of Dragons," a themed speculative fiction anthology dedicated to the memory of Anne McCaffrey. Forward by Cat Rambo and stories by David B. Coe, Sam Schreiber, Matthew Healey, Melissa Prange, Cindy Ray, Rachel Bellairs, and Lauren Harris, with a dedication by Rosemary Tizledoun and afterward by Michelle "Mica" Ristuccia. Visit our website at http://www.pendragonvariety.com for more information.

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We'll let you know when the book is available for purchase elsewhere. We are working on meeting Smashwords' requirements for distribution in their premium catalog, at which point it would be available at most online retailers.

Ebook Release: "Pendragon Variety - In Memory of Dragons"

Pendragon Variety, the podcast for aspiring genre writers, which I have been a cohost in for - wow, have we been running three years? - is releasing its first publication, an e-magazine dedicated to the memory of Anne McCaffrey. The magazine will later be released in audio as a serialized podcast.

Not only am I quite pleased to announce our first e-publication, I am extra tickled to put this down as an example of my ebook formatting services, which you can learn more about by clicking the Ebook Service tab above.

The release date? July 30! Until then, here's a blurb for you:


Pendragon Variety presents "In Memory of Dragons," a themed speculative fiction anthology dedicated to the memory of Anne McCaffrey. Forward by Cat Rambo and stories by David B. Coe, Sam Schreiber, Matthew Healey, Melissa Prange, Cindy Ray, Rachel Bellairs, and Lauren Harris, with a dedication by Rosemary Tizledoun and afterward by Michelle "Mica" Ristuccia. Visit our website at http://www.pendragonvariety.com for more information.