Andrew Taylor's Plot Advice

Andrew Taylor has some brief words of advice for creating your plot.

Book Signings

Here's a really fun read about what has happened to some authors when they go on book signing tours.

"The whole time I'm doing my spiel, I'm thinking, 'Cookies, cookies ... how long until I get to eat the cookies?'" Slaughter said, laughing. Then the thought struck her: What if they were poisoned? (She writes thrillers.)

Slaughter eyed the author escort who was spending the day driving her to interviews: "He'll be my canary in the coal mine," she decided. She urged him to eat a cookie.

Ancient Diaries

Frozen communion wine, soft rains that caressed the earth and winds that wrought an all-consuming yellow fog are described meticulously by the 17th century Swiss monk in accounts once consigned to dark ecclesiastical archives.

It's a bit sobering to read the words of someone who lived 300 or so years ago describing their thoughts on the weather and how it makes them feel. That something as simple as a quill and paper could endure throughout the years and bring the thoughts of the long dead to us now.

Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze," says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and "weatherman" of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery. "Since I've been an ordained priest, the sacrament has never frozen in the chalice."
"But on Jan. 13 it got even worse and one could say it has never been so cold in human memory," he adds.

Drinking Ink

Everyone's nibbled on pen caps or pencil erasers or even chewed the wood on a pencil and some have even been forced to eat their own books but not many have chugged raw ink before. There is that old saying about feeding the writer inside but I think this kid takes it a little too far.

A boy in Southwest China's Chongqing with an alias of Yang Yang has a unique taste - drinking ink, toilet water, shower gel and things of the sort, the Chongqing Evening News reports.

Tips for Writers

I absolutely love Mac OS X's text clipping feature which I shouldn't because it's been broken for years. However, I still clip gobs of text and the little clippings collect like used tissues in a wastebasket when you're battling the latest bird flu or monkey pox.

I've been sorting though some of the detritus that's eating up space on my hard drives and ran across this tid bit of writer's advice. I have no idea where I clipped it from unfortunately:

- write every day, try to get around two or so pages. Just keep writing and worry about the editing later.
- every scene must have conflict. Introduce it, act it out, and then resolve it.
- Every 'hero' must have an equal and opposite 'villain' opposing them.
- empathy for your characters, NOT sympathy.
- the list of things you have already heard goes on and on and on...

Atlanta Nights: A Novel

I've run across this a few times but only recently did I actually remember what it was called. What's Atlanta Nights you ask?

Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing an unpublishably bad piece of work and testing whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it, which they did.[1]

Why target PublishAmerica?

It has been the subject of controversy because it has been accused of being a vanity press or author mill by some writers and authors' advocates,[1] despite its claims to be a "traditional" advance- and royalty-paying publisher.

If you sniff around enough it's possible to turn up a downloadable copy. I can't make it through the whole manuscript but reading it in chunks can be a laugh out loud experience.

DIfferent People, Different Perceptions

Something interesting happened to me this week after I hit upon what I think is a really interesting idea for a short story. Part adventure, part creep-me-out I ended up staying up very late jotting down notes for it. The next few days I told a handful of close friends the idea and got different reactions from nearly each one:

One friend said it was boring because nothing happens at the end. There's a build up and then nothing.
Another friend went off the rails and put a comedic spin to the whole story.
Yet another said, "Don't tell me things like that. That's just creepy."
A fourth friend didn't really offer an opinion but helped flesh out the details of the events in the story.

To me the very fact that something doesn't happen at the end of the story and we leave it just as we begin, but with a greater awareness of what's going on is what creeps me out. It's a story that won't be difficult to write mechanically speaking but on subtler levels it still pops in and out of my thoughts every day since I came up with the original idea.

It's like the old saying about how you can't please everyone all the time. Different people have different life experiences and interpret the world through different filters. I suppose the trick to being a successful writer, or painter or musician is not the quality of the work you're making but with how many people it resonates with. Maybe it's an inverse proportion quality vs popularity, I hope not.

Jack Kerouac, Scrolls and Ginsberg

This is just kinda neat because it combines to things that I'm fairly passionate about, writing and photography. Jack Kerouac was photographed by fellow writer Allen Ginsberg.

Also interesting is that the original scroll Kerouac used to write On The Road has been published by Viking so if you want you can finally read the original draft of it. Somehow the idea of writing a novel on a scroll is very appealing to me. I can just see myself now carrying around a scroll and handwriting a novel or short stories on it.

Despite several friends and even two strangers giving me copies of the book I've never managed to read the entire thing which is something I plan on correcting this winter.

A Novel In Weeks, Six Weeks

Just about anyone can write a "light-hearted" novel in 6 weeks, probably less really given the popularity of NanoWrimo or a novel in a weekend or a Novel A Day contests. (Btw, nothing against them, I'm going to do Nano again this year.)

But when you're hired to write a novel in an incredibly popular series, one that is literally a household name, it seems to me that you should spend as much time as you think you need to hammer out something worthy of the brand you're keeping alive. Maybe this guy did, I dunno, I have not read his novel yet.

The deal is that:

Author Sebastian Faulks has revealed that he completed the new James Bond novel, ‘Devil May Care’ in just six weeks.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I know a writer who clackity-clacks their way though 10,000 words in a day then doesn't touch their keyboard for days, and I know another who is lucky to get maybe 200 words a day every other week. Writing isn't about speed, it's about telling a good story. If this guy can do it -and do the brand justice- in six weeks more power to him I say. But that's something I, personally, wouldn't brag about unless it was for something like Nanowrimo.

Pushing Reality Aside At An Early Age

Reality is a hassle; that's why many people like to read and it's something that's not just attractive to young adults onward, apparently preschoolers can find themselves swept away by a good yarn...

A large part of enjoying a good book is getting immersed in the life of a character, especially a character's thoughts and feelings. A new University of Waterloo psychology study shows that preschoolers can already perform this impressive perspective-taking feat and get into the minds of story characters.

Pulp Fiction Cover Art

Someone has posted a really fun gallery of pulp novel cover art over at Flickr.

Check it out.

Need iWork Templates?

iWork from Apple is nearly a complete package now that there is a spreadsheet application called Numbers. However, as great as the templates that come with the suite are you can always do with more. Here are some places that have additional templates:

iworkcommunity (lots of free ones)
KeynotePro (they sell their templates so I have no idea how good they actually are)
Jumsoft has some very orange ones for sale.
Oneeyedgoldfish has some for sale and a free one.

Those are about the best I could find. I'm sure there are more floating around though.