What attracts you to the genre in which you write? Young Adult has a magic about it that always brings me back; the stories and characters aren’t desperately childish and naïve, yet they haven’t been hardened by years and a world of experience. Outlandish things are still possible, and magic still lurks in the small things.
What piece of writing advice do you wish you’d known when you started your writing adventures? Don’t try to make every word perfect in the first go! First draft like crazy, then go back and shine it up. And then do it again. And probably a third time… but any which way, don’t expect perfection in the first go ’round.
If you could have dinner with any famous person or character who would you choose? Wow, this is a tough one! Hmm. I think I’d have dinner with Carl Sagan; he…
Welcome to another edition of Lisa Burton Radio, I’m your host, Lisa the robot girl, and my guest today has a very important job. In America we would say he’s a stuffed animal, in other places they would refer to him as a plush toy. “Welcome to the show, White Bear.”
“Hi, Lisa. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for choosing me to be your first stuffed animal interview!”
“Pleasure to have you. You’re best friends with someone named Angel. How did you two come to meet?”
“As far as I know, before meeting Angel, I lived always lived in a doctor’s office at Shriner’s Hospital in Tampa, Florida. I spent most of my time at the computer doing research or hanging out on a bookshelf. Lots of kids came in and out of that office, but they never paid any attention to me. One day, a…
Being a fantasy author, this really isn’t my area of expertise. Closest thing to social media in my world are telepaths and that’s a little bit too invasive. Okay, maybe they’re not as invasive as Facebook, but we’ll see where this goes. By the way, Bedlam doesn’t help me either because nobody has the time for tweets when there are cannibals sizing you up for a pot.
Figure out a fun way to reveal the tweets, posts, and status updates. Characters can talk about them, but that can be boring. You can always go the italic route in the middle of conversations or use it for an opener. Barring all of that, you could just write the entire thing in tweets. What could go wrong?
Create your own social media program to avoid getting sued. Look at what’s wrong with the current crop and improve on it. Talk to people about your ideas and see if they have suggestions. Once you have a new social media program ready, give up on the story and make friends with a programmer. You might be on to something there.
It pays to have the characters that aren’t on the social media site even if it’s a central part of the story. We all have those people in our lives who refuse to get in social media or consider it evil. They rant about it while outside in the fresh air and away from their phones. Basking in the sun instead of staying indoors to become paler than a Twitter egg. Fools.
Never forget the essential social media faux pas. There’s always that typo or misunderstanding that changes everything. After all, it isn’t like people think before reacting to a social media post. They never consider it was an innocent mistake because they forget that it wasn’t long ago that they wrote ‘boob’ instead of ‘book’. Like they’re so perfect.
Drunk social media never ends well, but cannot be avoided. Commonly involves nudity or requests for sex being sent to a parent.
Oversharing is a necessity. Can’t have social media without at least one character who reports on what they ate, reveals everything their kids did, or announces every little detail of their life. Not to mention the online quizzes, political posts, personal pictures that are one breeze away from porn, and some fairly questionable things.
Never forget the hashtags. No matter how ridiculous or nonsensical they are. You need your hashtags. Otherwise, it isn’t really a social media site. Might as well just do something crazy like send letters by mail.
Craig here today. I’ve read it before, but years of experience cements the comment: Your blog is your best promotional opportunity. Let’s talk about how it works, because it may not be how you think.
There are a couple of things you have to accept in order to make this work. Blogging is a form of social media, and you are the brand. You may think your book(s) are the brand, but that isn’t true.
I recommend not opening a book-titled blog. While this is curable over time, you might want to avoid this trap. What happens if you write a second, or subsequent book? The book isn’t the brand, you are.
Pick a title that has more longevity. I call my personal blog Entertaining Stories. (Shameless plug there.) You can see that it allows me to expand my content into multiple books, even multiple genres without the need…
It’s true that life is linear, but the living of it is all over the map. In this memoir-in-vignettes, novelist Kevin Brennan (Parts Unknown, Yesterday Road) examines his life the way memories occur in the wild: in no particular order. Whether it’s recalling high school humiliations, ups and downs in love and romance, or unique interactions with the human race at home and abroad, Brennan both entertains and moves the reader with moments of unexpected poignancy and full-tilt humor. In No Particular Order is a deconstructed memoir, like no other because it looks at life as it really is — a kaleidoscope of individual moments.
I think I had a plan for today. Could have sworn something was scheduled. Might have been this post I’ve been putting off since February about how the word ‘like’ has been abused and ruined. Seriously, it has no impact whatsoever these days. Doesn’t matter because I deleted that one and probably forgot to replace it. So . . . whelp . . .
The original plan was to use this past week to fix up all of my series and get them organized. Then I would tinker with the next notebook entry until the weekend. A nice, relaxing week since I only had 4 days to work with. Well . . . that failed a couple hours after my post went live.
I happened to look at the calendar and realized my son finishes school soon. In the back of my mind, I knew this was coming, but I thought taking a week to focus on other projects would be okay. Once I saw that I had 3.5 weeks, I didn’t think so any more. The plan changed from tinkering to editing because I have to work on Path of the Traitors and Warlord of the Forgotten Age back-to-back. These stories run alongside each other, which means I want to make sure I have the timeline the same. If Trinity in Book 14 is moving faster than the champions in Book 15 then things won’t mix well. This meant I had 3.5 weeks to edit 38 chapters and I don’t get much work done on the weekend. My top speed without getting sloppy is 3 chapters a day, but only if nothing else comes up. I did manage to pull that off this week, so 12 of the 18 chapters for Book 14 have been edited. This is good because editing that last book might still be rough since it’s another step toward this adventure ending.
A quick aside: I still need to get the final ducks in a row for The Life & Times of Ichabod Brooks too. That will be a July release if I can pull it off. Busy, busy, busy.
In Bedlam news, Protecting Bedlam will begin getting posted tomorrow. This will be a Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday posting until the story has been told. I wrote it like a full book, so the posts will be bigger than normal. I chopped it down as much as I could, but putting a mid-section cliffhanger for a decent post wasn’t working out that often. Keep in mind that I’m still nervous about this too. I typically try to avoid getting topical and political, but I couldn’t resist due to the original idea. Far too close to reality before it became reality. Anyway, I will do the usual warning that this story will include: Violence, Cursing, and Non-Gratuitous Sex. Not really sure how else to explain that last one since I don’t write sex scenes, the naughty bits aren’t mentioned, and it’s mostly just open discussion that it happened off-screen. Again, Bedlam is my more adult series compared to my fantasy stuff.
With all of that going on tomorrow, I might not be around for the onset. It will be my 12-year anniversary. We’re celebrating by going to see Wonder Woman for a matinee and then a nice lunch. I just have to say that getting the tickets was nuts. I had been checking for it to turn up on Fandango and it wasn’t there Wednesday morning. At least at 5 am when I just happened to wake up. At 7:30 am, I checked again out of curiosity and it was there. Not only there, but 1/4 of the seats were already taken for the showing we wanted to get. Now, we have to get tickets beforehand because if we miss the showing we’re aiming for then our day gets wrecked because of babysitting and other stuff. So, I was racing to get the tickets before my son’s Wild Kratts ended and the bus showed up. Easy? I wish because I kept getting sent back to the beginning. Every time, I found that the seats I tried to get were taken. Not sure what was going on, but I finally got them during the ending credits and it looked like at least half the theater was claimed. To explain, we’ve been looking forward to this movie ever since it was announced and more so when we realized it would be our anniversary movie.
That’s the adventure of the week. At least the stuff I can share. The books have been selling decently, but Ritual of the Lost Lambhasn’t returned to the Top 100 stuff for a while. Feeling like it might be the last Windemere book to be there considering it barely scratched the surface and fell a few hours later. Yeah, I know it’s a silly thing to focus on, but I think it will be cool to say all 15 books hit a Top 100 list outside of the New Release section.
So, what’s the plan for this week?
Finish editing Path of the Traitors.
Start editing Warlord of the Forgotten Age.
Watch Wonder Woman.
Continue reading One Piece.
Prep chapter 2 of Protecting Bedlam.
Avoid freaking out over the blog only book.
Cooking dinner as usual.
Settle my mind on next new writing project in time for next Saturday’s post.
By the way, feel free to volunteer for the Book is Live announcement for The Life & Times of Ichabod Brooks. I have the long-term volunteer list, but I need to remember to mention it in case someone else wants to help. Enjoy the weekend.
