Hungry For Your Love – New Cover!
June 23, 2010
The St Martins trade paper edition is due out in the fall. Here is the cover. I think the new cover is incredible!
My story is titled My Partner the Zombie and brings back Aloha Armstrong and zombie Matt Butcher as private detectives trying to save the world from a megalomaniac while trying to find love in all the right places .
June is good news month
June 22, 2010
June 2010 is turning out to be a good month. First, a check and a contract arrive in the mail for mystery short story sale, then a royalty statement arrives for a story appearing in an anthology in the fall, followed a few days later by the check.
A couple of days later an editor e-mails me saying they wish to buy a maunuscript. (I’ll say more about this later in a seperate blog once I sign the contract.) And my current editor says she wants to develop a series with me centered around a character I love from Batchlorette: Zombie Edition. I’m very exicted about this project, but it’s too early to say much more. I promise, once there is more to share you will see a post on the details.
In the future I’m planning a post about how proposals become manuscripts, and eventually become books, so keep watching my site for this interesting, and hopefully, helpful topic.
Of course, your comments and questions about anything I post here are always most welcome.
Cliffhangers
June 14, 2010
This past weekend I lead a workshop on cliffhanagers. So what is a cliffhanger?
Cliffhangers in fiction, simply put, are the reason most readers keep reading your story. The term cliffhanger refers to a term coined in 1919 about a silent film called the Perils of Pauline. This film depicted Pauline in a series of dangers, falling off cliffs, tied to railroad tracks but saved from certain death at the last second by the square jawed hero. While these situations seem cliché today the cliffhanger has been a staple of fiction (and even some non-fiction) for thousands of years. I imagine in the days when humans resided in caves the oral histories shared around the campfire were livened up with cliffhangers.
Not all cliffhangers relate to action sequences. The basic forms of cliffhangers are:
a. Dialogue
b. Action
c. Suspense
d. Danger
From these basic forms there are many offshoots and variations. And sometimes these are combined in some very creative ways.
Television and movies use cliffhangers to great effect. Sitcoms, soap operas, shows such as 24 and Lost, use all of these forms and more to drive the story forward and to keep the viewer watching. Without cliffhangers no one would watch. Yes, even those reality shows use cliffhangers. Think about when American Idol goes to commercial break.
In fiction writing why use a cliffhanger?
a. Reader expectation
b. To keep the reader reading
c. To twist the plot
d. To reveal new information to the POV character
e. To elicit an emotional reaction in the reader
In all genres and subforms of fiction cliffhangers are used. In romance there are often emotional cliffhangers and the best authors in the field use them to great effect. Nora Roberts is one of the masters of cliffhangers. I strongly suggest you read Nora and see how she does it. You will be surprised what you find.
Another author you should consider studying is James Paterson. Paterson uses cliffhangers in so many interesting ways. He uses every form and elicts strong emotion in the reader that will keep the reader reading late into the night.
So how do you learn to use cliffhangers?
a. Read across various genres for pleasure first then study how the author made the story work or not work
b. Practice cliffhangers
c. If you find a book you really like type a chapter or two into your computer.
You will find this last one a very eye-opening experience but don’t keep this or try to cut and paste these practice pages into your own work. This is plagarisim and in violation of the authors copyright.
So enjoy cliffhangers and employ them in your fiction and you will have success.
It’s official: I’m a Mystery Writer!
June 10, 2010
Big news. Yesterday I recieved a cheque in the mail with a contract for my short story Boomerang from Over my Dead Body magazine. OMDB is an online mystery magazine.
Boomerang is about a hitman who, while trying to escape the scene of his latest successful hit, finds himself helping a small time thief on his latest job. When the thief’s plan goes badly awry the hitman finds himself facing a life and death decision of his own.
The story is available at http://www.overmydeadbody.com/crossley.htm