Beneath a Broken Sky

It's finally here!

Quin is the newest generation in a long, proud line of Knights, but he less than lives up to his legacy. To earn his knighthood and escape the looming disapproval of his father, he accepts a mission far in the North. There he runs into Arria, an ancient dragon newly awakened, and Keeva, a half blood dragon whose word is as dubious as her birthright. The violent encounter with Arria and her servants leaves Quin's mentor dead, and him stranded far from the safety of the Knight's Guild. Keeva is his only ally, but she has a past she cannot escape. Quin finds a kindred soul in Keeva, but their growing friendship holds danger as well as hope.

Arria, her mate slain by Quin's ancestor, clings to the only thing she has left: grief-stricken revenge that threatens the survival of Knights and dragons alike. With Keeva's help, Quin must dig up a truth long buried and secrets that were never meant to be found. Both Knights and dragons need to fight together to defeat Arria, but in his attempt to unite these enemies, will Quin commit the ultimate sin for a Knight? To fall in love with a dragon.

Sound interesting? Click here to find out more.

Note: At the moment Beneath a Broken Sky is only available on Amazon.com. It will also be available from Barnes & Noble soon.

First draft of the year

I've started writing my first story of the year. This is a story that I started last year and stopped when I got stuck. Now I've come back to it, but I've had to make some hard choices to make it work.

This is the tricky part about rewriting a broken story. You really have to let everything be on the chopping block. Even things you love or things that you always thought were going to be in the story. To make it work, everything has to be able to be changed.

And I have changed just about everything. I kept my magic system, my hero and a couple locations, that's about it. Just about everything else had to change in one way or another. Now I'm hoping that those changes will make everything flow better.

I say "hoping" because I'm doing some twisted version of pantsing and plotting at the same time. The beginning is a bit fuzzy (though it's getting better because that's what I'm working on writing right now), some stuff in the middle is plotted out, as is the very end, but there's a huge gap towards the end where I have no idea what is going to happen. Hopefully it will come to me as I get to it.

And speaking of getting to it, I've decided to try a new plan for my writing time. I just finished listening to an RWA Conference lecture called "Fast Draft" (Candace Havens was the speaker). The idea is to do 20 pages a day for two weeks and you'll have a rough first draft. I do like the idea, but I've found using page numbers or word count as goals intimidates me and I freeze up and get nothing done.

So my plan is to do two solid hours of writing every day. One in the morning and one in the evening, or both in the morning, I don't care. I will get those hours in. No excuses. No whining.

Before I gave myself three months to finish this manuscript, but hopefully with this new plan I can fly through this draft and get it done a lot faster... Hopefully.

I'll be posting hours/word counts on Twitter and do a weekly update here (if I remember :-P).

As of today I have 5,119 words.

The Point: Mastering swordsmanship alone

We've all seen or read the stories. An unskilled Hero must learn how to fight. So he seeks out the master swordsman/Kung fu/Jedi/whatever and finds him cloistered away in the mountains/remote temple/far off planet. Once the Hero finds them and proves that he would make a worthy student, the master teaches him and he return to kick the antagonist’s butt. I can't say about the Jedi, but I know for swordsmanship (and just about any martial art) it isn't as simple as that.

Yes, training directly with a master is one of the best ways to learn, but it's only part of the equation. Someone who trains only with his master would be better then an untrained opponent, but he wouldn't be as good as you would think.

Just because you can spar with and perhaps even beat one master doesn't mean you can beat everyone who isn't as skilled as that master. Real fighting isn't like levels in a video game. There are hundreds of fighting styles and ways people use them. That is why it is important, even necessary, to spar with as many opponents as possible.

If you're opponent knows one trick that you don't then that could give them the upper hand. There's no way for any one person to know all the different forms of fencing. That is why a fencer’s best tool is adaptability. If you can read your opponent and adapt to them, you have a huge advantage.

Back when I was still sport fencing I started going to a saber class. Our club was small and before I started coming there had only been one gal in the class. She had been fencing for a while and could go toe to toe with our coach and, if not beat him, at least make him work for his win.

Then I come along. I've never done saber before. At the time I only had limited experience with foil. Since I had such limited experience my body signals were all over the place. She thought I was feinting an attack when I was just shifting my grip on this new, unfamiliar weapon. One of the first times she came in for an attack I parried and thwak got her right in the side of the head. We were both surprised I got that shot in. She came in for another attack in the same spot, parry, thwak again. It took her several more tries before she found the right counter to my attack.

But why did my attack land in the first place? She was better then me. Much better. But she had only sparred with our coach. She was trying to fence me like she fenced him, expecting me to make a cretin counter attack or fall for a cretin feint. If I had been a better fencer, I might have, she was very skilled in that, but since I wasn't good, I didn't know exactly what to do, so I just did whatever. I was random. That is very hard to fight unless you can quickly adapt.

You can't learn to adapt without having a wide range of opponents to practice on. You can't learn that alone.

Picture from SXC.

The Point: Bloody Sheath

I love Brandon Sanderson. I really do. But a scene in Warbreaker where one of the characters sheathes a bloody sword seriously made me twitch. All though I may give him the benefit of the doubt, because it was a bad guy who did it. Maybe Sanderson did it on purpose, because only a really bad guy would treat their sword like that....

Or maybe I'm the only one who noticed.

I have scene the same sort of thing from other books as well (but of course none of those books were as awesome as Sanderson's). The victorious hero will be standing above the bad guy's slain minions, bloody sword in hand. The battle is over so the hero takes his bloody sword and sheathes it. Now, before I start screaming and ranting, lets think about this. You have a sword that is covered in blood. A piece of metal covered in a liquid. Moisture is the enemy of metal. Dirt and debris on the blade will scratch it. Getting a scratch on your blade in the middle of battle is one thing, marking up your blade because you're too lazy to take proper care of it is another. Something as small as the oil from a finger print can leave rust marks.

If you want to take good and proper care of your sword (The sword that, by the way, your life will depend on in the middle of a battle) clean it off! My sword master wipes down his blades with 3 in 1, but the first step is to get all the blood and dirt off.

Keep my eye from twitching, have your characters clean their blades!

The Point: "Run him through!"

Running a sword all the way through someone and out their back looks cool and sounds like a cool death for your villain or a neat description to throw into your Hero's fight, but there are some things to keep in mind.

First the human body sucks... no really, it does. When a body is pierced it sucks around the wound, essentially trying to close back up. That's why we (students of swordsmanship) are taught to rotate the blade while we're making a thrust. This not only does a lot more damage (think cork screw instead of a straight in and out stab) but it also prevents the body from sucking around that wound.

What does sucky bodies have to do with running someone through? Well, the body will suck around the sword as well, making it very difficult to pull it back out again. You don't need to get stuck on a bone for your sword to stick in the body. The best way to understand this is to imagine walking in mud. You put your foot down and it sinks pretty easily, then when you try to pull your foot back out again the suction tries to hold on to you. The deeper the mud (the deeper you stab into the human body) the harder it is to get out.

If you go all the way through someone, there's a good chance that you will have to plant your foot on the person to get enough leverage to get the word out again.

This brings me to my second point, if you're fighting multiple opponents you don't have time to be yanking and pulling at your sword trying to get it free (unless of course that's an element you want to use in your scene, but make sure the actions match the consequences).

You don't need to run a sword completely through someone to kill them. All the vital organs you are aiming for are within three inches of the skin.

So watch how deep you have your sword blows penetrate and make sure the consequences match.

Kissing the Frog: Note Cards

Note cards. Almost every book on writing that I’ve looked at says to use note cards when planning your book. I tried it once… it wasn’t pretty. But now I am moving into the land of revision where the laws of the first draft no longer apply. After a little experimenting I think I found a really cool way to use note cards for editing.

Last time I revised a novel I wrote the scenes on sticky notes and put them up on the wall. That actually worked really well, but even the best stick note only stays sticky for so long. It was right about that time that I had wished for note cards and a decent board.

Lesson learned. I am now revising my newest novel and I’m using note cards, but I’m doing it a little differently.

First let me say that I’m… oh, what’s the right word? Cheap? Thrifty would sound nicer, but cheap is more accurate. I HATE spending money on something if I can make it myself for nothing. That’s why my writing desk is made from a couple short bookshelves I got at a yard sale and a piece of counter top found on the side of the road.

So it won’t come as a surprise to anyone when I tell you that I didn’t want to go out and buy a huge cork board to tack all my note cards too. My solution: Cardboard.

Being a taxidermist we get in a lot of big packages, many of them are made of nice double thick cardboard. At the time these boxes came in I didn’t know why I would need a huge slab of double thick card board, but it was just too cool to throw away (I’m not hording, I’m just planning ahead).

So with the cardboard and a bunch of tacks I “borrowed” from my mother, I had myself a handy little board for my note cards. Don’t think my cheapness stopped there. Years ago I got a pack of 4x6 note cards, but I really don’t need that big of a card to write scene descriptions on. So I cut them in half. Now I have twice as many 3X4 cards and they are just the right size.

Now that I have all my supplies together, time to get down to business.

I took the first note card and wrote the name of the POV character for that scene and colored it in (each POV character has their own color). Next line I put where the scene took place and beneath that I wrote a short description of what happens in the scene. Easy as that.

I could write who was in the scene, what their goals are, escalation of conflict, blah, blah, blah, but I really don’t see the point in that. At least for me. I use the cards as quick reminders of what happened in that scene. All that other stuff I deal with in a separate note book.

Over a couple days I went through the book scene by scene and made cards for each. Not only that (and this is the cool part I cam up with) as I wrote each scene card I made notes on a colored sticky note then stuck the note on the back of the card, the bottom edge hanging over so I could see it after I tacked it up on my board. The notes are color coded. A blue sticky note meant that the scene only needed some minor changes, pink, a major part needs rewritten and yellow was for a totally new scene. I also used small purple notes for quick thoughts that I came up with later. Now I can look at the board and see just how much work I need to do to this novel (which I’m happy to say, isn’t nearly as much as I feared).

So now, when I go to work on a scene, I just take the card down and pull off the sticky notes to see what I need to do.

So far it’s been working like a charm.

Here's a picture of my board:

Scene card (The pink in the corner means it in my Heroine's POV, my Hero is blue, Villain green. The pink sticky note means I need to rewrite a large part of the scene.):

Back of the scene card:

Immersion Week Two- Casting

Week two is done and I've found actors/place holders for nearly all of my characters (at least the more important ones). I love looking for place holders, not only because I get to look back at movies I loved, but also because this is the part where the characters really start to come together. Once I have a face to attach ideas to it makes it easier to round that character out. Look into their eyes and see what they love. What they hate. What they are afraid of. I'm not going to post all of my characters, but I will put up my main people:

My Hero:

This one is funny because he was actually one of my main villains in my last book, but for some reason he seems like a good guy to me now.

My Heroine:

I was really excited when I found pictures of Olivia Wilde. She fits my Heroine perfectly (except for the eyes and the hair, but as you can see I "fixed" that in photoshop).

My Hero and Heroine's son:

When I was first thinking about my Hero and Heroine's son I thought he would just be a side character, but he's really blossomed into a full main character now. Even more so than his mother I think.

My Villain (#1):

It just makes me laugh to have "James Bond" as my Villain ;-)

Villain (#2):

This is my Heroine's direct antagonist.

Villain (#3):

Yep, you probably guessed it. This is the Son's main antagonist.

So those are my Main Characters. Now it's on to week three: The Collage.