I learned how to write novels by drawing comics.

Jeffe already said it, really, but at the end of the day we learn by doing.

My number one answer as to how to write a novel is simple: plant your butt in the seat and start writing. Repeat.

Thats not far from true. But the fact of the matter is that any sort of craft requires time and discipline.

It also requires focus. That's not quite the same as discipline, but they are very close cousins.

WhenI was growing up my family moved a lot. How much? Seventeen schools in twelve years of schooling and most of my moving was done by the time I was fourteen. My constant companion while growing up, the ONLY constant other than my family, was comic books. Marvel, DC, Charleston, Gold Key. Whatever comic I could find, I read. I was raised as much by Superman and the Avengers as I was by anyone else. My moral compass was definitely affected by the actions of Clark Kent and his alter ego (No powers, but a definite sense of what i thought was right and wrong) and I knew at an early age that I wanted to draw comics.

I sat down every day and I read them and I studied them and I broke them down in my mind as to how I would lay out the individual panels and what I would say.  I spent a lot of time drawing, and I did my best to understand the basics of storytelling and anatomy and How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.

That last one? I read that book a thousand times and studied each example they gave

What I never managed in all of that time was how to draw comics well. It wasn't for lack of trying and I could get certain aspects easily enough, but in the words of a Marvel Comics editor ai was showing my work (I'd actually done a full 22 page issue of the DC Comics character The Creeper, but damned if I wasn't going to show it to someone and DC was not there that year; The best laid plans....) "You can't draw a straight line and I can see you've been using a ruler. Your anatomy is horrible and out of proportion, but I you're telling a great story. Have you considered writing?" I should point out that at first there was a lot of hemming and hawing, but eventually I told him he wouldn't hurt my feelings if he was brutally honest.

He was brutally honest. It hurt a bit. I was wrong on that aspect. He also bought my first professional sale a few months later. Turned out pencil wasn't my medium. I could tell the story just fine with words and that's what I practiced after speaking to him.

I learned the proper format by looking at a few other comic scripts and emulating the layout. I told the story n a way that the artist could understand.

Later, when virtually every contact I had at Marvel Comics got fired on the same day and I'd spent a month writing at least one one page proposal a day, I got sick of telling the equivalent of a story a day in the same basic format as the back cover text of a novel I sat down one day with an image in my head that would not leave me alone.

A solitary kid, overweight and winded, runs through the woods with half a dozen kids after him. They chase him down and bear him mercilessly, while, in the woods around and above them, hundreds of tiny creatures watch and cheer them on.

That image would n leave me alone until, finally, exasperated, I sat down and I wrote the scene out. Then I thought about it a bit and wrote the next scene that explained the first. And then I write the consequences of those actions.

I wrote about how that beaten down boy got better and got his revenge and I wrote about the motivations behind his actions. As I wrote I drew a bigger picture with words. It just kept growing.

I believe the final text was somewhere around 170,000 words. I was told matter of factly that it would never sell.

I sold it anyway. It's been in print multiple times and got some pretty damned decent blurbs back in the day. the story was called UNDER THE OVERTREE.

I liked the feeling so much that I did it again and again. Along the way I honed my writing skills with practice, with patience, with the help of good friends who gave me their time, and by trial and error. Oh, and with the help pf very patient editors.

As I have explained to people before, I went to seventeen schools in twelve years. My best year I had a 2.5 GPA. Most years in high school it was a 1.5.

When I was drawing comics, badly, granted, I was telling a story. That story had a beginning, a middle and an end. I drew out easily ten or fifteen comics, full stories, either on note book paper when I could afford nothing better, or on full sized 11 x 17 bristol board after I got a job and saved up for my meager supplies.

I don't physically draw much these days. No spare time, and, honestly, I was never very good But I visualize the same way I always did, and my palette of words is pretty comfortable.

I Learned How to Write Novels by ... Training in Kung Fu

I'm headed home from #RWA16, the Romance Writers of America annual conference, which was in lovely San Diego this year. This was a truly wonderful gathering this year.Grateful for this community that always leaves me refreshed and supported.

Also, the first book in my new Sorcerous Moons series comes out on Tuesday. I'm loving on this cover! Yes, I helped design it, but the amazing Louisa Gallie is the one who pulled it off. Love the feel. And here's the blurb:

An Unquiet Heart

Alone in her tower, Princess Oria has spent too long studying her people’s barbarian enemies, the Destrye—and neglected the search for calm that will control her magic and release her to society. Her restlessness makes meditation hopeless and her fragility renders human companionship unbearable. Oria is near giving up. Then the Destrye attack, and her people’s lives depend on her handling of their prince…

A Fight Without Hope

When the cornered Destrye decided to strike back, Lonen never thought he’d live through the battle, let alone demand justice as a conqueror. And yet he must keep up his guard against the sorceress who speaks for the city. Oria’s people are devious, her claims of ignorance absurd. The frank honesty her eyes promise could be just one more layer of deception.

A Savage Bargain

Fighting for time and trust, Oria and Lonen have one final sacrifice to choose… before an even greater threat consumes them all.

Our topic this week is “I Learned How to Write Novels by (doing some other activity).“ It will be interesting to hear what all everyone else has to say. Hopefully Jim won’t just post that he learned to write novels by writing novels.

~Gives Jim the beady-eyed stare down~

For me, I had to teach myself how to write a novel – both by focused, deliberate habit-building, and by an overall effort to improve myself.

As for the first, I didn’t know how to write long. I started out as an essayist and short-story writer. I could hold essentially the entire arc of the story in my head and I usually hammered it out in one writing session. Sure, sometimes an all-session, but still. I’d gone to working four ten-hour days at the day job, and writing all day on Fridays. For a while I wrote an essay or story a week – though most were 1,500 – 5,000 words

When I decided to write longer, I realized this wouldn’t work. I couldn’t hold the whole story in my head, and by writing one-day each week, I’d lose too much of the thread in between.

So, I had to deliberately build a habit of writing every day for a couple of hours – and teach myself how to work incrementally, rather than in a long, focused session. This was a huge change in work-pattern for me. I had always been a binge-worker. I was the girl in college who pulled all-nighters, staying up to write my papers the night before. I’m pretty good at concentrating and working in one long session.

While some people can do this with novels, I cannot. 10,000 words/day is a really good day for me. I can’t sustain that for many days in a row. For a 130,000 word novel? No, no, no.

Therefore I had to learn how to work in slower, steady increments.

But that’s not the subject of this week. What I discovered was that something else I’d been doing helped me enormously in this effort.

I started taking Tai Chi and Pakua Chang long before I decided to become a writer. Those are both internal Chinese martial arts that fall under the collective umbrella of Kung Fu. (I learned several more arts and styles over time, but this was where I started.) I’d been dating David for about six months at that point and he really wanted to learn Pakua. I’d been a religious studies major in college and had become very interested in the idea that practice shapes belief. (Christians, for example, teach that you only need to believe and everything else follows; in Judaism, practice comes first – prayers, rituals, dietary observances – and they teach that belief, and spiritual growth, arises from that.)

All of this is a long way of saying I was up for learning Kung Fu also, as a way for practicing a physical discipline that could lead to personal growth.

We studied those arts for over fifteen years. Along the way, I discovered a level of patience I’d never before possessed. That kind of training in particular depends on incremental work. We did a lot of moving meditation. Tai Chi requires very slow, meticulous and relaxed movements. There are various standing exercises that require fortitude of both body and spirit, remaining in the same very uncomfortable position for a long period of time.

After a while of practicing an activity, it becomes easy to focus on the specific goals – the next demonstration or test – and lose sight of the original reasons for taking it up. I became intent on the trees, pouring energy into the school I belonged to, both taking and teaching classes. It wasn’t until we eventually left the school that I remembered about the forest.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all that practice resulted in personal growth. I’d developed all sorts of patient focus for working incrementally that dovetailed directly into learning to write novels. I had created work habits that allowed me to move into a new kind of steady and productive creativity.

I get asked a lot these days to explain how I do what I do. I’m regarded as a fast and productive writer. Fortunately I also seem to write good books! The people asking inevitably want to know how to do the same – and I’m afraid my answer isn’t an easy or fast one. Except that I think we all have these other experiences that come into play, skills we’ve built over time that we can move into new 

efforts.

Nothing we do is ever wasted.

A Slew of Favorite Minor Characters

I figure the most memorable minor characters are the ones who come to mind first, so here is my list, in no certain order:

1. The tiny Death Star robot

2. The multipurpose Guard in Wizard of Oz

3. We had a lively debate on Facebook the other day whether the Scarpatine Pie in Grace Draven's Radiance novel counted. I vote yes! (Think meat pie with nasty live scorpions.)

4. In my own novels there's a rather dashing Captain Intefiqer-Duaen, a Ushabti warrior who serves the Queen of the Gods. He appears in Magic of the Nile in one scene and in Ghost of the Nile for one scene. I have a plot idea in mind for him someday, where Isis sends him to the land of the living to retrieve a lost....well, that would be telling.

5. I was always rather intrigued by this Hawkman in the "Flash Gordon" movie:

6. The passengers on the bus in the movie "Speed"...

7. James Shigeta (always loved him in movies) as Mr. Takagi in "Die Hard":

8. Thomasina Tittlemouse from Beatrix Potter - I love her fluffy coat!

9. Every put upon valet, butler and housekeeper in every Regency novel EVER.

10. And of course who could forget Lady Veronica in Jeffe Kennedy's The Twelve Kingdoms series, who I believe is still awaiting the arrival of her own Dasnarian mercenary. Ahem.

When Your Favorite MInor Character is Evil

This releases next Tuesday. It's something a tad different from me. You can usually count on me to bring the grim and faintly creepy. Also, body count. Pretty much absent from this book.

It is possible that I attempted a bit of comedy. I'll leave that to you to decide whether or not I succeeded. This book has one of my favorite minor characters of all time - I wasn't supposed to like him. I didn't want to like him. But he is awfully charismatic in a way I hadn't expected. No. I am not talking about the heroine's cat. Of course I adore Archimedes.

In this case, my favorite minor character is Satan. Here's a bit of a scene he has with the heroine.





            Fire surrounded her. Everything, even the rocks, burned. Flames circled the jagged black surface on which she stood. Obsidian stairs rose to a dais and a throne fashioned from burning, still living, still screaming, people.

She looked away.

Hell.

“Welcome to my office.” Satan stood beside her, still in the human form he’d presented in the restaurant. “I see you’re indoctrinated well enough to expect the fire and brimstone motif. Trite but effective.”

Fiona quelled and her gaze ran away from him, too, only to find the damned souls being swarmed by serpents. The snakes buried fangs dripping with poison into the flesh of their victims. The wet, ripping sound reached her above the hiss and crackle of the flames.

“Ah, I see it in your face, the same look I see on the face of each soul who lands at the foot of my throne for the first time. Awareness that settles so rapidly into despair. Don’t make the mistake of thinking Hell is about despair,” the Devil said. His voice crashed down, crushing her beneath derision. “Despair is useless to me. Everyone adapts to it. I am about hope.”

He shifted, peeling back the illusion of civility. Of humanity. His skin reddened to crimson. His eyes turned black. No irises. No pupil. Just the endless depth of evil. He grew horns. A tail. A vicious, razor-toothed smile of triumph split his multi-planed face.

“I am the hope that sucks the marrow from your bones. The hope that shatters souls. I am every futile, dashed dream lying in broken-winged tatters at your feet,” he said, obscene relish in his tone.

Fiona snarled at the towering creature. “You’re the reason my mother couldn’t survive that heart attack?”

His laughter stoked the flames surrounding them higher. Screams shoved her to the ground, cowering with her hands over her ears while her skin charred and crisped. Her shriek mingled with the cries of the damned.

“Do you not pay attention?” he demanded. “No. Your pathetic mother’s death was never in my hands. But that tiny, flickering flame of hope that burned you to the ground before she died, that was me.

“No one resists hope. No one adapts to its lies. Futile hopes bring me more souls than any torment ever devised. Get up, you stupid mortal. You’re cooking alive. It’s against the rules you believe you know so much about.”

 

            A fetid wind, slimy and cold, oozed across her skin. Shuddering, she climbed to her feet. From the way she gulped for breath, from the shattering weariness dogging her, she might as well have climbed Mount Everest.


As you can see, Satan, in this book, has no issue with being bad. He actively enjoys it. He loves twisting everything he can get his hands on. And there's just something about that unabashed love of being evil that's appealing. Yet there's no danger that Satan would get his own book. He can't. Not the way the rules of the world work in this book. So he truly is a minor character who gets a few bits of stage time, and who cannot graduate to being the star of his own show. At least, not until he's ready to go to war with heaven again. And we all know how that ended last time.

An Import of Intrigue: Writing My Favorite Secondary Character

Folks, in a few months my fourth novel, An Import of Intrigue, is coming out.  

I'm very excited for this book, and it was very fun to write, in part because I got to do more with my favorite secondary character in the Constabulary cast, Corrie Welling.

Corrie is Minox's younger sister, and she's just as dedicated to a career in the Maradaine Constabulary as he is.  But she's also still early in her career, and facing a bit of an uphill climb being a woman who actually serves in the streets-- as opposed to taking the clerking desk position that her cousin Nyla works.  So she works the shift she can-- horsepatrol on the night shift.  "Working the dark", as she calls it.

She also swears in ways that would make a sailor blush, at least in terms of Maradaine's own unique forms of profanity.

Corrie really gets to shine in An Import of Intrigue.  In A Murder of Mages, she is mostly just some extra color.  In Import she's elevated to a point-of-view character, she becomes integral to the plot.  

Corrie is, of course, one of the many reasons why I'm thrilled with An Import of Intrigue, and hopefully all the fans of the Constabulary books will be pleased with where their story goes.

Minor Character Favorites

This week we are talking about our favorite minor characters. I'm going to divide this up into two sections: TV & Film, and my books.

TV & Film:

3.) Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie in Escape from New York

He provided lightened a dark plot, created a sense of levity in the dangerous good guy on the inside, and generally classed-up the flick.

2.) Kristian Nairn as Hodor in Game of Thrones

Hodor proves a character does not need words if his actions have great impact.

1.) Pauly Perrette as Abby in NCIS

Abby is fun and wacky in a 'can't guess what she'll do or say next' way that provides a highly interesting side-point to the episodes.

My Books:

3.) Eris Alcmedi 

Excerpt, Arcane Circle, page 331

Eris crouched over her artist and smacked Lance’s cheek with increasing force. Lance looked like he’d barely graduated high school. “Shake it off, bitch boy.” His eyelids fluttered. “There you go, show me those baby blues.” He moaned, then blinked and focused on her. “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked as she flipped him off.






2.) Xerxadrea Veilleux

Excerpt, Hallowed Circle, page 186

She stamped her staff on the dais floor; it cracked like thunder and the orb atop it began to glow with a white light. “Why have you come?”

“It is my right to attend.” Menessos stopped perhaps ten feet from our contestant line. “Do you yet begrudge me the past, Eldrenne? Will your bitterness never cease?”

They had history between them. Curious.

“You give me no cause for anything but bitterness, Menessos.” She spat his name.

“What benefit could I seek in aggravating the wounds of decades past, Eldrenne?”

“Your motives are ever your own. To guess at them is to relinquish myself to thoughts just as depraved and selfish. I will not sully myself to venture there.”

“Your words sting me, Xerxadrea.”

The other Elders gasped in unison; he’d addressed her by name. WEC had only a handful of Eldrennes and once they became Eldrenne, that was their name in public.

“Good,” she replied. “It may not be the stabbing vehement agony you deserve, but a sting implies pain and if I have hurt you even a little, then I will relish it.”

Menessos took three steps forward, hand out, palms open in a show of nonaggression. “If my pain pleases you, Xerxadrea, if you delight in hearing of it, then come down from your dais, witch. Come down and make me bleed of your own hand, that you may be happy once more.”

Before I could even turn back to her, the Eldrenne glided past me to accept his offer. 



1.) Demeter Alcmedi  / Nana

Excerpt, Shattered Circle, page 305

Demeter stood before him with all the ferocity of a lioness in her eyes. “My granddaughter has been nearly killed how many times since she got involved with you and that vampire?”

Johnny’s chin dropped shamefully.

“Right now she’s stuck in a meditation downstairs. You”—she poked him in the chest—“were here. I bet she saw Menessos tonight, too. He resides an hour away.”

She shuffled a step forward. Johnny eased a step back.

“He is accustomed to the night, and more than normal stress.” She gained another few inches on him, and Johnny retreated again. “He can use magic. He could probably have fixed this . . . but you called me. I had to get my ass out of bed in the middle of the night and come home to fix this.”

Johnny could say nothing. She was right.

Demeter put her hands on her hips. “Hate him if you have to, Johnny. Hate him because he wants her and you feel threatened by that. But trust him, damn it. You three have to trust each other if any of you hope to survive this.”

Top 3 Favorite Minor Characters

My favorite minor characters are...hard to choose. I'm the sort of reader/viewer/consumer who tends to identify more with minors than the majors. For the sake of clarity, I'm defining "minor character" as having a third-tier relationship to the protagonist(s) and/or the plot. Secondary characters get a lot of glory; but we really shouldn't gloss over the amazing third-string who get so little time on page/screen yet have a notable impact on the story.

Because I'm a girl who enjoys making lists here my Top 3 Favorite Minor Characters:

1. The Master of the Young Amelia -- the merchant ship's captain from Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo (the book, not the movie). A man who recognized the genius beneath the filth of the escaped fugitive pretending to be a shipwrecked sailor. The captain was a man of authority who also had the humility to recognize and appreciate that Dantes was a rare gem of an asset to the crew. Yet, the captain didn't abuse Dantes, didn't manipulate or conspire against him, he didn't punish Dantes for seemingly being a better man than he. The captain was one of the few characters in the book about revenge and betrayal, who was a genuinely good guy.

2. Pree -- The club owner/bartender from Syfy's Killjoys (played by actor Thom Allison). Counselor, comic relief, and amazing eyebrows that he uses to great effect, Pree is the guy who when shit's gonna blow, grabs the booze. He owned my heart after that. He was a minor character in Season One, but Season Two Ep1 featured him prominently, so I'm hoping for more screen time for that character. A hat tip to our own Veronica Scott for her interview with Killjoy's show creator Michelle Lovretta. If you haven't tuned into this Sci-Fi bounty hunter series, you're really missing out.

3.  Asta -- the dog from the Thin Man movies. Comedy + mystery + happy couple + mischievous dog = everything I love in a movie. I dare you not to cry, "Asta! Asta!" the next time you see a fox terrier.

My favorite minor character

First, sorry for the late start. Turns out my hard drive on my Imac is toast.
Moving on, trying to pick one minor character I liked best is tough, because I have a lot of novels and  most of them have stupid numbers of characters.

Instead of searching through each and every one of my books to find just the right character, I'm going to go to Mr.Mortimer Slate, an undertaker in my novel in progress BOOMTOWN. He's got all the charm in the world and it does him no good. He is an outcast not only because of his job but because he is an albino of mixed heritage living in a town where money is the only master.

Mr. Slate starts off normally enough, all things considered, but he changes through the course of the novel, becoming something he's not even sure he can describe.

He is also the busiest man in the town, burying body after body and often burying then a second or third time, all while desperately trying to find the supplies to bury them and the land to do so as well.

Poor Slate just wants a simple life, but it's not his place to have it. he shows up in several additional stories of mine, not as the main character but as a companion to my anti-hero Jonathan Crowley. Slate has no choice in the matter, because whatever it is that corrupted him (I ain't telling, but I know) is making him less human and Crowley is deciding whether or not he'll have to kill the man.

Slate shows up as Crowley's companion in "Black Train Blues," "Blank White Page," my novella "The Devoted," and in the chapbook "What Rough Beast," co-authored with Charles R. Rutledge.

Not a bad run for a minor character.