My Ideal Reader: Is She Out There?

Currently self-studying Writing Fiction for Dummies by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy, and in chapter three have had to do exercises in discovering my ideal reader.

It seems rather odd to narrow down the type of readers I want. Shouldn't I try to please everyone? As my retailer father taught me, the customer is always right. Who am I to say that some customers are wrong?

But it seems that it helps to narrow your aim down to a core constituency, who will be your most loyal readers. Once you have that group captured and producing a good 'buzz' for your work, the other readers will come.

So I went through determining the gender, age group, politics, religion and interests of my ideal readers. Since I am somewhat of an outcast, an original, a person out of step with others, I put that in my ideal reader description, too.

This is my ideal reader:

"My ideal reader is an independent-thinking, Catholic (or Catholic-friendly), politically-conservative, prolife/profamily, brilliantly intelligent, very mature teenage girl (or youthful-thinking mature woman). She may consider herself an outcast or eccentric. She might have Asperger Syndrome or same-sex attraction/gay orientation. Her interests are likely to include cats, horses, farm critters, pioneering and exploring history, and foreign languages and cultures. She reads widely in many genres but likely has a preference for fantasy, science fiction, and/or western/historical books."

Well, that narrows it down. A lot. It was hard to do this, in a way it felt like saying to some potential readers that I was not looking out for them. But then, on the other hand, any reader who is mortally offended by elements in this reader description isn't likely to become a loyal reader. 

The readers who strongly identify with this description, on the other hand, are likely to become loyal readers, especially if I keep this description in mind as I write, and keep asking myself things like: what does this story have for the Catholic reader? For the politically conservative reader? For the teenage-girl reader? For the reader with Asperger Syndrome? For the cat lover? And so on.

Readers who don't strongly identify with the ideal reader description, but who are not mortally offended by it, might also become loyal readers if they find some of the things in the description interesting, or if they just happen to like my plots and characters. 

So: what do you think of my 'Ideal Reader' description? Do you think having an Ideal Reader description is a good idea for a writer? Have you ever written one of your own?

 

Giving my Main Character a Sex Change

Doing outlining on my WIP and decided to change one of my main characters from a Korean-American male to a Korean-American female. The character, Taemin Lee, would have looked like the actor pictured above (star of the Korean drama Bridal Mask).

In either case, the character in this contemporary fantasy is a student of magecraft (high magic), and if successful in becoming a mage will have to be celibate. (Because celibacy is cool. Just think of Tarma in Mercedes Lackey's Vows and Honor series.)

First thing I had to do was find a female Korean name to replace 'Taemin'. I hoped for something with the first element 'Tae' but found I had none in my names collection. I did find that there was a female character 'Namju' in the same Korean drama that I found the name 'Taemin' in, so I took that. Namju Lee. Well, if she went to Korea she'd be Lee Namju.

Namju is going to be the serious, logical one of the team. Still looks a bit like the actor in the picture, only more feminine. A tiny bit more feminine.

Her partner, Inae, is an Irish-American werecat. When she transforms into her cat form, she's a ginger-colored cat. Other times, she's a red-haired girl. NOT like Amy Pond, Inae is more pixie-ish. Maybe because of the pointed ears. And the tail.

The 300-Blog Follow Limit on Blogger

Did you know that on Blogger, you are only allowed to 'follow' 300 blogs? You can have lots more blogs than that following yours, but you can only follow them back until you hit 300.

But there is a loophole, according to Carole's Chatter Blog Tips: You go to the blog in question, and if they have a Blogger 'Follow' widget, sign up there and it will not be held against you.

Of course, this only works for Blogger blogs, and ones that happen to have the widget displayed.

This is too bad. There are two ways I follow blogs--- one is through Facebook, when one of my Facebook friends or a Facebook page I like posts their blog posts on Facebook, often through Networked Blogs. The other is the blogs I follow through Blogger, displayed on my Blogger dashboard.

I have tried using NetworkedBlogs to follow blogs, but frankly, I just don't check in at NetworkedBlogs unless one of the blogs I myself has there needs a change in the syndication or something.

I am now syndicating this blog to my new Facebook page, Lina Lamont Fan Club by Nissa Annakindt. So if you go there and 'like' this page, you will be able to follow the posts of this blog through your Facebook. I also share Doctor Who-related posts, and of course cat pictures like the mama cat and kittens above. (The mama cat is Chachamaru, the same cat that's on the cover of my poetry book.)

I have been reading a book I downloaded by James Scott Bell, 'Self-Publishing Attack!', which gives, among other things, some very good tips for writers who want to use blogging and social media to build up a following and, in time, sell books. These things are recommended even before you are ready to publish your book!

I am inspired by this to create a plan of action for my blogging/social media life as well as for my writing. I am hoping to write to this blog more faithfully, to visit the blogs I follow more regularly and comment there, and in time build up my following base to greater numbers.

Have you been inspired anytime lately to do things to improve your blogging or social media life? What did you do? How did it work out?

The Secret of Using the Snowflake Method for Scenes or Short Stories

Do you know the Snowflake Method? It is a method, taught by author Randy Ingermanson, to help you go from a vague novel idea to a workable outline in ten steps. In "Writing Fiction for Dummies" he goes to great lengths to show how to use it to create a novel.

But what if you can't write or plan at great lengths? What if you only are ready to write short fiction right now? Or what if you just can't plan out a whole novel before you start, but your novel comes to you in scenes and short sections, so that you write it as if it were a series of short stories? It may be that you are in the middle ground between being an outliner and a seat-of-the-pants writer, and need to plan things, but only on a scene-by-scene, section-by-section basis.

Never fear, the Snowflake Method can be used in scenes and short stories, too. You just adapt it a little. I've been using the Snowflake Method for the opening scene in what I'm working on now. Because I have Asperger Syndrome, I'm not really good at planning out a whole novel in advance. So I'm writing scene by scene--- and planning this scene in advance.

The full Snowflake Method is meant to cover a full novel. For shorter work, you don't have to do all ten steps. The initial steps may be all you need to write your scene or story.  Here are some hints:

Step One: Storyline
A storyline for just one scene is a lot smaller in scope than one for a full novel.  Here is my scene storyline for the scene I am working on: A cat-girl is stuck in a drab grocery store job until she fights with a werewolf and meets a student mage. If I were to write a storyline for the whole novel/novella instead of just this scene, it would be different. But as yet I haven't fleshed out a lot of the rest of the story. But I do know enough about what will happen in the scene to write this.

Step Two: Three-Act Structure
Your scene is not going to have 'three acts'. It's just a scene! But you can probably divide it into three sections--- beginning, middle and end. In the Snowflake Method, this is supposed to come to about 5 sentences. Mine tend to run over, and I have in the past used what was intended as my Three-Act Structure to be my Short Synopsis (Step Four). But for a mere scene, you may not get as far as doing a Step Four. The Three-Act will be enough.

My Three-Act from today introduces the setting--- a small rural grocery story--- two major characters--- the cat-girl and the student mage--- and minor characters--- the couple that owns the grocery story, and a mother werewolf and her children. There is action--- a minor supernatural creature is banished. And the scene concludes as the cat-girl, who has shape-shifted into her cat form, tries to flee an irate werewolf and is caught by the student mage. (The next scene will show the result of this chance meeting.)

Step Three: Character Definitions
Here is where you write out some brief info on the characters--- name, ambition, scene goal, conflict, epiphany--- and write a one-sentence and one-paragraph summary of the story/scene from the point of view of the character. For scene/short story snowflaking, this gives you more than you need to know about most of the characters. I wrote this out in full for my two major characters, who are not only the focus of this scene, but are the major characters in the rest of the story. The more minor characters, I am going to do far more abbreviated versions of the character definition work.

For a lot of writers, these three steps may be plenty to write the scene or short story. For others, you may go on to do the other steps, particularly if it is a longer short story, or if you lack confidence when you sit down to write out a scene.

Question: Have you ever tried the Snowflake method to write a scene or a short story? Does it sound like something that might work for you?

Like our new Facebook page at: 

http://www.facebook.com/NissaAnnakindt

Why Your Book Reviews/Promos Suck

Sometimes you go around the internet and read a book review and say to yourself, 'there is no there there.' I know, I've written those kind of reviews myself. There is a similar problem with author-written book promos.

What is the problem? It's that the reviewers have lost sight of the important things. They write down something abstract about the theme: this is a book about man against nature. This is a book about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This is a book about a dystopian future where only computers are allowed to vote.

These statements lead to book reviews that can't hook the reader, because they have forgotten the essential rule: fiction is about folks. Folks with problems, specifically.

Even if you are the second-worst book review writer ever (the first-worst is probably me), you can improve by a simple and amusing method. It is called a storyline--- a one sentence summary of a novel that focuses on a character and his problem or goal.

In 'Writing Fiction for Dummies' by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy, it gives instruction on how to create a storyline for use in planning and writing a novel. (It is the first step in the Snowflake Method.) But storylines, and also the one-paragraph summaries that are also taught, are great tools for writing a book review or a book promo.

Here is an example storyline: 'A physicist travels back in time to kill the Apostle Paul.' That's only 11 words, but it packs a lot of punch. Why? Because it mentions a character, and a major conflict or goal of that character. Compare that to a lame book review abstract statement: this book is about the issue of whether you can use time travel to change history.... Boring, by comparison, isn't it?

Whether you are a book blogger, enthusiastic reader, or book author, it's a very good idea to practice writing storylines. You can use them any time you want to tell your friends about a favorite book, or write a book review, or promote a book of your own.

Here are a couple other storylines:

The Lord of the Rings: A hobbit learns that destroying his magic ring is the key to saving Middle Earth from the Dark Lord.

The Lovely Bones: A young girl watches the turmoil in her family from heaven after being raped and murdered by a neighbor.

Pride and Prejudice: A young English woman from a peculiar family is pursued by an arrogant and wealthy young man.

And now, a smart aleck storyline of my own composition:

Harry Potter: A fallen Dark Lord seeks to regain his power, only to be thwarted by an annoying boy wizard.

This last is not QUITE as silly as it seems. In the Ingermanson/Economy book, in the chapters on character development, it suggests writing storylines from the point of view of various characters in the story. After all, every character in a story believes he is the hero of the tale.

Challenge: Think of a book, perhaps a popular one such as 'The Hunger Games', and write your own storyline for it and post it as a comment. There is no 'one right answer' for this. Just do the best that you can.  Continue to practice the technique and put it to use whenever you write a book review. If you participate in blog tours such as the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour, you might challenge the readers of your blog tour posts to come up with their own storylines for the book in question, perhaps from the point of view of their favorite character. 

Hugh Howey, Indie Author Success Story

In the May/June issue of Writer's Digest, there is a most inspirational story about indie author Hugh Howey, who recently scored a triumph in getting a print-only deal from a book publisher, which allows him to continue to sell the book in e-book form himself.

The book in question, Wool, started out life as a short story Howey put out as an e-book. Readers demanded sequels, and in time the story turned into a novel and was selling over 20,000 e-book copies a month.

The first installment of Wool is available as a free e-book on Amazon.com. The omnibus edition of the whole thing is not that expensive, so I downloaded a copy for my Kindle.

The story is a sci-fi set in a grim future where humans live in a silo--- a large, contained habitat--- because the outside world is toxic. (If this was meant as an enviromentalist-extremist sermon, Howey wisely keeps that to himself.) The main characters of the story begin to suspect that they are not being told the truth about their world, but to know that can mark one for death by being put out in the toxic environment to clean the sensors.

The novel is not unflawed--- what novel is? My main suggestion for improvement is that the author should have cut down the word count in each scene to get rid of all the superfluous words and make the whole thing tighter. But the story is sufficiently compelling to overcome the problem of wordiness which is so often fatal to a work of fiction. 

I enjoy the novel so far. As for the Writer's Digest article, I found it very useful, and inspired my current effort to write short stories. I mean, if Howey can turn short stories into successful e-books, leading to successful novels and a major contract, why not me?

DeathDay: What Alien Invaders Must Do

An alien invading army must be able to do three things: move, shoot, and multiply. Multiply? Yes, as in 'be fruitful and'. An alien invading army that cannot do that might as well stay home. And that is the problem I found with the alien invaders of William C. Dietz's DeathDay.

DeathDay, published in 2001, and its sequel EarthRise, is a mashup between an alien invasion novel and a solemn tract on the overwhelming importance of racial political correctness. As you may have guessed, that bit didn't work for me.

The alien race, the Saurons, come in three color coded types, and for the purpose of educating us, the ruling type is black! and the menial caste is white! But the important thing about the Saurons is the way they reproduce--- and the fact they don't seem to be able to multiply.

With the Saurons, their reproductive phase begins when a nymph begins growing within their body. When the nymph is big enough, it emerges, killing its parent. But this doesn't matter because the nymph is identical and carries on.

This reproductive phase happens to the whole race at once. When that happens, they high-tail it to a planet, invade, and use slave labor to construct chambers for the change to happen in.

Now, there is an important mathematical bit here: there is only one nymph per Sauron. And 3% of Saurons are early changers and they, and their nymphs, won't survive. So that alone means that each new generation is 3% smaller than the last.

And then there is the factor of Saurons that die of other causes. Since their military force is overwhelming, they don't have battle deaths to worry about. But then they gather survivors to put them to slave labor, giving the angry slaves and other rebels plenty of cause and opportunity to kill a few Saurons. And there are natural causes and accidents as well.

So what we have here is a species that is incapable of population growth at any time, no matter how favorable the circumstances. A species, moreover (I love the word 'moreover', I had a blog named that once) that is locked into population shrinkage for all eternity.

The question becomes, why are there any Saurons left? How could they evolve from the slime when their biology means that the first little band of Saurons to evolve would have shrunk and become extinct long before they had time to develop the wheel, much less space travel. This species is non-viable. It cannot do what the author has it doing.

I fully understand how author William C. Dietz made this mistake. Population growth of any kind is a strong taboo in modern-day progressive circles, to the point that some even call for deliberate human extinction.

How could these aliens be fixed? I might have the aliens not be evolved creatures, but created ones. Now, don't get all bent out of shape over 'created', some alien genetics lab trying to create some perfect warrior race as a weapon will do just as well as Almighty God. In this scenario, the creators can make as many Saurons as they like in a lab for an original base population, and can teach them to use any technology they need to use to fulfill their purpose.

As for the population shrinkage thing: we might give Saurons the ability their creators had to build new Saurons in the lab. But that might change the nature of the race to give them that ability.

What I would do is introduce a concept of twinning. A certain percentage of Saurons would produce two nymphs. That means a certain number of living Saurons would have twins. Perhaps there would be a certain food supplement to adjust the twinning level to the amount desired: to keep the population the same when the living space on their spaceships was full-up, and to increase when they had extra living space--- perhaps from adding new ships to their fleet.

The lesson of DeathDay--- other than to avoid getting all preachy with your race relations politics--- is to think your alien societies through. Make sure you are not creating a non-viable, doomed race such as the Saurons when a little thought can make them realistic.

The Worst Advice Lawrence Block Ever Gave Me

Lawrence Block, he's a friend of mine. Well, in a totally fictional and fangirl way, he's a friend of mine. I've read his Tanner and Burglar books for years. And Lawrence gives me great writing advice, too, ever since that day many years ago when I first bought a copy of LB's book Writing the Novel:
from Plot to Print.

But in that book Lawrence gave me a major bum steer that I am only now getting over. You see, in that book he recommends strongly that the novice writer NOT bother with writing short stories. The market for short stories, he declares, is too small and too low-paying now for that to be very practical. He recommended that the new writer start out by writing a novel.

Is that the way Lawrence Block learned to write? No, he admits. He wrote short stories for years before he felt ready to tackle the novel.

Many other writers of Lawrence Block's generation learned the same way. At the time, there were a great many short story magazines, called 'pulps', in a wide variety of genres--- sci-fi, mystery, westerns, romance, adventure--- and they were available on every news stand. (Yes, there used to be these things called 'news stands' that sold newspapers and magazines. A newspaper was kind of like the evening news broadcast, only written down and printed on paper.)

At the time LB wrote the book, there were only a tiny handful of short story magazines left and they paid the same as they did a couple of decades back, even though the dollar had declined greatly over that time.

I will agree with LB that at that time there was no real financial incentive for the novice writer to write short stories. But the thing is, the reason most writers started with short stories wasn't a money thing. They did it for the same reason most of us learned to walk before we learned to drive a car or fly an airplane.

A novel is a complicated thing, and you can spend months on it before you discover you are driving it into a dead end. While a short story can be simple enough that you can hold the whole thing in your mind.

A shorter work is just more possible for the novice writer to do, and to do well. Short stories, being short, are also easier to revise and improve.

Lawrence Block said that you can write a novel in the same time it would take to write twenty short stories, and that the odds are better for selling that novel than for selling the twenty short stories.

But what if your writing, at first, is not good enough to sell at all? You will end up with seven utterly hopeless short stories, seven that are a bit better, and then you will have a few with potential. While if you had started with a novel right off the bat, you will have an utterly hopeless novel.

The changing world of publishing has made short stories more worth doing. No, there has been no revival of the pulps as a paying market for short fiction. But now, self-publishing is easier, cheaper and more respected. There is also the internet. There are e-zines to submit to, and web sites where would-be authors can post their stories, and the possibility of publishing your short story, in installments, on your blog. You can also turn a short story into an e-book and sell it or give it away.

All of these things can build you up as a writer. You will learn your craft, and you will get feedback. A tiny amount of that feedback will be things that are actually useful to you.

I have decided, for myself, that what I need to be doing now is to work on short fiction. Perhaps because of my Asperger Syndrome, which has some symptoms similar to ADHD, the complexities of a full novel are beyond me right now. But if I can get the short story right--- well, story stories have been known to become novels, as in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, or Hugh Howey's Wool. This just might lead to something.

What I really wanted to change this blog's name to....

OK, so I've been dissatisfied with the blog name for a while and I couldn't think what to call it because THIS TIME I want a permanent name I will be happy with forever or at least until next month.

And I had this perfect idea, I'd call it 'What is an antihero? An antihero is a hero who is made out of antimatter. If an antihero touches a hero, the universe explodes. I like explosions. Explosions are cool'. Now isn't that just the best blog name ever? But some IDIOTS out there at Blogger seem to think that is too long for a blog name. Hey, it's shorter than one of my other blog name ideas--- the entire Gospel of John.

And so I'm back to The Lina Lamont Fan Club which is cool but it makes people call me Lina because they can just TELL from my blog posts that I am the sort of person who would start a fan club for herself. Only I didn't. Really.

Then I thought maybe I could name it after a WIP (Work in Progress) only my current WIP, the working title is 'Inae Schlechter and the Toilet Ghost' and that won't work at all because what if it makes people come to the blog looking for plumbing advice about Ghost Flushing?

And so my big plan right now is to change the blog name seven times today and the seventh time I will flip the I Ching coins six times and if the number of the coins adds up to the number of the beast in the book of Revelation, I'll name the blog 'Emperor Nero and the Toilet Ghost'. Or something.

Mind you if my cat Chachamaru has her kittens today, all bets are off. And I WON'T name a kitten Emperor Nero. Or Toilet Ghost.