Traveling

Yet another possible Author photo!

I am on travel this week. I am attending a computer security conference.

I was lucky to be able to visit my brother and spend some time at his mountain property.

Lots of inspiration there for my writing. The variety of trees alone was great for inspiration. The climate differences were amazing as well.

His property was not my only inspiration. Even the conference has it. There are 25,000 people here. The crowd control alone has story potential.

--Plus the weather is 72F and beautiful.

Travel

I am currently at my brothers weekend property.

We did several vineyard tours and wine tastings and other things yuppies do.

I did it wearing a Big Labowski related T-shirt though.

Anyway, I managed a little research for my book. I have some abandoned vineyards in my novel and some orchards as well. Just seeing what ancient grape vines will be a huge help with that setting.

--I have no lemon trees though like my brother...

Traveling

I am currently on travel for work. Attending a conference in San Francisco next week.

My brother lives near there so I went up a bit early to visit. Air fare was way cheaper that way.

Anyway. It cuts into working on my book. But feeds lots of info for it. For example, I am staying in Napa valley where he has a nice mountain house. The place is surrounded by vineyards in various states of repair. My book has an abandoned vineyard in it and it really helps to see actual overgrown vineyards. I also love the different trees. My brother actually has old growth redwoods on his place. Beautiful.

--People watching is great too. 

Selecting a Title

I had selected a working title for my book: FALLING

A piece of advice I had received, if you are self-publishing on Kindle, was to go to Amazon and search for your title to ensure it is easy to find.

Here is the results for FALLING.

Over a hundred books with the same title and most of them seem to be bad romance novels.

Oh The Humanity.

So I am on a mission to pick a new title. Here are a few initial ideas:

• Blood and Anvils
• The Outer Ring
• The Hermitage Redoubt
• Answers Above All
• Enemies Within Us
• To The Fore
• Into The Impossible
• To Sleep After

--Let me know if you have any ideas!

Conflict

I like books the hook me in the first few pages with a conflict that you MUST keep reading to find out what happens.

There is lots of different kinds of Conflict. The image from Writingfix.com shows a couple simple examples.

Alfred Hitchcock liked to establish conflict early and crank up tension. Show the ticking bomb under train seat and then the boring baseball conversation the people sitting on the bomb is suddenly something else.

I have actually read books where the conflict was not clear or present and I usually dislike them. Other stories have a conflict but a weak protagonist that does not resolve the conflict.

I like protagonists with heavy conflicts, striving to resolve it, going after the wrong resolutions, suffering setbacks or full reversals, or maybe even full failures.

--For me, as a reader, the bigger the conflict the better.

Loose Ends

I was talking with my friend Roberta yesterday about getting to the end of your book.

I would still be writing had I not imposed a deadline for the first draft. Even then it was way to long.

In the "Cut" phase I am trimming out superfluous plot lines that result in a ton of loose ends.

Now I am not going to have every little thing tied up in a bow. In fact there are a few subtle things that are seed stock for future plot lines.

In the books I love they have a real conclusion and a deneumont. 

Loose ends and even worse, arbitrary ends bug me. If the last chapter of a book concludes nothing and I have to wait a year for the next book, it has to be a VERY good story. Otherwise, I am really pissed.

Simple examples of books that tie up loose ends but continue would be the Harry Potter series books. They tie up enough loose ends for you to be happy. Other stories leave you hanging like it's just the end of a chapter. The Tunnels series did this and it  bugged me. I was feeling like it was done to just get me to buy the next book. A ploy. The thing that sucks is when you read faster than the author writes. I am so not doing that.

--Loose ends will be tied. But leave them wanting more!


  

Writers Inspiration

My wife Brenda and I went to the Smithsonian American History Museum yesterday with my friends Jim and Roberta and their kids.

That is a really fun museum. It has been completely revamped since the last time I was there.

They had a great exhibit about Puppets. They have original Muppets, and my favorite was a collection of Tim Burton stop action puppets from A Nightmare Before Christmas. 

There were so many stories there.  So many things that could inspire writing.

I need to retire so I could spend a whole day there studying various things.

We are going back to see the Museum of Natural History today. The dinosaur exhibit is closing in April for FIVE YEARS and we want to be able to see it one more time before it's not available for half a decade.

--More inspiration awaits!