Getting a Kindle

I decided to finally buy a Kindle and decided on the Touch model. Why buy a Kindle when I already have a Nook Color (which I do love)? Several reasons actually.

1. I love gadgets and frankly was looking for an excuse to buy one. A Kindle Touch is a pretty inexpensive way to scratch that itch.

2. Camping season has started, and I've been wanting an eInk reader for both the battery life and the ability to read outside in direct sunlight.

3. As a marketing tool. This was the reason that finally convinced me to fork over the money. I've known for some time now that the Kindleboards were a great community to participate in. I've heard of plenty of authors whose only marketing is hanging out on the Kindleboards. I've been wanting to do it for some time now, but the informal price of admission is a Kindle. Like any good community, they want authors to be active participants who do more than market their services. Without an actual Kindle, that was going to be tough.

In my day job as a networking coach, I wouldn't hesitate to pay $100 a year to join a networking group. Buying a Kindle is like paying that, plus I get a cool gadget to play with. Made the decision easy.

Why not join the Nookboards since I already have a Nook? I tried that. The forum was pretty dead. Kindle is still the major ebook reader, and they have the most active communities. Go where the people are.

Are you thinking about digital publishing? Do you own a Kindle? If not, seriously consider purchasing one. It'll get you into the party too.

Look me up on the Kindleboards. I intend to be an active member of the community!

Writing Magic, Part Two

Last week I talked about what went into creating Dafydd's aura sight. I hope you enjoyed the excerpt. This week, I wanted to talk about ritual magic.

Dafydd's rituals follow a modified Wiccan formula. The modification is that he gets to skip most of the visualization steps. When he closes his circle, it magically happens. He doesn't need to visualize the magic first.

Using a Wiccan formula means I get to cheat and use various rituals I find in online Books of Shadow. Saves making it all up myself.

His rituals do use ingredients, and I need to research those. He buys his stuff in Chinatown, so sometimes he (and I) need to find substitutes, but that's part of the fun.


He also uses time of day to power his rituals. Sunrise and sunset are particularly powerful times, and I often time his rituals to happen then. Which means he always knows the exact time the sun rises and sets, which he notes is a cool party trick but makes sleeping in kind of tough. In later books, I plan to use solstices and equinoxes to power some seriously potent magic.

My beta readers told me the rituals read well and sound right, which is good. They are a serious pain to write. In fact, the first one I accidentally wrote completely on present tense, which I then had to rewrite. Not hard, but tedious.

Now I'm going to give you Dafydd's own words on rituals. Enjoy the excerpt and feel free to tell me what you think. I'm still editing, so changes are easy to make.

***

Rituals can be tricky things. You have to set everything up just right, use the correct ingredients and apply your will appropriately. It's not strictly necessary to have magical talent to perform a ritual, but if you don't have talent, you need to substitute something for the missing power. Certain times of day and days of the year have inherent power, and the non-talented can perform working rituals at those times. Why do you think Wiccans do their magical workings at Samhain or the solstices? There's power at the turning of the seasons.

There are other ways to create ritual power, but I don't recommend blood magic. Sure, it works, but blood magic is dangerous. Someone or something has to die to create enough power for big workings, and as a white warlock, I'm duty bound to hunt you down and bring you to justice. Besides, killing is just wrong.

If you're like me and have magical talent, you can perform rituals any time, and they will work, assuming you did everything right. But I can take advantage of powerful times too. The ritual will take less out of me and probably be even more effective. So there was every reason for me to take advantage of sunset.

Why are sunrise and sunset powerful times of day? They are times of change. During times of change, the barrier between our world and the world of spirit is weaker, allowing energy to seep through to our world. Ritual magic allows us to harness that power and direct it to do what we want.

Laura once asked a good question when I was telling her about rituals. "If rituals are just a way to direct power, and you've got power available, why do you need all the ingredients?"

It was a good question because it was one of the first ones I asked my dad when he started teaching me magic. Great minds think alike and all that.

My dad told me that technically, the ingredients aren't needed. If you have enough power, a strong will and complete focus on the outcome, you can do ritual magic without all the trappings.

Very few, maybe only a handful in history, have ever been strong enough and sufficiently focused to make that work.

For normal ritual casting, the ingredients have symbolic meaning. For example, I'd be using a magnet to symbolically link me to what's missing, St. John's Wort is a good herb for divination (in other words, it's good for helping to find stuff). Mugwort helps enhance magical power, and sandalwood chips are the best thing I know for granting wishes. It's not that any of the ingredients have power in and of themselves. It's their symbolic meaning that gives us the means to focus our will to make things happen.

I'm probably not explaining it well. Laura gave me some pretty odd looks when I tried to tell her about ritual magic. What can I say? Teaching isn't in my blood. It was one of dad's gifts that he didn't pass on to me.

On Writing Magic

Writing magic is hard. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's even harder when you decide not to have your protagonist use flashy elemental magics. Nope, Dafydd never throws around fireballs or lighting bolts. I decided I wanted him to use more subtle magics. Paul handles most of the physical stuff.

Of course, as I discovered when I started writing the second book, that made it awkward to have Dafydd participate in fight scenes, but I think I've handled it well. And in book three, I'm going to pull out something really cool.

Anyway, Dafydd's magic basically falls into three areas:
1. Ritual magic, usually in the area of divination (finding stuff)
2. Potion brewing
3. Aura reading

So far the potion brewing has happened off-screen, though Dafydd and Paul quaff plenty of them, especially in fight scenes. I suppose I'll have to show a potion brewing scene sometime. but I want to save it for one that advances the plot.

Dafydd does a bit of aura reading in Haunted Vampire, and there's a much longer scene in Werewolf Puppy. He also explains how it works in that book, and it was a fun scene to research and write. I spent a lot of time looking up the meanings of various colors and figuring out what they mean in an aura. I tried to mix obvious stuff (black and red are vampire colors) and some less obvious color meanings. Here's an excerpt I particularly like as Dafydd explains aura colors to Paul.

Dafydd and Paul have just left Lounge 201, the vampire bar. Paul had asked him to read a particular vampire's aura.

***

I frowned, still not completely sure what I had seen. "Okay, mostly his aura was like the rest. Red and black. Some dark green."

"What's that mean?"

I smiled. "Jealousy. Almost everyone in that room had it to some degree or another."

He snorted. "Not a big shock. Jockeying for position and companionship are practically a way of life for my kind."

"But not you."

His eyes widened. "What do you mean by that?"

I shrugged. "Just what I said. There's hardly any of it in your aura."

I watched his face. Even in the deflected light of the passing streetlights, I could see his brow furrow. His fingers tapped the steering wheel. Finally, he said. "I left that behind a long time ago. But that's not all you saw."

"No." I hesitated. "He had some orange mixed in with everything else."

He nodded, as if he'd expected that. His shoulders slumped slightly, and I guessed he'd expected it but hoped he'd been wrong. "And that means?"

"That's hard to say. It's not something I've seen much." I struggled to put something that was pretty subjective into objective terms. "Yellow usually means a connection. If two people are dating, you'll see the yellow in their auras approach the same shade. The closer they are, the closer the colors. The darkness of the shade will tell you how solid the relationship. Darlene and Damien had a lot of dark yellow in theirs. And their shades were practically the same, so I knew they were together."

He nodded. "They've been an item for most of a century. So the other one's aura was yellow?" His voice sounded doubtful.

I shook my head. "No, not yellow. Orange. And I've not really seen that color before."

He frowned. "Orange? But wouldn't that just be yellow and red, like you just said."

"No. Aura colors don't behave like paint. Each color is separate. So red and yellow aura colors don't make orange. It's like green. Yellow is a connection color. Blue is a good color. It generally indicates positive emotions. If auras were like paints, yellow and blue wouldn't combine to make dark green, jealousy."

He nodded. "Okay, but it does make sense that green is a mixture of yellow. It's hard to be jealous if you don't have some connection to someone."

I paused, never having looked at it like that before. "I guess you're right. My aunt never mentioned that."

***

It took me a couple hours of research to pull together material for the colors in that scene, and the earlier scene in the bar.

By the way, that bit where Paul says that yellow and blue do make sense combined as jealousy? When I wrote Dafydd's line, I honestly hadn't gone there. But as soon as I started writing Paul, I made the connection. That's one of the coolest parts about writing fiction. You really do start seeing things like your characters. If one has a blind spot, you've got it too, until you switch roles.

Next week, I'll talk more about ritual magic and what goes into writing those scenes. And yep, I'll have another excerpt.

Indie Authors Don't Edit

This is a common thing to hear when people say they won't read self-published books. Traditionally published authors tend to say it the most and the loudest, usually when they are defending their traditional contracts.

Is there some truth to it? Sure. But it's easy to find and avoid them. Just read the reviews on Amazon. Readers are quick to point out books that needed the help of an editor.

So where can an Indie author get editorial help? And how much will it cost? Let me use myself as an example.

Haunted Vampire went through the following process. When I finished the first draft, I let it sit for a couple of weeks before giving it a read-through (on paper), pencil in hand. Then I gave it to a couple of beta readers who gave me excellent feedback. One of my readers said he liked the book but it lacked dramatic tension. I went back and did a thorough rewrite to address that.

Then I sent it to an online critique group http://critters.org for feedback. About ten people responded, with various comments. I incorporated the comments in another rewrite.

Then I had it professionally line-edited.

How much did it cost me? Actually nothing in dollar terms. The beta reading and critique group were free (although I had to critique in return to "pay" for the group's services). The line-editing was a barter service, so that didn't cost me any money either.

See, it doesn't have to cost a lot to get good editorial guidance. The critiques in return did take some time, but it actually helped me as a writer. Nothing teaches you your craft faster than critiquing others.

The next book is going through a similar process. I've done the beta readers and critique group, and now I'm working with all the comments. My rewrite this time is less intense because it's a better story than the first one, and I learned a lot through writing and editing Haunted Vampire.

If you're thinking about self-publishing your own book, don't think you can't turn out a polished product without spending a fortune. You can!

The Technology of Being a Writer

Editing on Werewolf Puppy is going well, thanks to my Nook Color tablet. I've been out and about so much lately that taking it with me on the go is the only way to be sure it gets worked on.

My tablet doesn't handle the entire manuscript well, so I've broken it into parts, and take the current part with me. Syncing the file through Dropbox means I always have the most current version with me, no matter if I'm on iPhone, tablet or netbook.

It's not a perfect solution. One of my beta readers practically wrote a book's worth of comments, and I need to go through those while I'm editing. Android isn't good at quickly switching between documents, so I've been viewing her comments on my iPhone while editing on the Nook. It also works best if I have a WiFi connection when I'm working, so I can sync updates right away, but that isn't a deal breaker, as long as I remember to update the version on my tablet before I leave the house. (Guess what I forgot to do yesterday? It should have been okay, but Cosi's WiFi was down. Oh well. I downloaded it to my phone and worked on it there.)

As far as editing on the small screen, it works for me. I'm actually finding it easier to focus and find things  to fix. I've become a big believer in viewing the manuscript in different media. What I miss in one, I'll catch in another. Like a typo yesterday that I missed in the printed version and on my netbook screen. I finally caught it on the iPhone.

The more I use technology for writing, the more I marvel that authors like Dickens managed to write and edit at all!

Challenges in E-Formatting

I'm going to go off topic for fiction today and talk about my experience with formatting The Enthusiastic Networker.

 

This poor manuscript went through too many formats. It started life as a series of Constant Contact newsletter articles that I cut and pasted into a text document. Those ended up in Open Office, and eventually into Word, where they went through at least two rounds of track changes. One last trip to text so I could format the HTML.

 

It shouldn't have been a problem. The last conversion to plain text should have cleaned it up, but no. I still had odd quotes and apostrophes that didn't convert well to ebooks format. Some research and global find and replace finally got it cleaned up, and it converted well to Kindle. I think. If you buy the e-version and find problems, let me know, okay?

 

What did I learn from this? Only one word processing program per manuscript. That makes it so much easier. I guess I could also have decided to pay someone else for the conversion, but where's the fun in that?

Making Some Progress

As I said last week, right now I'm using this blog as a way to hold myself accountable to moving forward on the books. And it's not going as well as I'd hoped.

Thank goodness for my tablet. I used to think of writing as something you do sitting at your desk, on a computer. I know, for other people, it's legal pads and a pen or a typewriter, but I'm rubbish with both of those, and I've done almost all my writing on a computer.

Right now, it's when I can, where I can. On Monday, I was sitting in my truck, 15 minutes early for a meeting, writing a new scene on my tablet. It's not as fast, but that day it was the difference between something and nothing. I opted for something.

Now I need to get my draft broken up into tablet-sized pieces so I can edit on the go to. The way my life is going, I think that's the only way this'll get done.

Good news is I'm liking the new scene and character, and I think Pat, who won the contest to be the character, will like him too. I expect we're going to see a lot more of Father Eyler. :)