Toluu : SF Novelists

SF Novelists

A mutual support group for SF/F Novelists

This month my first two fantasy books, Poison Study and Magic Study are being re-released as Young Adult (YA) books with new cover art – which is the third cover design for them. (Long story - you can read all about it on December 8th on Harlequin’s paranormal blog www.paranormalromanceblog.com) You can see all my various covers here: www.mariavsnyder.com/cover_gallery.php

Why YA? Good question! I wish I had a good answer! One reason could be the YA market is doing rather well and editors and publishers are looking for fiction aimed at YA readers. Or because my books have a young female protagonist – she’s around 19 at the start of Poison Study. Or because I already have a strong YA following. Or because Harlequin is planning to launch a new YA imprint with original books in the fall of 2009, and they’re testing the YA market with a few re-issues. Pick a card, throw the dice – it could be all of those reasons or none. Publishing is a…strange beast

Despite the reasons – I’m thrilled. Much to my delighted surprise, I really enjoy interacting with young adults. I’ve been invited in to a few middle schools and high schools and always have a blast.

I usually do a presentation on how a book goes

Finding the love againYesterday

As many of you know, since I’ve talked about it incessantly here and on my other blog, I just wrapped up edits for The Turning Tide. Pleased as I am about that, there’s no rest for the wicked, or writers for that matter. Bitter Night is due in January and I was over halfway done when I stopped to work on The Turning Tide edits. It’s now been a couple of months and as much as I love this story, or rather, loved it, I am feeling a little ambivalent just at the moment. I’ve to find the love again. The question is–how?

The first step for me was to read through what I’d written. I had to reacquaint myself with the characters. But of course, in taking so much time away, I lost a little bit of momentum in terms of what I was excited about. The story has a slightly different feel to me now, and I want to try to capture it. That will require going back fixing things in revision, but for now, I want to press forward and get a draft done.

I have reread and I’ve looked over my synopsis–and this time I was glad I’d gone into so much detail. But what I realized was that one of the characters who was elusive before (I had a terrible time nailing down his voice), had become elusive again. So I did some talking to him (interviewing him a little) and then I reread the last chapter over and over and stared into space. Then I stared into space some more, then checked my email and every blog site known to man, watched some youtube video, stared into space, rerea

How do you make your book the best it can be?November 30

With the second draft of Medium Dead complete and winging its way towards beta readerdom, I’ve been thinking about the honing process. You’ve done the research, you’ve written the book, you’ve revised it … what more can you do to make sure it’s the best it can be?

Back in the eighties I worked in IT and one of my many jobs was to evaluate and adapt Michael Fagan’s technique for improving the quality of documents. Though primarily aimed at technical specifications the Fagan Inspection was touted as applicable to any document and highly adaptable. Could it work for novels?

But first, what’s a Fagan Inspection? The idea of the Fagan Inspection is to hand out a document to four or five people who analyse and fact check it to death. Not to be confused with the Fagin inspection which involves sending teams of small boys to steal code from your competitors.

What made the Fagan Inspection different from other quality control techniques is that each inspector could be assigned a role – analysing the document from a specific viewpoint. This reduced duplication of effort and imposed a structure on the process. Anyone who’s ever workshopped a story will know the human obsession with spelling mistakes. They’re the easiest error to spot and the least expensive to fix. Fagan was more concerned with the expensive errors.

To give an example, here’s how I adapted the process to inspect a system design specification. First, I brought in a b

Not Much of a Life…November 27

In my Novel Writing class, I generally use one of my last classes of the semester to answer “Frequently Asked Questions” from my students, giving them the chance to get at stuff I might not have covered, or ask questions that might not have been asked in class, or to get at information that needs further clarification. I did the FAQs last week for the class, and one question I got this time (and usually get, honestly) was “Since we have to have give you at least 10,000 words of writing for this class, how many words did you produce over the semester?”

It’s a fair question, after all. I do expect a lot from the students in that class; they should expect the same of me. So I sat down and figured out what I’d done with my own writing over the course of the semester. Here’s what I gave them as my answer:

I wrote a poem or two
I wrote a blog post every other day or so (that’s a few thousand words there…)
I wrote lesson plans and created presentations
I wrote critiques of student work for the Novel class as well as the Intro To Creative Writing class (lots of those, generally five or six a week, at roughly 500 words a shot)
I answered e-mails… (lots of that, too…)

“Yeah,” someone muttered at that point, “but none of that’s fiction.” I grinned, because I wasn’t finished yet.

I proofed the galleys for DARK WATER’S EMBRACE (a lot of work, but no new words)

Writing for loveNovember 26

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means that the next day, according to the marketing slogans I grew up with, is…yes, it’ll be the “first day of the Christmas shopping season!” It’s enough to inspire me with a feeling of sinking dread and the desire to hide under the covers until December is safely over. I love Christmas, but even I cringe at the shopping season beforehand, and I’ve spent wayyyy too many shopping trips in my life filled with angst and stress and the absolute conviction that I’m spending far too much money on gifts that the recipients won’t even like.

This year, though, I’m actually excited, and the reason is because of something my brothers and I decided last year. Instead of buying each other presents that year, we all decided to do something completely different. My brother Ben is a Clarion West grad and published writer of f/sf/horror short stories, and my brother David is a film student who writes screenplays as well as directing them. We’ve always been big fans of each other’s writing (we had a family writing group when we were kids, and we still trade critiques), but what we did last year was something new: we made special requests. For Christmas, Ben asked me for a horror story, and Dave asked me for a swashbuckler with swordplay, banter, and a twisty plot. I sat down to writ