EPICON2010

I'm back from NOLA, actually been here for several days catching up on email. Had a great time and spent most of my time visiting with people. First of all, compliments to Holly Jacobs. She's a funny lady and a fellow person of Irish descent. Though my ancestory is more of a mongrel nature having English, Welsh, German and American Indian in the mix. Bought her book though she kept telling me I didn't have to. Is that a way to sell books? Read it and though I'm not into the contemporary genre at the present time, though always subject to change, enjoyed the book. Brought back some memories since I have an adopted daughter who had a baby at a young age.
Then there's Marilyn and Hap. Have known them since the first EPICON in Omaha and still remember the Persian restaurant plus other adventures we've shared. Virginia Beach and the restaurant across the street from the hotel. Las Vegas and the cold that wasn't really cold to me.
Brenna is next and this time she appeared with a sling. Didn't try psychic healing this time though I considered doing just that. Congratulations to her after finaling for many years, she is the proud owner of an EPIC E award. Nicely done.
Jolie, one beautiful woman and one who thought she was superwoman. This aging lady stepped in to give her a hand on the decorations for the banquet which turned out to be lovely and like our own Mardi Gras. Kudos to her and may she keep writing.
Then there's Dan, from Mundania, one of my publishers. This is one funny man. He hosted the awards and kept me laughing. I did harrass him a bit about my book I'm awaiting release. Also one my grandson is dying for. He's re-reading the first in the series -- Flight. To me this was a tribute and also to my publisher for letting it into ebook and print.
Then there was Zetta and Jim, two I met in Las Vegan. He has the great accent. I've always been a sucker for a brogue. Also kilts are interesting. Zetta is a funny lady and I enjoyed our chats and showing off pictures of my grandchildren.
Lorna and Larry and also friends who are now writing mysteries as well as other things. They're savvy people. Lorna and I competed as to who laughed the most at Dan's brief monologues.
Fantasy writers Kathy and Gloria are acquaintances and I've read some of their books. Good ones. Gloria's has dragons and I'm a sucker for dragons. Trees are interesting, too.
Rick Reed was another from Las Vegan to arrive in NOLA for EPICON. He cleans up nice. And he allowed me to post a silliness on his blog.
I won't forget Kin who won the Children's YA last year and is collecting donations to be auctioned off for her local zoo. I bought her book for my granddaughter and she presented me with a cute little lamb.
Met a lot of new people and at my age it takes several cons before I remember names.
Of course there's Charlotte who did a bang up job with organizing the conference and making our stay wonderful.
Linda McLaughlin and Janet Quinn who I've known for several years and are always glad to talk about people we know.
Marcis, her husband and mother and her sort of shy daughter who is a real cutie were with us on the boat cruise.
Can't forget Carol who last year ran herself ragged being president and running the conference. This year she's facing a boatload of releases. Running ragged in a different way.
Lisa and Sean who oversees the treasury, More poser to him. Lisa has come up with bids for Williamsburg for next year. Can't wait. She had a pair of dresses for the banquet and was a real quick change artist.
Then there's Debi Sullivan, a woman with a sexy voice and a strong sense of advocacy for New Voices.
These are the names I really remember and ones I spent some time with. There were some new faces and hopefully next year I'll have the names to the faces. New Orleans is a lovely place and I did have some time speaking to natives and hearing of their experiences and their hopes. Looking forward to seeing everyone next year

A Rose By Any Other Name

Guest blogger, Tracy about naming characters. Sounds like she's another eclectic writer.
A Rose by Any Other Name – What You Call Your Characters.

In my newest novel, Bride of Tranquility and the first book of the series, Tranqulity, one of the four main characters is a waitress named Average Jones. I’m currently working on a young adult science fiction novel that involves a set of twins named Mary and Elizabeth. And for a detective novel that I have outlined, my primary characters are a pair of partners named St. James and Dean.
In case you haven’t guessed, I have trouble picking character names.
Choosing the right character name is very important for a story. Names are a basic part of us, given to us at birth like a label sewn into the tapestry of our soul. So when you give a character a name, it tells the reader a little bit about your character.
For the television show Supernatural, the creator chose the names of the primary characters, Sam and Dean, because they sounded like Sal and Dean, the characters from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Like Sal and Dean in the book, Sam and Dean of the show are always out on the road, searching.
When author Timothy Zahn needed to pick a name for a smuggler and fallen bounty hunter for the novels that were to be the re-launch of the Star Wars Universe novelization franchise, he chose the name Mara Jade. Mara is a word that means “bitterness,” and Jade is a name that means “fallen woman.” Both words described his character’s status and personality.
Average Jones, the first resident of Tranquility that you meet in the series is named ironically. Because each character in Tranquility has an unexplainable superhuman ability, they are anything but average. Even though Average’s name implies that she is ordinary, as the name for a woman, “Average” is a little bit exotic. In naming Average, I hinted at what readers can expect from the town of Tranquility – a strange mix of both the ordinary and the bizarre.
When you are looking for a good name for your characters, there are some excellent resources out there. Phone books are a great source for contemporary names. But you should avoid them if your setting is fantasy or period. The name Wendy was invented by the author of Peter Pan. If you write a medieval fantasy, then naming your heroine Wendy will seem strange.
Literature or historical accounts written during the time period that you are writing in is another good source of material. Henry, Margaret, Rose, Elizabeth, Mary, Jane and Edward were all popular names that people of all stations used in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, thanks to the monarchy of England.
When naming a character, you want your story to stand out. In order to do that, you should avoid using the same names in genre fiction that are over-used already. Although it’s trendy to give babies differently spelled names now (Traycee instead of Tracy), you should resist this for naming your characters.
A final naming trap to avoid is to give your character an unpronounceable name. Worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction authors are prone to overusing accent marks. Apostophies, glottal stops, accent marks. (Why yes, Mr. Tolkien. I am looking at you).
Remember, you want your character’s name to either add something to the story, or at least be wearable. The last thing that you want is for a name to throw a person out of the story. Once you’ve lost your reader’s attention, it is hard to get it back.
If you think you have a good name for your character, try it on for size. Wear it around for a few pages. Try reading it out loud. Do the first and last names run together? You may want to end your character’s first name with something other than S to avoid possessives like Silass’s. And you may want to avoid ending a Given name with the same letter as a surname. Try reading Liam MacDonald out loud, and it may sound like Liamacdonald.
And remember, if you don’t like it, you can always change it.

More of My Way -- Rough draft

Once I have my six points planned it's time to begin. I start a rough draft feeling sick. Don't ask me why but I know I am never going to get the story down. I take the chapter sketch and then begin with sort of an outline. Then I begin. After doing the opening paragraph about ten times. This is a delaying tactic. My object is to get the story down as fast as I can. This draft is done partly in pen and partly on the computer. Some people do a book in a month and have a lot of pages. I do the rough draft in a day per chapter so my time varies. This is writing only a mother could love. Seriously, there is some dialogue, some stage direction and whole scenes done in one short paragraph or even a single sentence. I might write, they make love her viewpoint or they make love his viewpoint. She finds the body. There is a magical confrontation. Much depends on which genre I'm working on. There are no emotions, very little motivations. This draft probably ends up at about one quarter to one half of the book. Not many people work this way, but it works for me. I must know where I'm headed before I can made the story and the characters work.
The book I'm coming close to finishing began this way to the consternation of my critique group. I've never read them rough draft before. This story also had several changes, sort of major ones, during the rough draft. My hero had an older nasty brother. He remained the same. He had a younger sister who was supposed to be the new pharaoh's wife. Somewhere during the rough draft I knew this wouldn't work. He had to have a younger brother who would not be the pharaoh but something different in another book. This story also started out to be just a single book but during the rough draft this became a trilogy. At the end of the process I had about 25000 words of what looks to end up between 75000 and 80000 words. What I began with is not what I started with but I knew there were other drafts to do where all the problems would be solved.

More of the planning

The next two points are the ones I consider most important. They are what and why. What does each character want and why do they want it. The why has more than one part. Not only why do they want it but why can't they have it. Since each character in a story wants different things for different reasons and why they can or can't have their desire are also different. These play an important part in the road map I draw to get from the beginning to the end of a story. Each scene has a component of what and why. What is the purpose of the scene and why a character is chosen to tell the scene. While planning my current story I realized several things and some of these didn't occur while I was doing the rough draft but came earlier in the story. At the onset the heroine wanted three things that seemed impossible. When she is given the chance to obtain one of her wishes there is a twist. She must leave her world and travel to an alternate one never to return to her world. There became a big why. Why would she choose to go. After figuring out why her other two desires were not obtainable, I had the reason she could accept this. Her real desire became the desire to live. Thus ended the first scene. The hero had other desires. He is a man of ancient Egypt, not the one we know of but one that is similar in many respects. He wants to follow the god Horu. His father has given him to the priests of an alien god, Aken Re. He desires to run away but something is keeping him from doing this. He needs to figure why, especially when a large hawk appears with an amulet naming him as belonging to Horu. The hawk is different from the hawks he knows since it often flies at night. The hero has his first desire and that is belonging to his chosen god, or does he? Does his father's command have more power than the hero's wishes.
This kind of what and why was taken while I laid out the road map for my story in a chapter synopsis which often changed as I wrote the book.

More of My way

Now that I've given my characters their names I need to find more about them. Turning to one of the many Astrology books I have on my shelf, I decide what Sun sign each character will have. For those who will be major players I also find a Moon and a Rising sign for them. This gives me the Inner person, the emotional person and the face they show the world. Here's a bit about one of the characters. Tira is an Aries with a Cancer Moon and an Aries rising sign. This double bit of Aries can make her prone to leaping before looking, a love of martial arts, a deep sense of justice. The Cancer moon gives her a love of old things and a deep need to find someone to love. Betrayal really does a number on her. I then do this with the other major characters, usually the hero and the villain, if there is one. Not all books have bad guys but I do love creating them. That's part of my twisted mine. Then I look at physical descriptions, Other characteristics will develop as I'm writing the Character draft.

My way continued

I talked about the when and the where in the last posting. The next step in my way means I have to find the characters. For this book I needed a hero, a heroine and at least one villain plus characters that would be important to this story and would perhaps become important to the other stories in what I now saw as a trilogy. One thing I really need to learn is to name my characters. Some people may think this is strange but until my characters have a name I really can't write about them. Somehow the name helps me define their character. For my current book the name I chose for the heroine was Tira and that name just popped into my head. Finding the names for the other characters was more difficult. I took some of the books I have about Egypt and used the names I found there to develop character names. The hero became Kashe. Hos older brother became Pian. There was a reason for these names sunce I was injecting some Nubian influences into the characters. Tira is a young black woman and Pian is a throwback to an ancestory his father has tried to deny. Kashe's younger brother is named Namose which is a take off of an ancient Egyptian name. Of course when I began the rough draft of the story, Kashe's younger brother was his sister called Merin. The change came about during the planning of the story. I'll explain later. Now for some villains. The nomarch of Mero and his son Pian are among the less that nice characters and so are the priests of Aken Re. There are two main ones in the story. Oris and Hebu, these men have come from a different country, actually they belong to the Hyksos, the mysterious invaders of the land. One more character crept in and this was Tuten, a retired member of the nomarch's guard and Kashe's mentor. Once I had the characters there were other needed things but that will come later.

Ideas

Writers get an idea and run with it to strange and interesting places. Let me show you how this works. I've always been interested in Ancient Egypt and have used it in one book but I wanted to do perhaps a time travel using the setting of the area where I've read many books. So I thought of a number of things that would be needed. Where was easy and that led me to do reading in one of the many books I have. Actually this was kind of an encyclopedia of Egypt. One thing I learned was there were no camels in Egypt until around 1 AD. That sort of took me on a turn. I really wanted camels and horses and chariots. This was when I decided I needed to cast the story in a different Egypt or an alternate world with enough the same to make the world recoganizable. Once I had the basic research done, I was ready to plan. To plan, I need to know how my story ends. I also plan the way I'm going to get there. Not that this is carved in stone and in future posts I'll show how this happened with this story and with other stories.

Writing My Way

I'll be posting some writing tips here several times a week. When I began writing, I read every book I could find about how to write and I tried and picked a bit from this one and a bit from that book and evolved my own system, sort of. I am partly a plotter and partly a pantster. This often confuses my critique group since my early drafts are very sparse as far as detail. I'll be talking here about ideas and how they develop into stories, about the various things I need to know before I can begin writing and about the drafts I do and the lists I make. I absolutely love drafts. For me writing is sort of like painting in that I apply layers after layers until I find I can't continue to add to the story. Then I breath a sigh of relief.

More on Shape Shifters -- Why

Many people have thought of becoming an animal. I know I have. The reason for this is probably unique to each individual. What animal would you like to be. I'd opt for a cat, not a small cat but lately I've been spending some time with the large cats. Lions are group oriented and there is strength in numbers but they're not my first choice. I'm quite partial to cheetahs. In Africa, they're the smallest of the large cats and the fastest. They're also pretty. Leopards are beautiful cats but more solitary than most of the large Africal cats. They eat alone even when they have cubs. That's more aloneness than I'd like.

Now we get to the why. Why do I want to be a cat rather than some other animal? I'm not a dog person. Wolves and bears aren't my thing either. I'd choose a cheetah for all the things I'm not. Fast, pretty and predatory. That may be what attracts us to shape shifters. They can do the things we can't or won't.

Any opinions.

Shapeshifters and other weres

I'm fascinated by shapeshifting characters in books and have never written one, but perhaps one day I will. I think I prefer cats or maybe dragons but Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton have done a good job with shapeshifting dragons. At least they had a good way of showing where the extra weight went. Dragons definitely weigh more than men and women. In fact my first encounter with shapeshifters was in Andre Norton's Witch World Series books I've read time and again.

Some of my friends and critique partners write about shape shifters, Jane Toombs recently sent my a blurb about one of her shifters. Dance Of The Cedar Cat from Eternal Press is a werecat story. Sussie has been trained by her grandmother to always go though a ritual on full moon nights where she chants Finnish words and locks a little cedar cat inside a box. As an adult, she sometimes forgets--until one night, under a full moon, something mind-calls to her to strip off her clothes and come out and join him in a dance. The first time, she rushes to the little cedar cat, chants, locks it in the box, and the urge to join whatever it is out there fades. But the time comes when she answers the call--and finds out what she really is... Haven't read it yet but will download it into my reader if it's available.

Jenna Kernan is a critique partner and her shapeshifters come in various kinds. Her first one out is a bear. The book is Dream Stalker and she uses Native American myths as a background for her stories. I've heard the book in part but I haven't read the end which I will as soon as I finish a book about dragons I'm reading.

I met Sara Taney Humphries at a book signing. I didn't buy a print copy of the book but I did download it into my reader. Her shapeshifters belong to one of ten animal clans. In The Amoveo Legacy her hero belongs to the Golden Eagle clan. The woman fated to be his mate is a hybrid whose father was of the Gray Wolf clan and her mother was human. Samantha has no idea of her heritage. The story tells of the troubles they face from others who do not want them to mate. I enjoyed the book very much.

The last one I'll talk about here is a hoot. The Seattle Barista Killer by Murdoch Hughes. We share a publisher in Mundania Press. I heard about this book for several years before publication. His hero is a vegan werewolf detective named Harley. He's really only half werewolf and sort of a loner. This book quite tickled my funny bone and still does with re-reading. As a detective Harley sets out to learn who is killing baristas, young women who work in coffee bars in Seattle. A sense of smell is quite an asset for a detective.

So if anyone wants to share their shapeshifters or help me find a way to turn the large cats I love into shifters feel free to post. Janet