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Blog Tour, Faerie Blood

Drollerie Blog Tour: Faerie Blood Foolery

This month’s Drollerie Press Blog Tour theme is Foolery: April Fool’s Day, playing jokes, pranks or mishaps or mischief that occur in your writing, and anything else our participants could think to come up with.

My contribution for the tour is a new character snippet upholding the theme: what happens when Jude Lawrence meets her new officemate Kendis Thompson, and discovers that she’s coming onto a team with a lively sense of humor. (This is what Jude gets for having a birthday on April 1st!)

Hope y’all enjoy! I figured it was about time Jude should have a character vignette!

Blog Tour

Drollerie Blog Tour for April 2010: Foolery!

Hi there all and welcome to another edition of the Drollerie Press Blog Tour! If you’ve had half an eye on the Internet at all today you’ve probably seen a lot of clever things going around (in no small part what the fine folks at xkcd did to their site, as well as the many amusing posts tor.com had up), and in a similar spirit, we’d like to bring you a few posts on the theme of Foolery as well.

Anna Kashina expounds on why she finds the Fool an irresistible character type to work with.

I’ve got a new Faerie Blood character sketch up, about what happens when Jude Lawrence shows up for her first day at work.

David Sklar ruminates on how finding the Fool in yourself is more difficult at forty than at twenty.

Angelia Sparrow has some things to say about the Holy Fool, including a reference to a fine song by S.J. Tucker.

Please come around to all our posts and say hi, you guys! Bonus points if you bring with you a bit of Foolery of your own–and be on the lookout for what we’ll get posted next time. As always, thanks for coming by!

Blog Tour

February 2010 Blog Tour!

We’ve had a bit of a hiatus on this, y’all, but as of this month I’m reinstating the Drollerie Blog Tour! This time around, though, we’re doing something different: we’re inviting non-Drollerie authors to come participate, and so for the February round, several of my fellow Drollerie authors and I will be swapping posts with several non-Drollerie authors. I hope to make this a regular thing–so any non-Drollerie authors reading this, if you’d like in on the blog action, do drop me a comment and let me know.

But! This month’s topic, aside from general introductions of various authors, is “best and worst experiences with works in progress”. And this month’s lineup of posts is as follows:

Nora Fleischer is hosting Brandon Bell, with a post right here. Brandon is hosting posts by Sarah Avery and Nora here and here.

Anna Kashina is hosting a post by author Gayleen Froese, here. Gayleen in return is hosting a post by Anna here.

John Rosenman and I are both hosting Hamish MacDonald, a true self-published author. My link for him is here, and John has his version of the post over here. In exchange, Hamish has posts up for both me and John!

Our own David Sklar is exchanging posts with Angelia Sparrow. David’s post on Angelia’s blog is here, and David has Angelia’s post up on his LJ over here.

As always, thanks for reading these posts, y’all, and I highly encourage you to visit all the posts on the tour. Drop comments and say hi, and tell the authors I sent you! We’ll be back again in another month or so, and we hope to expand the scope of where Drollerie authors visit. Watch this space for more details!

(Crossposted between Drollerie Press and angelakorrati.com. Please feel free to comment in either place!)

Blog Tour

My February blog tour guest: Hamish MacDonald

This month for the blog tour, I’m hosting Hamish MacDonald, a fellow member of the Outer Alliance. Many people turn up their noses at the concept of self-publishing, but Hamish avoids all of the usual issues with that–he not only writes his own books, he designs, prints, hand-binds, and sells them, too. He is, in short, a true self-published author.

If you’d like to read the rest of the blog tour posts for this round, point your browsers right here.

And without further ado, here’s Hamish! I’ve put in a More link where he mentions a spoiler warning for the ending of his book, but you can get most of his post without it. Enjoy, all!

The Boomerang of Revelation

My best experience with a work in progress isn’t a particular event, but a kind of experience. It happens at some point with every book, but I first became aware of it when writing my second novel, The Willies.

I’m a huge fan of outlining. Before I start a novel, I plot out the whole arc of the story. It’s like taking a map on vacation: You can still wander all you like, but you won’t get lost or fall off a cliff. Some people start at Page One and that works for them — most notably Stephen King, as he claimed in his book, On Writing — but I find I can let go more when I can trust that I know where I’m going. Having a map of Paris is completely different to walking through its streets, so I don’t think it spoils the fun at all; in fact, it makes sure you don’t miss the best sights.

Isn’t outlining everything in advance like opening your Christmas presents early? No, because unlike a Christmas present, the stakes with a story are different: There might be a dead chicken in the box, and it’s best to know that before you’ve committed a year or two to the project.

That said, there’s always a point with every book when I discover some piece of the map is blank: I thought I’d filled that in, but something here doesn’t connect. With The Willies, that happened at the end, and the whole story fell into a pothole in the road. How does it end?

The Willies is a science fiction/thriller/comedy story about two friends who discover they’re clones. The lead character, Hugh, has a perfect memory: everything he’s ever seen and heard is stored up in his head. He and his childhood best friend, Simon, were products of an experiment and were never meant to be born, and now someone wants them dead. So by the end, they’ve been on the run for about 250 pages, wrestling as they go with the difficult friendship they’ve had. But how would it resolve?

(Spoiler warning: I’m going to talk about the ending here, in case you might consider reading the book.)

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