I’ve been doing some research for an article on how writers can use the new social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc to promote their work and stumbled upon this video done by author Dennis Cass in which he makes fun of trying to figure out how to use all that stuff. Having had more than one conversation like this with other writers, I found it pretty damned funny and thought I’d share it with you all. The book club comment is damn near perfect!

A scene is the most basic building block of a novel. String enough of them together in the correct way and you’ve got a page turner. Do it incorrectly and you’re almost guaranteed to have a flop. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my time as a writer, this is the most fundamentally important in my view.

The average novel contains anywhere from twenty to sixty scenes. Go ahead; count them and see. There is a particular flow to a good scene and it is important to understand this flow before you can start messing around with it to suit your own style. This flow consists of six standard parts:

Goal

Conflict

Disaster

Reaction

Dilemma

Decision

In any particular scene, your character has a goal he wants to accomplish. While pursuing that goal he encounters a conflict. That conflict ends in disaster, which prevents him from reaching that goal. The character reacts to the disaster, be it physically, mentally, or emotionally, which forces him into a dilemma. Does he do X or does he do Y to continue trying to reach his goal? He decides on a course of action and a new goal. Then the process starts all over again.

Look at some of your favorite scenes. Think about them with respect to the six aspects mentioned above. Can you see where each section comes into play?

One of my favorite scenes can be found in Robert McCammon’s SWAN SONG. Two of the main characters, a boy named Roland and a former soldier named Colonel Macklin, are trapped in the cave-in of a survivalist’s refuge. Macklin is the only one who knows the way out of the complex. But his hand is buried beneath a ton of debris. Roland must gather his courage and chop Macklin’s hand off at the wrist in order to free the colonel, and ultimately, free himself.

The goal would be their mutual desire to get out of the complex. The conflict is that neither of them trusts the other. The disaster is, of course, Macklin’s trapped limb. They react to it individually and then as a team. A decision is made, an action taken, and a new goal is then assumed.

A series of good scenes built in this fashion soon turn into a good novel.

So what do you do to make your scenes stand-out and assume a life of their own? Let us know in the comments.

The fine folks over at RSSDay.org have declared today to be RSS Appreciation Day. Following along in the spirit of things, I’ve decided to give a quick little primer on RSS feeds and how you can use them to make your use of the Internet one heck of a lot easier.

Okay, so, if you’re anything like me, the number one reason you use the Internet is to gather information. And it really doesn’t matter what kind of information you are getting - the daily news, tech reviews, friend updates from MySpace and Facebook, the latest scientific article, whatever. You probably also make a habit of visiting the same websites on a regular basis, because you like the content or maybe just because you like the way it is presented.

Now, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is simply a way for you to gather information from websites that update their content on a regular basis without having to visit the website over and over again. An RSS document, known as a feed, contains either a quick summary or the full content from a website’s update.

In order to make use of an RSS feed, you first need a feed reader. The two most common that I’ve seen in use are Google Reader and Bloglines. I personally use the latter, but you can use whatever feed reader you want. Most email programs including Outlook and Thunderbird now capture RSS feeds as well.

Once you’ve selected a feed reader, take a moment and visit one of your favorite websites and subscribe to their feed. You can do so by clicking on the orange feed icon either in the navigation bar of your browser or on the web page itself as shown in this image from my other website, Josephnassise.com.

Once you click on the icon you’ll be redirected to a page where you can subscribe to that feed with one or two clicks of your mouse. From that point on, to read the latest content from your site, all you have to do is visit your feedreader.

I regularly read about 50 sites per day, so this saves me a tremendous amount of time. By calling up my feed reader, I can read all the latest content from one location and not have to waste all that time jumping from page to page. If the content isn’t anything I’m interested in, I can simply skip it and move on to the next feed.

So there you have it, RSS feeds in a nut shell. So what are you waiting for? Go subscribe to something. You can even start with this site right here!

Like many writers I know, I’m a pack rat when it comes to information. Anything I see or read or hear that I think might be useful for a story at some point or another gets clipped or bookmarked or jotted down for safekeeping.

The trouble with this is that until recently I didn’t have a useful way of storing this information for future use. My magazine or newspaper clippings went into one big file folder, making it near impossible to find anything quickly. My internet bookmarks were more organized, but there were so many of them that even that system became clunky after only a short time. And I won’t even mention what happened to all those notes jotted down on napkins or the nearest scrap of paper.

Clearly I needed a better system.

And I found one in Evernote.

Evernote bills itself as allowing you to “easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.”

So far it has lived up to its hype.

Evernote is now my way of capturing information that I might want to use at some point in one of my books. Maybe it is a web full page or a snippet of text from one. Maybe it is a photo, be it from my digital camera, my cell phone, or someplace like Flickr. Maybe it is an email or a portion of a chat log. Scanned information. To do lists. You name it and Evernote can capture it.

Evernote has a desktop application (for both Windows and Mac) and a web application. Anything you add to it can be synchronized across all your devices, from your desktop to your laptop to your mobile phone. I have it set up so it provides links from both my email application (Outlook) and my web browser (Firefox) so all I have to do is highlight and click on the link to capture the information I want to save.

Once the information is in Evernote, you can file it using a variety of methods and this is where the true versatility of the app comes into play for me. Multiple notebooks allow me to file information for different books projects together in one place regardless of the type of data I’m saving. Or I can choose to file similar data together – all my photos in one notebook, all my web clippings in another, etc. Either way, a robust tagging system lets me search for similar clippings across multiple notebooks.

The Search feature is particularly cool, as it searches not only the text in your notes, but also the text in any pictures you might have saved. I use Bloglines as my news reader and tend to save a lot of articles in their built in Clippings service, but the additional ability to search through images for text provided by Evernote has caused me to begin saving my latest clippings direct to Evernote instead. As time goes on I’ll probably move my older clippings there as well, since I can find things easier that way. There is nothing more annoying that knowing you’ve saved something and not being able to find it!

Evernote is in beta right now and you need an invitation to try it out. You can go to their website and sign up (it didn’t take me long to get an invite this way) or, you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll pick five random winners to receive an invitation direct from me.

(All images taken from the Evernote homepage and Copyright 2008 Evernote.)

Novelist Josh Palmatier’s (jpsorrow) has organized something he’s calling the Plot Synopsis Project, which is taking place on March 18th. It is so cool that I’ll let him tell you about it in his own words…

“Essentially, I gathered together a group of authors who were willing to post an entry about their own plot synopsis writing technique as well as a sample copy of one of their own plot synopses OR post an entry about how they got published without using a plot synopsis, to show everyone how different people write their synopses, and that it isn’t necessarily required to get published. There are other routes. I would say that MOST people have to write a plot synopsis in order to get published though . . . and most of us hate doing it. I personally do.

And just to clarify, by plot synopsis, I mean the (usually) 3-5 page summary of the book that is (usually) included in a submission package to the agent or editor, along with a cover letter or query letter, and sometimes with the first few chapters of the novel. This is not the one paragraph pitch, or even the one line pitch. Some of the other authors will talk about these other things as well in their discussion, but the main thrust of these posts is the 3-5 page synopsis.

The participants include:
Patricia Bray (pbray): Patricia Bray

Chaz Brenchley (desperance): Chaz Brenchley

Mike Brotherton: Mike Brotherton: Hard SF Writer

Tobias Buckell: Ask Me A Question

S.C. Butler (scbutler): S.C. Butler

Barbara Campbell: Barbara Campbell

David B. Coe (davidbcoe): An Exchange of Words

Jennifer Dunne (jennifer_dunne): Flickering Flames

S.L. Farrell (sleigh): At The Intersection of Fiction & Reality

Diana Francis (difrancis): Mad Libs

Gregory Frost frostokovich): Maunderings of the Diseased Mind

Felix Gilman: Felix Gilman

Jim C. Hines (jimhines): Jim C Hines

Jackie Kessler (jackiekessler): Jackie Kessler

Mindy Klasky (mindyklasky): Read ‘Til You Drop

Misty Massey (madkestrel): A Hazardous Occupation

C.E. Murphy (mizkit): The Essential Kit

Naomi Novik(naominovik): Dragons! Lip Gloss! Death!

Joshua Palmatier (jpsorrow): The Creation of Wrath Suvane

Maria V. Snyder: Maria V Snyder

Jennifer Stevenson (smokingpigeon): Smokingpigeon

Michelle West (msagara): Trying To Catch Up

Sean Williams (ladnews): Sean Williams

I think is a terrific idea and I urge any of you who have trouble writing a synopsis to check out how varied these are from one another, proving the old adage - there’s more than one way to skin a cat!

Beija.

It’s a Portuguese verb meaning “to touch with the lips as a sign of love.”

It also happens to be the name of a new type of rum.

I want you to remember that name, because I think you are going to be hearing a lot about it over the next year or two, especially if you live on the east coast. And not just from me. If all goes well it will be the next hot thing with the trendy bar and night-club crowd, with Beija-made drinks taking on the Mojito for the title of Most Popular Latin American Cocktail.

I’ll get back to Beija in just a moment, though. First, I want to talk first about dreams.

Most of us harbor a secret dream in our heart. We might not talk about it very often, but it’s there, lying just below the surface like a shark in the water, just waiting for that right moment to rear its head and remind us of what’s missing from our life. We find ourselves thinking about it during loose moments and odd hours, wondering what life would be like if we only had the money or the time or the guts to give it a shot.

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Photo by Baston

My apologies for not posting over the last several days. I was under deadline with my latest novel, EYES TO SEE, and every spare second went to getting it finalized and turned in. Since it was EYES that kept me from you, my readers, I thought it only fair that I share a little bit of it.

So, without further ado, here are the opening paragraphs of EYES TO SEE. (I’ll be back with a regular blog post in the next day or so…)

CHAPTER ONE

Now

I gave up my eyes in order to see more clearly.

That was many years ago and I don’t miss them all that much, except perhaps on days like this. The rain started late in the afternoon and by the time I stepped outside it had become a steady downpour, making the pavement slick beneath my feet and washing out the smells I normally use to help orient myself whenever I leave home. Thankfully the car service was punctual and moments later I was safely ensconced in the rear seat and headed across town to the address I’d been given.

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Photo by Snak3yes

Writing a novel is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the computer and write.

Writing a good novel? Well, that’s a bit harder. I’ve been writing professionally for seven years and I’ve sold nine novels in five different countries. My work has appeared on the bestseller list in Germany and has generated enough income for me to do it full-time to support my family. Since other writers helped me as I started out, I’m going to do the same thing here for anyone inclined to listen.

A good novel starts with a good idea. What we call a premise. A premise is the basic, underlying story. In essence, it is what the book is about. It is the central idea that makes people want to read the book.

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Photo by star-dust

When I first started out in this business, writing a book proposal seemed a daunting act. I wasn’t quite sure what exactly it should contain, how much was too much, what tone to take, etc.

While working on a new proposal just the other day, it occurred to me that proposals might be an interesting topic for some of those who read this blog, whatever their experience level might be. So, in today’s essay, we are going to deconstruct my standard proposal format and answer any questions blog readers have on the topic.

First, understand that I typically write the proposal before I write the actual book. That means I don’t have the luxury of having the finished work in front of me to refer to when drafting the proposal and I know going in that the end result might differ slightly from the proposed version. Editors are fine with that, provided you don’t veer too far off course. (In other words, if you sell a book based on your proposal about a modern psychic who solves crimes for the Chicago police department, you’d best not turn in a historical romance novel set in the 13th century.)

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We all know the drill. You bust your hump writing your latest novel. Your agent sells it to a major New York publisher. You wait another ten to eighteen months before your book sees print. You’re excited, enthused, ready to take on the world – this is the book that is going to be your breakout work. Big time here you come!

Six weeks later your newest “masterpiece” is relegated to the returns bin in the back of the store, waiting to be sent back to the publisher.

When looking at your next work, your publisher glances at your sales figures for that book, says “eh” and you find yourself wondering what happened to that terrific relationship the two of you had as that next book is turned down flat.

Obviously, there is a lot happening here. Marketing and promotion play a major role in how your work fares in the marketplace. So do reader interests and society’s latest trends. Many of these issues are outside the author’s control.

But at the same time there are things that can be done to bolster that initial relationship. One area many authors are unfamiliar with (or don’t take the time to look into) is foreign rights sales.

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