Category Archives: fiction

Author Interview: Susan Barnett Braun

Susan is a long time writing friend and colleague.

I met author Susan Barnett Braun at the 2011 Write-To-Publish Conference in Wheaton, Illinois. I attended that conference with the help of a generous Cecil Murphey scholarship. Susan did the same. I was one of six people who were members of an on-line writing group, The Writers View 2. Six of us in that group received scholarships. We got an e-mail loop going before the conference and agreed to meet, share meals together, and hang out.

Susan received her scholarship by other means, perhaps direct from Cec’s website. But when she got to the conference and quickly came to know of our little huddle of scholarship winners, she “crashed our party,” so to speak, and joined us for meals and other conversations.

Susan and I kept in touch afterward. She was beta reader for several of my books, providing great feedback. One of her daughters, who is talented with graphic arts software, has made several of my book covers.

What evil lurks in the organ loft? You’ll only find out on Kindle Vella.

Susan recently dipped her toe into the Kindle Vella pool. She wrote about it on Facebook, and I exchanged e-mails with her about the process and prospects, then offered to interview her here about it.

Q: Before we get into Kindle Vella, tell us a little about your writing career up to this point.
Susan: I loved to write even as a child, and wrote several books while in elementary school. I would write them out in longhand, and my mom would type them for me on the typewriter. I’d even take a few snapshots and add those in. I wrote my first book as an adult in 2011, when I wanted to write a memoir of my childhood for my 3 girls to read someday. After doing that, I attended a writing conference which further lit the writing fire. I wrote two other books in the next year or two; one a biography of “mad” King Ludwig II of Germany, and the other a children’s biography of Kate Middleton.
Q: In an e-mail to me, you implied that “Kindle Vella got me writing again”. That implies you’ve been through a dry spell, or at least a non-writing period. Is that true?
Susan: It is, as far as books go. After my whirlwind of writing the three books about a decade ago, I didn’t write more books. I just didn’t have the ideas or the motivation that I often felt when I had written my books. I have, however, blogged since 2008. That’s been great in keeping me still writing in some form. I have to say it feels good to be working on a longer work, a story/book, again.
Q: What made you decide to write a serialized story for Kindle Vella?
Susan: In June, our family took a vacation to Glacier National Park and the surrounding area. One night, we had dinner with my husband’s cousin. She is a prolific writer, and she immediately asked if I’d heard of Kindle Vella. Although the term was vaguely familiar, I didn’t know anything about it. She told me about how she’d become a big fan of Vella. It’s a different way of releasing a book, one chapter (or “episode,” as Vella terms it) at a time. She works full-time writing grants, but on Saturdays she writes on her Vella stories and then releases a couple of episodes each week. She liked the way it’s so easy to do this, plus after a story is fully released on Vella, Amazon makes it easy to convert into an e-book or paperback 30 days later. She was so excited about Vella, and spoke so highly of it, that I caught her enthusiasm and thought I might enjoy trying it too. I like the idea of serialized stories — it reminds me of the “old times,” when authors often released stories this way, but in magazines, not online.
Q: Tell us something about the story line in Phantom of the Organ.
Susan: Fiction isn’t my usual genre. In thinking about what I might write as a fiction piece, I thought of what I knew. That led me to the world of church, and specifically, a church organist. I thought I might like to try writing a mystery, and I liked the idea of combining a church with a mystery. My girls have always loved Phantom of the Opera story. All those threads came together for me, and I came up with a church organist who is practicing at night in the church, when she hears strange noises … The Phantom of the Organ was born.
Q: Rumor has it there will be a season 2 of PotO. Is this true?
Susan: Yes! My original story line took me 10 episodes to tell. I thought that was that. But then, I realized I was liking the characters and setting I’d come up with. I wanted to spend more time with them! So, I thought up another mystery for season two; this one involving items going missing from St Matthews church. My plan at this point is that I’d like to come up with four seasons. With each season running just over 10,000 words, that would be a book nearing 50,000 words. At that point, I would plan to release the story as an e-book and paperback. Can you tell I’m having fun with this?
Susan’s books can be found through her Amazon author page. That doesn’t get you to her KV story, however. Here’s the link for that. I hope you will check it out.

The Key To Time Travel

I don’t have a cover for the new book yet. Before long I’ll get that process started.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was writing fast and furiously this month on The Key To Time Travel. I’ve been working on this since around July 10th, when grandson Ezra and I put the first words on the computer. I suggested a way to begin it, and he gave me some ideas of what to put in the prologue. In a few days I managed to complete the Prologue, Chapter 1, and some of Chapter 2. Ezra and granddaughter Elise read and approved it at that point.

Due to the several special projects I had over the summer, I made little progress on the book. But I kept thinking about the plot and how I would get Eddie into trouble with the forest throne, a.k.a. a time portal. I worked on it some in October and got it up to around five or six thousand words. Again, there it sat. Again, I pondered the plot even as I was busy with other things.

As I reported recently, I got into a good production rhythm after Thanksgiving, and wrote and wrote. The words flew from my mind to the keyboard and screen. December 19 came, and I wrote “The End”—figuratively, that is.  Soon I will start the editing process, as well as look for beta readers.

So what’s the story about? Somehow I need to describe the plot without giving the story away. It’s about Eddie Wagner’s experience with the forest throne. As the second of four children, he is anxious to ‘one-up’ on his brother. He knows enough about the throne from older brother Ethan to know what it does and how to work it. He needs the blue and orange pegs. He knows which one does what, and that the ends are marked designating ‘past’ and ‘future’.

But did Grandpa destroy the pegs? Eddie gets to spend an extra week at his grandparents’ Ozarks home after the rest of the family goes home. He has a long conversation with Grandpa and learns things that Ethan didn’t reveal. Grandpa also said that he couldn’t destroy the pegs, and that he didn’t yet want to throw them away.

Eddie makes up his mind to search his grandparents’ big house and find the pegs, then go to the throne and send himself into the future. He will stay there just long enough to get something to prove he was in the future, then he would go back to his time and show Ethan how he himself had the greater adventure.

As you can imagine, it won’t work out the way Eddie wants it to. He takes the pegs, one sawed in half by his grandfather, then sneaks down into the hollow to the throne while his grandparents are busy. He uses the pegs the way they are meant to be used, and…

…well, it just didn’t work out the way he expected. If I say anymore, it will give the plot away. You’ll just have to wait till the book is published, buy a copy, and read it.

Book Review: “Turning Life Into Fiction”

This isn’t one of the premier books that every writer needs to read and have on their shelf, but it is a worthwhile read.

I have a fair number of books for writers in my library. I should read more of them, but, given the large number of books I’m working through, I tend to pick others over those. Recently, I browsed one of my bookshelves, the one tucked away in the storeroom, and pulled two out. I took them and no others on our recent trip to Texas, forcing me to read them.

On Wednesday I finished the first of them, Turning Life Into Fiction, by Robin Hemley. Since that’s what I do to a fairly great extent in my fiction, I thought this would be good to read. It was. I read the paperback edition, copyrighted 1994. My copy is a new book but I don’t remember buying it. Possibly I won it at a writers conference.  That might sound old, but really it isn’t. The advice that Hemley gives works across the 90s and the 20s.

Take your life, or any part of real life, and figure out how to turn it into fiction. You aren’t writing history, and there’s no need to make your fiction exactly faithful to history. Begin with the truth. Add characters, delete characters, change the gender of characters. Start with the real setting; make some changes, but probably not as many as with the characters. But, if you change anything about a real place be prepared for someone very familiar with that place to call you out on it. That’s okay. For every 1 reader who knows the place you will have 1000 readers who don’t. So make a few changes. Maybe more than a few.

Hemley starts with journaling, and the importance of it, then moving on to memoir. He talks about the news and how to take virtually any news story and be able to develop a fictional story about it. He cautions the writer, however, that not every historical detail needs to be part of your memoir or story. The writer needs to take great care to see that the story has the right details, the details needed to pull in the reader and keep them reading.

The last chapter has to do with legal and ethical concerns. You don’t want to use real people in your books without permission. If you do, change enough so that the character bears only a little to the original. While successful lawsuits against fiction writers based on characters that resemble real people are rare, they do happen.

I’m glad I read this book. It helped me to see how I’m doing a lot of things right as I turn real life experiences into fiction. I’m not going to keep this book, as I never see myself re-reading it. But it’s a good book, a worthwhile read for any writer.

The Time Crunch Has Started

Every year, in November, tens of thousands of writers, at the start of November, sign pledges, set goals, and sit their rear ends in seats in front of computers and begin a novel. Yes, it’s National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Internet groups have formed for it. Some in-person meet-ups are probably happening. The goal is 50,000 words for the month. That’s not quite a novel for most genres, but it’s more than just a good start. It’s well on it’s way to writing a novel.

But I am not participating. I never participate in NaNoWriMo. The main reason is the busyness of November. Our main annual family celebration is at Thanksgiving. Preparations for this normally consume much time and energy, leaving little for writing and certainly not enough to complete a novel or even 50,000 words of one. I am working on a novel, and today hope to carve out enough time to add 1,000 words to it. But I can’t commit to NaNoWriMo goals.

This year the time crunch is made worse because of decluttering. Two bedrooms have been in use as decluttering staging areas. They are cluttered. The dining room and our large dining table has also been a site of staging. Boxes and piles, boxes and piles, seemingly everywhere. They grow a little and shrink a little, depending on whether we are finishing with something or starting something new.

Saturday we made some good progress, so naturally the dining room looks much worse than it did on Friday. I said progress because we finally, after nine months, dug into boxes of linens left behind in our house when my mother-in-law died three years ago. We sorted. Somethings we discarded (which means put them aside to go to Goodwill, which takes odd cloths and makes things out of them). Today, Monday, with a little extra effort, might have all this sorted out and put either in the garage for storage/donation or in smaller boxes for storage. I hope.

Writing will continue, even as I work on both physical and digital decluttering. But I have no real goals for output until after Thanksgiving. Then, maybe by the end of December, the first draft of that novel will be done. Meanwhile, I will say with Emerson, there is time enough…for all that I must do.

Book Review: Behind The Stories

This is like a time capsule of Christian fiction around the turn of the millennium. Well worth the read for anyone writing Christian fiction.

Some time ago (as in a couple of months), having finished reading a book and wanting to find one to read that I wouldn’t keep, thus reducing my inventory, I found on the bookshelf tucked in my close Behind The Stories: Christian Novelists Reveal the Heart in the Art of their Writing. I don’t know where I got this, but suspect I picked it up at a thrift store. Nor do I know how long I’ve had it, but I suspect ten years. The copyright date is 2002. I have a fair number of books for writers on writing and publishing, and I need to work through them, read the ones I haven’t read and decide if any of the ones I have read I shouldn’t keep.

That makes it almost a time capsule type of piece. The author is Diane Eble, though in some ways she is more of an editor than an author. The book covers three to four page stories from 40 Christian novelists. This is as things existed in 2002, or a year before that based on publication schedules. So it misses any that came to prominence before that. Many of the names are familiar: Jerry B. Jenkins, Karen Kingsbury, Janette Oke, Bodie Thoene, Terri Blackstock, Francine Rivers, Beverly Lewis. Others are not as famous, but I actually met some of them at writers conferences: Robin Jones Gunn, Alton Gansky, Angela Elwell Hunt, Deborah Raney. They cover the full spectrum of types of Christian fiction.

It was encouraging to read their stories. Almost every one of them went through some kind of trial. Maybe it was a difficult childhood. Maybe it was a struggle to find their voice. Maybe it was the busyness of life. Each persevered and found authorial success. That is an encouragement for me.

I rate the book 4-stars. It loses a star for something I can’t quite put my finger on. And, it is not a keeper. Next time I leave The Dungeon, I will go out to the garage, and take it to join the other books for sale. Maybe someone else can find meaning in these brief stories.

Book Review: The Body In The Library

A good Miss Marple Book, but not a keeper. We will be passing it along.

Continuing with our reading books in the house that look like they would be good to read but not necessary to keep, my wife pulled The Body In The Library from the Agatha Christie box and we read it. This was the first of her books featuring Miss Marple that we’ve read.

It’s a good book, as all of hers have been. A servant, in the midst of her morning duties, finds a body in the library of a manor house. She tells the lady of the house, who doesn’t believe her at first. Finally the lady goes downstairs and sees for herself. Before long the police are called. The lady knows Miss Marple, who is from that village, and calls her to come over. She arrives before the police do. Her reputation as an amateur crime solver is already well established in the village, which seems to have an above average murder rate for cute English villages.

Since Miss Marple will be the one to solve the crime, I figured the murderer had to be someone she comes in contact with. She’s there at the manor house and encounters three people, plus the police. The story then moves away from Miss Marple and follows the police as they do their work. The dead woman is identified as an 18-year-old professional dancer at a hotel in a nearby town. She’s newly studied at a dance school. Her older cousin has a solid position as a “mingler” with the guest of the hotel, dancing and playing bridge and being friendly with the guests, who are mainly upscale tourists.

Miss Marple has a number of other contacts. A retired Scotland Yard man is called in on the case, and he knows and thinks highly of Miss Marple. It isn’t long before another woman is found murdered—or presumed murdered—in a burning car. When this happens, Miss Marple is then certain who committed the first murder. Actually, she was pretty certain of it even in the first meeting at the manor house.

My main complaint about this book is it was difficult to tell how much time passed from one event to the next. Most of the action took place in the same day, or at least I think it did. Yet, there seemed to be too much going on for it to be happening in one day. Perhaps a second read would help sort that out.

I did not have the murderer correct. My thought process as to who it would be was correct, but I chose the wrong person. In my defense, the clues were not as well laid out in this book as they were in the previous Christie books we read.

I give it 4-stars. A good read, well worth the time it took. It’s not a keeper, however. I see no chance of ever reading it again.

Book Review: Assumed Identity

Morrell is a master of the plot and an amazing character developer. This book doesn’t disappoint in those areas.

Some books you read you remember very well, some books you forget almost entirely. Some books you sort of remember, but can’t figure out specifics. Assumed Identity by David Morrell is in the later category.

David Morrell taught a half-day class on fiction writing at a writer’s conference I went to in 2006 in New Mexico. As chance would have it, he and I wound up at the same table at lunch and we had a good conversation. Many people don’t know his name but you know his most famous character: Rambo.

I read Assumed Identity in 29 sittings in August and September this year. My paperback is exactly 500 pages, so my reading averaged 17 pages per sitting. Not bad, but I’ve done better.

The book is about a man who worked in Army special forces, in a task group that tried to infiltrate and then root out drug lords in various places. Some of his assignments may have been with other situations as well. It was kind of hard to understand all his backstory. In this book he had six or eight different identities as situations unfolded. One mission went awry when, through bad luck, someone he’d know a few identities prior ran into him in Mexico when he was trying to infiltrate a drug organization. Four drug lords/their body guards turned on him. He killed or wounded all of them, was wounded in the gun fight then again in his escape.

But escape he did—not once, but multiple times in the book. His work was perfect. He approached each situation kind of like a Jedi knight in Star Wars, you know how they seemed always confident, always ready in every situation, always undaunted when taking on multiple enemies, alway having the right equipment, the right stamina, and oodles of mental tenacity. That was the protagonist in this story.

Through most of the book he was worried about a certain woman he had worked with a few identities ago, as he received a note from her to meet at a certain place at a certain time in New Orleans, which was an indication she was in trouble and needed his help. With considerable difficulty he got to that place, but something bad happened and he didn’t see her, being injured in a knife attack. Later, he becomes involved with another woman, a newspaper reporter, who was trying to make a name for herself by exposing this secret army operation.

As I’ve been writing this some of the details of the book have come back to me, such as the next-to-last plot twist that was very major. Such as the destruction of an archaeological site in the Yucatan Peninsula by one of the world’s wealthiest men looking for oil, an operation that kept being mentioned in seemingly meaningless chapters that finally came together in the end.

This was a good book. It blended together Army operations, secret missions, civilian news, petroleum, drugs, and archaeology, with much action. I recommend it to anyone who likes a good action book.

As to the question of whether I’ll keep it or not: no, I won’t. I have around five or six Morrell books. This was the last one to read. I’m going to put them together in a lot and sell them on Facebook Marketplace. Perhaps a David Morrell fan will see it and want them. If not, after a couple of months, I’ll just mix them in with the 500 other books I’m currently trying to sell. I think, among my David Morrell reads, this was my least favorite. Still I’m going to give it 4 stars. It lost a star for a few confusing parts.

World-Building Trumps Everything

In writing classes, you learn lots of “rules.” Be consistent with point of view. Avoid or at least minimize the use of adjectives and especially adverbs. Keep sentences short. Watch out for plot gaps and gaffs. Mind your sentence length. Etc, etc. These things are drilled in, over and over, in every writing techniques class in every conference, book on writing craft, and writing webinar.

Breaking “the rules” is possible, or course, for a skilled writer who is already published. But a writer starting out should avoid these rules. The rules are what good writing is all about. “Get a copy of Strunk and White, learn it, embrace it, apply it.” So the experts say.

Another factor that comes into play in writing, apart from the quality of the words as they are strung together into sentences, at least for novels, is to create the fictional dream for the reader to get lost in. Or, as they would call this in science fiction and fantasy, build your fictional world carefully, expansively, and invite you reader to inhabit that world for a time. It’s called world building.

As I read books or watch movies, I’ve come to realize that world building is more important than the quality of the writing (in the case of books) or production (in the case of movies). This came home to me twice recently. We went to the theater and saw Saving Mr. Banks, the story of Walt Disney obtaining the rights to the Mary Poppins stories and making the movies. The difficulty of the author in letting go of the rights, and why, was the key element in the story.

As we were at this movie, I found myself lost in the story. The scenes switching between early 1960s Los Angeles and the author’s childhood in rural Australia was easy to follow. As you saw the girl’s relationship with her dad, the problems he had with alcohol, you immediately began to wonder how this tied in with Mr. Banks, the father in the Mary Poppins story. Was Mr. Banks the girl’s dad? If so, how did saving Mr. Banks tie in with the real life dad’s story?

As I say, I was lost in the story. For ninety minutes I forgot about books I wasn’t writing, blog posts I should be planning, specs I should be developing at work, wondering how I will be able to retire on schedule, and a host of problems that seem to consume life. The developers of the movie had created the perfect fictional dream, and I was lost in it.

The second thing to bring world building to mind as the most important element in fiction is the Harry Potter books. As I explained in my last post, the wife and I are reading these. I want to be careful here, because it’s very common for an unsuccessful writer to criticize the writing of a successful writer and have it appear as sour grapes. I assure you my criticism of Rowling isn’t in that category. But, in fact, while she does well with some of the rules, she violates many of the them that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

She uses adverbs to the point where it become sickening, especially on speaker tags. “said Ron hesitantly.” “Hermione said emphatically.” “said Snape snarkily.” “asked Harry cautiously.” More often than not, the speaker tag comes with an adverb. Three or more in a row might have the adverb with the tag. And, she way overuses speaker tags. When the speaker is clearly identified by the context, why include a speaker tag? It’s redundant and slows down the story. But she does it over and over.

And then, some of her sentences are awkward, with subordinate clauses modifying/referring to the wrong reference, based on the rules of grammar. These are typically long sentences, with the properly referred-to item and the descriptive clause so far removed from each other that it’s a mental struggle to understand what’s being said. These aren’t excessive, but there are enough of them to be noticeable.

Since the books are wildly successful, who am I to criticize the writing style? It smacks of sour grapes. Yet, I’m not making up what is taught in writing classes. I’ve heard the same things over and over. Why then is the Harry Potter series so successful? Are the experts wrong? Is there a separate set of “rules” for children’s books? Or is it possible that readers don’t care as much about the quality of the writing as the experts say? And that, what the readers want more than stellar writing is…

…an outstanding story? One that gives them the fictional dream, and puts them into a different world for a time. That’s what I think. There’s nothing wrong with stellar writing. But it shouldn’t come at the expense of world building or creating the fictional dream.

I have more to say about that, but unfortunately I’m at the end of my post, and shall have to cover it in the next post. See you all then.

2012 Writing Plan: Fiction

Now, on Jan 4, 2012, looking ahead to what I plan to accomplish this year with my fiction, here’s what the year will look like.

  1. Publish my second short story, titled “Too Old To Play”. The story is written. I’ve  edited it for typos, plot, language usage, etc. It’s ready to publish, in my view. I e-mailed it to my critique group mailing list and to another trusted reviewer, so far with no response. I’m not really worried about  receiving critiques. If I get some, I’ll see what I need to do. If I don’t get any, I’ll publish as is. My schedule is to eSP this in January. Since it’s a sequel to my previously published short story, “Mom’s Letter”, I hope they will feed sales to each other. I’ve already “commissioned” creation of the cover.
  2. Publish my novel Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I finished what I consider the last round of edits a month or so ago. Publishers have told me it’s a good idea, but they won’t publish such a long work in a difficult genre from an unknown author. I figure it won’t have great sales, but what’s the downside in self-publishing it? Only the cost of a cover (already commissioned). If it doesn’t sell much, then the editors will be proved right in their judgment of it. If I make anything on it, that’s more than my prospects through commercial publishers. Right now I’m planning for an e-book. It’s so long I’m afraid a POD print book will be too expensive. I’m targeting this for February, which is very do-able
  3. Publish my novel In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. The book is written, and partially edited. I sent it out to about twelve beta readers in October, and have heard back from three. The copy they read had many typos, as I had not proof-read it. I have a few plot issues to address, and must make a judgment on the amount of dialog vs. narrative. I think I can have all this done by the end of February, making production of an e-book in March fairly firm.
  4. Publish another short story in the Danny Tompkins series. I hadn’t thought of adding another story to this series until recently. Heck, the second one didn’t even come to me until three months ago. I haven’t seen myself as a short story writer. So I’m still testing the waters. A plot for another one (actually two) has run through my mind, so I might as well schedule it to be written and published. I’m guessing this will be somewhere around June, but I’m still in the early stages of this.
  5. Begin work on my third novel. I could go several ways with this. I could work on a sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I hadn’t planned on that, but my friend Gary pointed out to me how the things I left hanging at the end of the book could segue very well into a sequel. I’m thinking my espionage book, China Tour, is most likely to be next, since it has had the longest gestation period. But a series of cozy mysteries has been brewing, and the first of those might be next. Given the uncertainty of what I’ll be working on, I’d say completion of the next novel in 2012 is unlikely, and I’m not putting completion in my plan.

So, there are my fiction writing plans for 2012. In a vacuum (i.e. with no non-fiction), it would be an easy schedule. Covers may be the hold up for maintaining my publication schedule.

2011 Writing in Review: Fiction

In 2011 I spent a lot of time on my fiction. At the beginning of the year I polished and published a short story, “Mom’s Letter”. I wrote this somewhere around 2005-06, first for a contest and then expanded and reworked. I published that at Kindle in February, at Smashwords in July. Sales are brisk, with a total of 9 copies sold (No; that’s not a typo).

When I attended the Write-to-Publish Conference in June, I pitched my second novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, and an agent was interested. I hadn’t looked at it for a couple of years, and was surprised to see, when I prepared to submit the partial manuscript after the conference, that I had less than 15,000 words written. I thought I was over 20,000.

So I got busy. From mid-July to early October I completed the novel, ending at about 87,000 words. I sent it out to beta readers in October, and have received a trickle of comments back.

At that point in time, after a brief break, I read my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, which as been “in the drawer” for about three years, looking for “about 60 typos” a beta reader said I had but didn’t identify, and fixing a few minor plot problems or references. My goal is to e-self-publish it around February 2012. I made the typos and think it’s ready to go, cover permitting.

I then decided to work on another short story, to help me get another book on my self-publishing bookshelf. So I dashed off a sequel to “Mom’s Letter”, titled “Too Old To Play”. I’ve distributed that by e-mail to my critique group, but so far have had no responses. In my mind it’s ready to upload to Kindle, though I’m open to edits.

Beyond this, I dreamed a lot. I know which novel I’ll work on after that. I have at three series identified and at least five novels in each (by title). I have only outlined, at least in part, one. So this is work for the rest of my life.