Want To Be A Book Character?

If you’re staring at the naked guy to the right, that’s Tobias from my upcoming superhero novella From the Ashes (Entangled, August 2012).

Last night I was playing with my new graphics tablet, and whipped out a quick sketch that I really need to refine (especially the clothed version). What I also need to refine, though, is Tobias’s personal history and the secondary characters around him, so as I work on edits assigned by the Great Editorial Goddess K.L. Grady, I’m introducing two new named characters.

And that’s where you come in.

If you’d like to have a character named after you, just comment and tell me why you should be in my book. When the contest is over, I’ll pick one female and one male winner, and name the new characters after them. I may even have the chance to work in a few physical similarities, so if you win I’ll ask you for a couple of traits like hair color, height, etc. Nothing too creepy or stalkerish. A few details:

1. Contest entries close on January 15th, 2012. If I take any longer to finish my edits, K.L. may kill me.

2. Because From the Ashes does involve a m/m relationship and the new characters are involved in the main character’s backstory, the two new characters will likely be in some way involved in the LGBT community, even if they aren’t gay themselves. If that bothers you, don’t enter. (Then again, if you follow me on Twitter and got here from there, I sincerely doubt anything LGBT bothers you after dealing with me…)

3. Only one entry per person.

4. If you’d rather not use your real name, we can create a variant. It does still need to be a normal name a normal person would have, though, and if you use a completely fictional name it rather removes the point of naming a book character after you.

5. If you’re female but would like a male character named after you, or male and would like a female character named after you, let me know in the comments. We can always gender-reverse your first name.

6. Winners will be mentioned in the acknowledgements in the back of the book, just so people who aren’t aware of the original contest will know of your awesomeness.

7. If you’re uncomfortable posting your real name in the public comments, don’t. I can always ask you for the proper name to use via email if you’re selected as a winner. Just make sure you leave a way for me to contact you.

8. Because the characters are part of Tobias’s history, they won’t be taking a prominent role in the main storyline, though they’ll still be very important in demonstrating his character and establishing the base from which he grows. Your comment will have a strong role in determining how I choose to integrate the new characters into Tobias’s past, but I reserve the right to decide what works best for the story and make the necessary adjustments.

A little about From the Ashes:
25-year-old Tobias Rutherford is a villain in a world without heroes, born to a race of superpowered beings known as aberrants, whose mutant evolution gave rise to neurological disorders that labeled them as psychopaths, sociopaths, freaks – and Tobias’s father is the worst of them all. Plotting the demise of mankind from within an empire built on conquered nations, the supervillain known as Blaze uses his son as a weapon, a tool, an extension of himself with no free will and no future other than the one his despotic father has planned. A graduate-level researcher by day, the villainous Spark by night, Tobias does what he must to further his father’s goals – until one night with Dr. Sean Archer makes him question everything he thought he knew about aberrants, his own humanity, and the power he has to shape his own destiny.

P.S. Akismet is still being crazy aggressive, so if your comment doesn’t show up initially, don’t double-post. It’s in there, and I’ll fish it out of the spam filter ASAP.

Winners: Worst Writing Habit Contest

Thanks to everyone who participated in the “What’s Your Worst Writing Habit?” contest. The response was phenomenal; over 100 entries, and every last one of them absolutely awesome. A little humbling, too, as I recognized a lot of my own bad habits in your entries. ~coughs~

But you’re waiting to find out who won, right? The random number generator gods are hard at work, and they’ve landed on…

Winner: Rebecca Enzor
Rebecca posted about her floating-head syndrome, and her love of dialogue. I guess I’ll be seeing both when I crit her full. ;P

And let’s not forget second-place:

Runner-Up: Julie Weathers
Julie will be receiving a three-chapter critique, and maybe a little help working on that habit of writing things out of order.

I’ll be emailing the winners tomorrow to request your manuscripts, or you can email me at adrien-luc(at)entangledpublishing(dot)com if you don’t want to wait.

As promised, here’s the top 5 comments, and my response:

1. Liana Brooks
My worst writing habit is TWITTER.

I turn it on to check the news in the morning and it’s open all day. I’ll write a few paragraphs, and then go chat with other authors. Write a little more, and then check out someone’s new book they tweeted about. At this point I’m almost positive I have a serious Twitter addiction.

You’d think the answer to this would be to close Twitter – Tweetdeck, your browser, whatever. But they’re still right there, waiting to be opened again. Drives me out of my mind, because I do this too. All the time. There’s only one thing that really works for me: writing in TextRoom. TextRoom is a full-screen text editor that blocks out everything else and cuts down to the minimum needed to write. There are other full-screen editors, like Q10 and DarkRoom, but I prefer TextRoom because it allows rich text formatting instead of NotePad-style plain text, making it easier to deal with when I copy to Word to save in .doc format. It also makes sure I can’t see those windows in my taskbar, or the damn Twhirl notifications – and it helps keep me on track with daily wordcount goals, percentage trackers, etc.

Or, you know, you could try this thing called self-discipline. I don’t advocate it. It’s terribly dull and annoying. God knows I don’t have any. Oh hey, someone just tweeted at me…

2. L.S. Murphy
Besides checking my email every thirty seconds or so, I overuse the heart as an emotional cue. You would think my characters should see a cardiologist as much as their hearts beat, drop, slam, or dissolve in the pits of their stomachs. *Sigh* The heart wants what the heart wants…

This is a problem I see rather often, actually, and it’s hard not to fall back on the heart as an indicator of emotion. We’re ruled by our hearts, and everyone understands what it means when the heart stops, stumbles, races. We know the feeling. We share it. So it’s not always bad to use the heart as a way to convey emotion – but you also have a great opportunity here to really strike your readers with something unique, something they’ve often felt but never been quite aware of it. In one story I read, a nervous character curled her toes up inside her shoes–but she didn’t focus on the cliched toes curling. Instead she focused on how uncomfortable it was when the knuckles of her toes pushed against the insides of her shoes, and the fabric on the insoles bunched up in the creases. It made it more real for me, because when I scrunch my toes up nervously, I feel the same thing, but never really think about it.

When you’re conveying emotion in a scene through physical cues, stop and close your eyes. Put yourself in the scene, and try to picture everything. Maybe the taste of the air, breathed in through the mouth instead of the nose because the character’s panting with fright. If they’re blushing, maybe their neck is burning instead of their face, because they’re blushing just that hard. Angry? Forget clenching fists or tension in the shoulders. What about that hard pull of sinew in the solar plexus as the body prepares for action? The point is, we don’t just feel emotion with our hearts. We feel it with our entire bodies. We react from the tips of our eyelashes to the tips of our toes. It’s not something we normally think about, but if you’re going to write convincing emotional responses, you have to.

If you’re having trouble imagining from your perspective, watch emotionally charged movies. They can’t always rely on the beating heart unless they use special sound effects; what they have to rely on is body language and visual cues. Look for those cues, and how the actors convey emotion. Imagine what those cues must feel like – the sensations involved, etc. Use that for a frame of reference when trying to break out of the typical heart-shaped box. (Go ahead. Groan. I know you want to.)

3. Tamara Gill
My worst writing habit would have to be the use of adverb tags with dialogue. And I’m a really lazy writer…punctuation, what’s that?

Okay, the laziness I can’t help you with. Punctuate your sentences, dammit. Unless you like watching my head explode.

…

Don’t answer that.

Anyway, on the adverbs: don’t beat yourself up over it too much. One or two here and there? Actually not that bad…as long as it’s only one or two. When every dialogue tag is “he said softly” and “she said loudly,” it’s a problem. The fun thing about the English language is that it’s ridiculously full of nuance and has about fifty different words for everything, many with different inflections and subtle variations. There’s probably a verb out there for that “said + adverb” combo.

Obviously these two are easy: saying something softly can be murmuring or whispering, while saying something loudly can be shouting or yelling or even screeching, depending on the tone you want. Choosing the right verb can go a long way towards defining tone and even characterization, more so than tacking on any adverb. Just think about the difference between shouting and screeching. Both involve saying something loudly, urgently, but one is aggressive and almost imperative, while the other is high-pitched and can seem angry, bitchy, hysterical, or even panicked, depending on context.

The right verb is out there. You just have to look for it.

4. Sarah Robinson
I tend to overwrite. My manuscript as it sits is at 100,000 words. Young adult Contemporary. I know I need to get it below 80,000 to make it acceptable to agents, but I can’t seem to part with much more. I need fresh eyes.

…my first YA novel (which will never see the light of day) was 135k. Yeah. I know. That’s frightening.

Two tips on how to get around this. One, plan for it to be 75k. If you’re not a planner, that may be hard, but if you have that goal in the back of your mind, it forces you to consider what’s really necessary as you write. It gives you a little leeway for that 80k limit, too.

Another way, though, is to refuse to allow yourself any internal monologue as you write. None. Every time you catch yourself doing it, delete it. Write only the action and dialogue, as straightforward as possible. Don’t even tell us if your MC is wondering what another character is doing. In your next draft, you can go in and add that where it’s necessary – but only where it’s necessary. Most of the time it’s internal monologue and exposition bogging us down, but we tend to write less of it if we’re adding it in after the fact and trying to figure out the best place to fit it into seamless action.

5. Kathryn Sheridan Kupanoff
My worst writing habit? Ugh. I could give you a million, but since you asked for one, I’ll settle for long-ass sentences when I’m on a roll, and just can’t seem to find that period, and how could I stop this train of thought when the character’s mind seems to be going here and there, and what did the beginning of the sentence have to do with this? That’s why it’s always good to reread, kids. Periods are your friends (also told me by my health teacher in high school, but I don’t think it was relevant to this question).

…I admit I picked this one not because I had anything useful to say, but because it made me laugh until I choked. You know how to fix this one. Okay. Well. Maybe you don’t. If you don’t? One action per sentence. Seriously. Go back to baby steps, and write very simple subject-verb-object sentences. Don’t let yourself do anything else, no matter what. In edits, you can combine into more complex sentence structures. The point isn’t to write in a simplistic fashion; it’s to train yourself to break your thoughts up and present them in an organized fashion, so that the more you practice, the more you’ll be able to write concisely and oh hey this sentence is getting a little long here and…

…yeah. Maybe I need to take my own advice.

And that’s it for now. Keep an eye out for two new contests soon: one that’ll show you how to tighten your story’s hook, and one that’ll give you a chance to be a secondary character in my upcoming book, From the Ashes.

In the meantime, I’ll be hanging out at the Romance Author Hotspot 2011 holiday bash from 12.24.11 to 1.1.12, giving away free books and just chatting, so feel free to drop by – especially since RAH is giving away a free Kindle!

Contest: What’s Your Worst Writing Habit?

CONTEST OFFICIALLY CLOSED.
Thanks to everyone who participated; we got over 100 entries! Winners will be posted shortly.
—————————

Want to win a full critique of your manuscript? Tell us about your worst writing habit – that nasty little flaw you’re trying to shake but just can’t.

Mine? I can’t seem to let a line of dialogue go by without adding some kind of little action to it, until my characters are lowering their eyes and looking up and walking around and fidgeting like they’re shaking off a bad round of PCP. In edits, cutting that out tends to get rid of a few thousand words on its own. I know I shouldn’t do it, but it keeps creeping in anyway, so I just let it happen and keep a sharp eye out for it when ripping the finished draft into bloody little pieces.

So what’s yours?

The rules:

1. You have to comment to win. Share your worst writing habit. Make sure to leave a valid email in the email field so that, if you win, I can contact you. Email addresses are not displayed publicly.

2. I’ll critique both literary and genre fiction manuscripts anywhere from 30k to 100k in length, but not non-fiction. It’s not that I don’t like it; I’m just not qualified to critique it.

3. Entries will remain open until December 20th, 2011. At that point I’ll choose one first-prize winner and one runner-up at random, and contact them for their manuscripts. The first-prize winner’s manuscript will be read in full and marked up in Word with editorial commentary, accompanied by an email discussing overall impressions and critique points. The critique will remain private between me and the author. The runner-up will receive a critique and markup of their first three chapters only.

4. The winners will, however, be announced in a blog post. The top five comments will also be posted to the blog, with my responses on how to help kick that habit.

5. This is not an official submissions call. Do not email any materials for the contest unless officially requested. (Well, if you want to query, go ahead, but it’s not related to the contest.) The contest is in no way affiliated with my work at Entangled Publishing, and neither participating nor winning constitutes any form of endorsement for publication. Any queries for publication are considered separately, and contest participants are welcome to submit their stories outside of the contest provided they comply with Entangled Publishing’s submission guidelines.

Get it? Got it? Good. Get to commenting!

P.S. If your comment doesn’t show up immediately, Akismet probably caught it. I check the spam filter regularly and will fish it out in short order, so no need to repost.