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This week, a rainbow glows above the house where I live with the man of my dreams and the World’s Greatest Dog. The sun is shining. My children have called every day to tell me

Can you ignore the urge to write? Can you ignore a puppy?

how much they love me. Godot showed up to ask if I’d been waiting for him, as did Mr. Goodbar.

Why? Because my agent loves my current WIP (not to be confused with he thinks it’s perfect), the one I spent 14.8 years re-writing, the last time in blood.

Life wasn’t always like this. Fifteen years ago, I had no idea it would take me so f*** long to achieve one scrawny, measly dream, or that I’d go through so many prequels to what would finally be The Book. The question that intrigues most writer friends (and the one I ask each time one of them launches their book) is how did I get here? What’s the good and bad that made my writing work–and not work? I hate analyzing myself–for me, introspection is as much fun as going to the opera. I write. I edit. I rewrite. I don’t think deep thoughts about who I am or where my existential self is going. Sure, I’ve been told by my toxic critique group and a few well-meaning friends that I don’t ramp up the drama fast enough for a thriller (my chosen genre). My characters’ motivations aren’t believable. The stakes aren’t high enough even after the thirteenth rewrite. Or the fourteenth.

Or the fifteenth.

Many times, I felt like a violin in a marching band.

But what I do well as a writer is I never give up. I don’t know the meaning of that phrase. How does one ‘give up’? I tried to after the failure of Book #1, the soul-seering paleo-historic biography of pregnant Lucy, trying to survive in a world that had stacked the deck against her. No one–I mean no one–found it appealing. Not agents, not my family, and most pointedly, not my annoying critique group (though they’ve never liked a thing I wrote). Since I took up writing to tell Lucy’s story, I decided to quit.

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I have an interesting rundown on spring cleaning for your blog on Write Anything. If you’re thinking of doing some maintenance (and you missed my article here earlier this month), I have some good suggestions for you.

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q:  I don’t know what I did, but my computer doesn’t run right anymore. What can I do?

A:  With access to the internet, computer malfunctions have become even more prevalent than ever. Sometimes you download a program–or your child mistakenly pushes a button that allows malware on your computer. Suddenly, through no fault of your own, things just aren’t working right anymore.

This is so common that Microsoft has a program called System Restore on every computer with Windows operating system. System Restore is a utility that allows users to restore their Windows configurations to a previous state. While System Restore is often associated with providing recovery when driver or software installations go awry, it can really shine when spyware or other malevolent software compromises user machines. In many situations, this handy utility can roll back afflicted machines to a completely uninfected state. Of course, System Restore can work only when it is turned on and cataloging system states, so make sure it’s enabled on all user machines.

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Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

Before fame claimed him as a writer, five-times married (and divorced) Henry Miller’s work experience included a bellboy, garbage collector, cement mixer, gravedigger, employment manager at Western Union, employee at Park Department in Queens, manager of New York City speakeasy, and proofreader on the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune. After a full and long eighty years of life, he summed up his goals in this way:

“(My) ideal is to be free of ideals, free of principles, free of isms and ideologies. I want to take to the ocean of life like a fish takes to the sea.” 

Today, he is best known as the controversial American author of numerous books, including the sexually-explicit Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, shared what he considered to be the Ten Commandments of writing (originally published in Henry Miller on Writing). See if you agree:

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We All Fall Down

by Michael Harvey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Michael Harvey’s debut novel (Chicago Way) turned into a fast-moving sometimes dark TV series (now cancelled) introducing outspoken Chicago PI-and-ex-cop, Michael Kelly. We All Fall Down (Knopf 2011) is Kelly’s first novel I have read and I am enthusiastically placing the other three on the top of my book pile.

The plot revolves around bioterrorism, pathogens are released in the Chicago Subway via exploding light bulbs. The effects are dramatic and deadly and we learn of new strains of terror referred to as “black biology”. The Government is forced to quarantine large parts of the city as hospitals turn into morgues. Michael, with clever, aggressive and highly perceptive insights into this threat, begins to hunt the perpetrators while protecting the scientists desperately seeking the vaccine.

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I love thrillers–their fast pace, bigger-than-life heroes whose vulnerabilities are juxtaposed with invincibility, their hard-

Twenty-four Days to stop them.

working, non-stop efforts to prevent dire consequences regardless the personal pain or innate impossibility of the task. It’s my life. Never easy, but always worth it.

There are thousands of thrillers. If they were a favorite tshirt, they’d be torn across the sleeve and now used as a dust rag. To set myself apart, I added a twist: intelligence. My POV characters are blindingly smart (which takes a lot of research on my part), problem-solvers, never happier than when their asked to untangle a mobias strip of disconnected clues. I’ve been accused of being ‘too complicated’, but not by anyone of consequence. All I care is my agent likes the approach and he’s the one who will take it to publishers.

My current series relies on technology (I’m a tech teacher) and science for the wow factor. There are some amazing inventions out there that will shake up our world when extrapolated to their inevitable conclusion. Star Trek used this science to drive their success and much of what they hypothesized twenty years ago is now reality. My science is similar–based on real life, but not quite there yet. Think Jurassic Park.

There in lies my challenge: To explain complicated science in a way people will not only understand, but buy into.

My current WIP has a working title of Twenty-four Days. It is a high concept novel written in the spirit of Jack DuBrul and is peopled with imaginative characters—human and digital–who must beat a ticking clock or face a disaster that will upend their world. As my query letter summarizes:

Navy SEAL-turned-world-renowned paleoanthropologist Zeke Rowe is called back to action when two nuclear submarines are hijacked while testing a secret weapon developed by a British-American coalition. The evidence points to Salah Al-Zahrawi, a dangerous terrorist Rowe himself had killed a year ago. Rowe solicits the aid of his girlfriend, Kali Delamagente, a brilliant researcher who knows Al-Zahrawi better than anyone, and her AI–a quirky mechanical creature who likes to be called Otto and claims to be able to follow a digital trail anywhere there is a computer connection.

In a matter of hours, Otto finds the first sub and it is neutralized, but he can’t find the second one before it destroys a cruise liner and attacks two American warships.

Click to be notified when "Twenty-four Days' is available

Piece by piece, Rowe uncovers a bizarre nexus between Al-Zahrawi, a North Korean communications satellite America believes to be a nuclear-tipped weapon, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser tasked with supervising the launch.

And a deadline that expires in twenty-four days.

As the world teeters in the crosshairs of one of the most dangerous platforms of nuclear war in the world, Zeke finally realizes that Al-Zahrawi’s goal isn’t the destruction of North Korea’s neighbors, but much more personal.

Twenty-four Days climaxes with a modern-day Naval battle. Because America hasn’t been in a sea battle since WWII, our current weapons technologies have never been battle tested. So I doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. I hope that appeals to military thriller fans.

That’s this week. By next week, when my agent’s comments arrive, I may have to shake everything up.

BTW, if you’d like to be notified when Twenty-four Days is ready, click here.

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As a working technology teacher by day (writer by night), I get hundreds of questions about using technology in writing. Tech Tips for Writers is a weekly post answering those questions. I’ll cover issues friends have shared, I’ve experienced or questions from readers. They’re always brief and always focused. Feel free to post a comment about what you the writer hate about technology.

Q: I have Windows 7 and I can’t find Explorer anymore. Where did it go?

A: Right click on the start button and select ‘Explore’.

DOS is a lot harder to find. Type ‘command prompt’ into the search field and it’ll pop up.

I still miss DOS…

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Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

I have a huge bookshelf of self-help books for writing. If I get stuck, I roll my chair around to face my floor-to-ceiling shelves and explore tips from Donald Maass, Bob Mayer, Strunk and White, James Frey on my problem-du-jour. These books are a wealth of information and take a long time to digest. I thought I’d take a few of my favorites and distill their highlights.

Literary agent Donald Maass is also the author of more than 16 novels. I must admit, I’ve read none of those, but have devoured his thoughts on how to write. I’ve reviewed both Writing the Breakout Novel (Writers Digest Books 2001) and The Breakout Novelist: Craft and Strategies for the Career Fiction Writer. These next nine tips are from the former. There’s just too much in two books to cover in one post:

•  When novelists whose previous work merely has been admired suddenly have books vault onto the best-seller lists or even achieve a large jump in sales, publishing people say they have ‘broken out’.
• I first came to my conviction that the techniques of breakout storytelling can be learned around the moment that I first met one of my best clients…

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Helsinki White

by James Thompson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

American author James Thompson’s Helsinki White (G.P. Putnam Sons 2012) is as much about Finnish politics as it is about heroine, crime,  and catching the bad guys with unorthodox methods. What caught my attention when I selected the novel was that it’s based in Finland, a country that isn’t often the setting for detective stories, and it’s told from the first person present tense of Inspector Kari Vaara, a Finnish law enforcement officer. I know nothing about what drives Finland’s government, economics or culture, so was fascinated by this peek behind the curtains. Since Vaara is married to an American, I got explanations throughout the story of what was Finnish and how it differed from America.

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I love similes. They say more in 5-10 words than a whole paragraph. They are like spice to a stew, or perfume to an evening out. They evoke images far beyond the range of words.

Reading good similes and metaphors is like reading tomorrow's stock report a day early

Simile–the comparison of two unlike things using the word ‘like’ or ‘as’.  As bald as a newborn babe. As blind as a bat. As white as snow.

Wait–no self-respecting writer would use those. Similes are as much about displaying the writer’s facility with her/his craft as communicating. We are challenged to come up with new comparisons no one has heard before. I’ve seen contests on writer’s blogs for similes and most leave me bored, if not disgusted. It’s harder than it looks to create a simile that works. Look at these I found on G+:

• #1 – Being with him was like sitting through a Twilight Marathon, all sparkles and self-loathing.
• #2 – She was as nervous as my guinea pig, Mittens, when we turned him loose in the hog-stall last winter. Soon we found out that he wasn’t THAT sort of a pig .
• #3 – The snow fell like billions of breadcrumbs, promising a flurry of activity and a huge pile of shit in the aftermath .
• #4 – Her eyes were as blue as the ink in my pen, that trickled its life’s blood gently down the front of my pocket, as I tried in vain to get her attention..
• #5 – His hair soared in the wind like a captive egret, finally released into the wild. Not a minute had passed before a passerby made a joke about “if it was truly yours, it’ll come back to you…” He punched that person.

OK, there’s one more rule about similes: Make them concise. If you look at the tried-and-true ones above, you’ll notice they’re pithy and quick:

• dead as a doornail
• blind as a bat
• dry as dust
• good as gold

They also seem to benefit from alliteration, though that isn’t required.

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As a working technology teacher by day (writer by night), I get hundreds of questions about using technology in writing. Tech Tips for Writers is a weekly post answering those questions. I’ll cover issues friends have shared, I’ve experienced or questions from readers. They’re always brief and always focused. Feel free to post a comment about what you the writer hate about technology.

Q: I’m pushing the power button on my laptop (or desktop, but more commonly this happens with laptops), but it won’t turn off. What do I do?

A: Push the power button and hold it in for a count of ten. That’ll work. If not (there’s always that one that breaks all the rules), hold it for a count of twenty.

Questions you want answered? Leave a comment here and I’ll answer it within the next thirty days.

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Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

I have a huge bookshelf of self-help books for writing. If I get stuck, I roll my chair around to face my floor-to-ceiling shelves and explore tips from Donald Maass, Bob Mayer, Strunk and White, James Frey on whatever my problem-du-jour is (last week, it was opening paragraphs because my agent wanted my mss to start not in the frying pan but the fire.). These books are a wealth of information and take a long time to digest. I thought I’d take a few of my favorites and distill their highlights.

Bob Mayer is the NY Times Best-Selling author of 23 books and an instructor for the Writer’s Digest School. If you dabble in the military milieu as I do, it doesn’t hurt that Mayer is a West Point Graduate and Green Beret. Here are some of my favorite ideas from his seminal book, Novel Writer’s Toolkit: A guide to writing great fiction and getting it published (Writer’s Digest Books 2003):

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Kristen Lamb’s wonderful social media how-to book, We are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media (Who Dares Wins Publishing 2010), provides a great nuts-and-bolts introduction to the basics of marketing your book online. She

Market books with social media Photo credit: Jane Friedman

shares her knowledgeable insights in branding yourself, putting your name out there (something I innately fear), and joining the online conversation in an enthusiastic voice that can motivate you even though it’s… just words. She then explains how to get your new ‘brand’ out there on the many facets of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and a WordPress blog. She has a lively blog called Warrior Writers (the name alone should make you click through) where she explains that  times have changed and she no longer pushes the My Space sign-up (I suggest Google Plus as a replacement because I’ve found lots of useful info in my G+ stream).

I’ve spent considerable time learning how to market online. I don’t have a lot of discretionary money to hire agents or specialists. Spreading the word must be through me and be cheap. Since I have yet to publish a fiction book, most of my effort is directed at my non-fiction K-8 technology training textbooks. So, I sat down at my computer, Kristen’s book in my lap, and compared her instructions to my current marketing plan. Here’s what I found:

• She convinced me of the importance of branding–putting my name on all my writing so readers understand my voice. As a result, I added my name to my WordDreams blog. I didn’t add it to my tech blog because I think Ask a Tech Teacher (my blog name) is a brand of itself.
• I purchased my name as a URL and set up a website (with the help of the wonderful guys at WriteClick who focus their blog templates on the unique needs of writers)
• I pay attention now to my Twitter streams. I found out a lot of people were retweeting my material and mentioning me. I can’t believe I never responded.
• She explained that online marketing for writers isn’t about pushing a book, but sharing expertise. That validates my inherent lay-back style. I’d much prefer to chat than sell.
• She told me to create a collection of strategic content material–my best posts that showcase my writing, thought process and voice for potential readers. I’ve now done that. When I do guest posts, I can cull from this collection–update, add/delete as necessary, knowing the basic content is strong
• I reworked my bio to describe me in the context of my brand. Since I have multiple personae, this was more challenging than it sounded on the pages of her book, but I’ve done that. Now, I attach that quick bio to each post as a summary of my creds.
• I’m supposed to create a detailed profile of my reader demographics, but I have only a general one. Eventually, this suggestion will percolate through my brain enough to come up with a way to accomplish it, but right now, I’ll settle for less.

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For most writers I know, life zooms by with few breaks to pause, glance around at the surroundings and clean up the clutter and confusion that grows like mold from our everyday authorial life. The end of the calendar year was a good time to do

Yearly blog maintenance--have you taken care of it?

that, when many of us were blogging less, posting almost nothing, and had less commitments and obligations than would fill our usual week.

Have you seen those weeks? When push came to shove, they got pushed into my six (as my soldier friends say) and now I’m neck deep in New Year’s resolutions, new projects and honey-do’s. No matter. With my agent planning to send my book out to publishers in 3-6 months (assuming I complete the edits, sigh), I want everything with my name attached to it as extravagant and full of promise as a sunrise. Here’s my list:

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: My tools for formatting disappeared from the top of my MS Word (2003). Where’d they go and what do I do?

A: They do disappear at times, for no good reason. Here’s the simple fix:

• Right-click in the toolbar area at the top.
• Select Format or Standard.
  
• Make sure they’re checked. That’s where 99% of your tools live.
• This is true in all MS Office software

Questions you want answered? Leave a comment here and I’ll answer it within the next thirty days.

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Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

I have a huge bookshelf of self-help books for writing. If I get stuck, I roll my chair around to face my floor-to-ceiling shelves and explore tips from Donald Maass, Bob Mayer, Strunk and White, James Frey on whatever my problem-du-jour is (last week, it was ‘story arc’ because my agent said he was rereading my mss to review the story arc.). These books are a wealth of information and take a long time to digest. I thought I’d take a few of my favorites and distill their highlights.

Today, I’ll focus on the highly-respected Janet Burroway Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Longman 2003), the first book I ever purchased on how to write. It’s full of ideas, suggestions, and tips, so I’ve picked eleven that made a difference to mean. If you enjoyed this book, please add the thoughts that grabbed you by the throat and inspired your writing under ‘comments’:

• The process of discovering, choosing, and revealing the theme of your story begins as early as a first freewrite and continues …beyond publication.
• John Gardner points out that theme ‘is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it–initially and intuitive but finally an intellectual act on the part of the writer’.
• Very few writers know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
• Novelist John L’Heureux says that a story is about a single moment in a character’s life that culminates in a defining choice
• Mel McKee states flatly that ‘a story is a war. ‘It is sustained and immediate combat.’ He offers four imperatives for the writing of this ‘war story’: 1) get your fighters fighting, 2) have something…worth their fighting over, 3) have the fight dive into a series of battles with the last battle … the biggest and most dangerous…, 4) have a walking away from the fight
• A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.

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Bloodland: A Novel

by Alan Glynn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

British author Alan Glynn’s third thriller “Bloodland” (Picador 2011) is about a rising star who’s death captures the imagination of the nation (if not the world). The fun begins when struggling journalist Jimmy Gilroy is asked by a publisher to write her story. He is warned off by people he respects which makes him dig into her death to find out why powerful people would want her story stopped.

What he finds is a vast conspiracy that almost destroys him.

The most appealing part of what might otherwise be a mundane story (beautiful starlet dies in a car crash, nation feeds on the story–think Princess Diana) is the author’s voice. It is a mix between a somewhat dark stream of consciousness and a non-formulaic approach to the wild ride of a thriller. It kept me reading despite the wealth of characters I had to sort through and the complexity of the plot Glynn wove. It made me wish I had the ebook so I could search. If not for the back summary, I don’t think I could have followed it.

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Last week, I reviewed Toxic Feedback, a discussion on how harmful the negative opinions of well-meaning people can be to writers. This next is a great follow-up, sent to me by one of the members of my writers’ critique group. To have your writing flailed by the man whose picture likely appears next to the dictionary definition of ‘Writer’ might convince you to end your career. Lucky for us, James Fennimore Cooper either never read it or shook it off as the rantings of a jealous colleague:

Mark Twain’s Critique of The Deerslayer

So peeved was Mark Twain by critics’ acclaim of The Deerslayer that he unspooled them with delightful attention to detail.  Twain said, “In the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.”  And:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In The Deerslayer, Cooper violated seventeen of them. These seventeen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove.
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.
8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.
10.  They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer this rule is vacated.

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As a working technology teacher by day (writer by night), I get hundreds of questions about using technology in writing. Tech Tips for Writers is a weekly post answering those questions. I’ll cover issues friends have shared, I’ve experienced or questions from readers. They’re always brief and always focused. Feel free to post a comment about what you the writer hate about technology.

Q: My desktop icons (those little pictures that allow you to open a program) are all different. What happened?

A: I get this question a lot. Push the start button and check who the log in is. That’s the name at the top of the right-hand side of the start menu. It should have your log-in name. Any other, log out and log in as yourself and the world will tilt back to normal.

This happens a lot in my lab because I have separate log-ins for different grades. Students being students often forget to log out. I teach even the youngers how to check for this problem and solve it.

Truth be known, lots of adults have this problem, also. They’re used to sitting down at a computer they share only with themselves. When tech comes and does something on it–say, fixes a problem–and they don’t log out, my teachers are also lost

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Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

I have read several of James Frey’s how-to books on writing–How to Write a D*** Good Novel and How to Write a D*** Good Thriller. Although I write thrillers (and I’ll get one published if I ever get the rewrites done for my agent), there are a lot of general rules about constructing novels that apply across the board whether you write thrillers, romance, YA or novelettes. Frey points these out in a pithy concise manner that even those of us with short attention spans can get. Here are some of my favorites from his 176-page book, How to Write a D*** Good Novel: