Excerpt from Little Miss Thunderhead Posted

The fourth book in the Red Cloak Island series is coming later this year, and the first chapter is available for you to read.  Click here to read the excerpt and find out how the next all-new adventure of our favorite sixth-grade superheroes begins.  You can also find links to read the first chapters of all the other Red Cloak Island books by clicking on the Books link in the menu above.  Enjoy!

April Showers Bring ... Excerpts!

Spring has sprung, and as the weather warms and the grass and flowers begin to grow again, it seems like the perfect time for something new.  During the winter hibernation there was time to write and polish the next book in the Red Cloak Island series, Little Miss Thunderhead.  This time it is Sidney Raine taking center stage as she and her friends from the first three books find themselves on a break from school for the holidays.  Evil doesn't take breaks, though, so expect them to find themselves in the middle of a new adventure with a villain unlike any they have faced so far.  Come back to the blog later this week to read the first chapter excerpt, and check out the excerpts already posted from any of the other books in the series you may have missed.

Happy New Year!

Happy holidays to everyone! The weather is getting cold here in this part of the world, but I'm planning to heat up the blog here in 2017. Look for an excerpt in the next week or so from the fourth Red Cloak Island book, tentatively titled Little Miss Thunderhead. A book cover reveal will follow, and the book itself will be out within the next couple of months. Meanwhile, I have a number of thoughts to share in upcoming posts, and even more books to write.

Got an Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Google Play gift card this holiday? Not sure what to use it for? Use the links on the Books page to pick up any of the Red Cloak Island e-books you might have missed. They're great fun, and if you have them all then there are tons of other great books. If you'll spend the next 2 months snowed in, like me, books are an excellent way to pass the time and fight the winter blahs. And if the weather is warm where you are (lucky you!) then get outside, enjoy the sunshine, and don't forget to bring a book with you.

Whatever 2016 was for you, I hope 2017 is ten times better for us all.

Story Building Part Three - Endings

You could say that writing a book is like running a marathon, because you have to take that first step, then keep taking step after step, and eventually you get through it even though it is a long and sometimes exhausting process. In previous posts I described getting started, and said that you can never, ever get finished if you keep putting off getting started. That's the truth. I believe that. In another post I said that you need to keep at it, keep writing every day -- or at least as often as possible -- to keep the momentum going and work your way through that long, long middle part between the very beginning and the very end. Also true, I believe.

But writing is unlike running a marathon, because the course is not laid out for you. As a writer, you need to figure it out as you go. Each sentence leads to the next to form a paragraph, each paragraph leads to the next to form a scene, scenes build into chapters and chapters into books. But nobody can tell you which way you should go. You have to make your own choices along the way, and to tell a good story you often have to choose the least predictable options to keep readers intrigued. If marathons were like that, you could run a full 26 miles but instead of crossing the finish line in front of cheering crowds you could end up lost, confused, and unsure how to get home.

Writing a good ending depends on having written a good opening and a strong middle. At the start, you need to get your readers hooked by raising questions. Paint a picture of an amusing hero, but suggest he has a secret. Introduce an ordinary young lady, but mention that she has an important destiny to fulfill. As the story unfolds, answer some questions to reward the reader for following along, but raise new questions as well. Keep those questions in mind while writing the book. Jot them down in a separate notebook or computer file, if necessary, because the job of your ending will be to answer those questions. Was the villain's evil plan thwarted? Did the star-crossed couple find true love? Did the main characters find that magical thing they were after, and was it worth the price they had to pay to obtain it?

Speaking for myself (and being well aware that others have different opinions and that there is no one-size-fits-all right way to do things) I like when the ending calls back to the beginning of the book. If the story opens with the hero leaving home, it can be very satisfying to have it end with him or her coming home again, or finding a new home. Taking into account all that has happened throughout the book, the author has an opportunity to paint a similar picture with a different brush, and the contrast will be what sticks in the reader's mind. For example, think about The Hobbit (the book more than the series of movies) which is literally subtitled There and Back Again. Bilbo wants nothing more than to remain safe in his quiet Shire at the start, only to find later that such quiet safety can be boring for someone who has discovered a yen for adventure. A more recent example is the difference between how Harry Potter views his life with the Dursleys between the start of Sorcerer's Stone and the end of it (and in some of the subsequent books as well.)

I grew up in a smallish city that felt pretty large to me at the time. Then I moved to Atlanta, spent time in San Francisco, and visited Philadelphia and New York City. I've been back to the place where I grew up since, and it looks different to me now. Smaller. Quieter. I don't miss it the way I thought I would.

That isn't to say that all stories should be about leaving on an adventure and coming home again afterward. But something in the end ought to call back to the beginning, to give the story the feeling that it ended where it should because it started where it should. It could be a relationship or friendship torn apart that comes back together in the end, or an object lost that eventually is found.

For me, the end isn't just a place where I stop typing, it's where the questions of the story are answered and the mystery is resolved. The path of the story isn't so much a line from beginning to middle to end, but a circle, a loop made by events set in motion that swing around until they come once again to rest. When that's done, the glass starts to cloud over again and the world I've created lives its own life while I look around and find that I am back in mine, right where I left it.

Story Building Part Two - Middles

The saying goes that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." The lesson (I think) is that no matter how big of a job is front of you, you need to get it started if it's ever going to get done. I agree with that.  In my previous post, I said the most important thing about starting a book (or chapter, or page) is to get started right away.

The less obvious lesson is this: a thousand miles is a very, very long journey.  It can be exhausting.  Once the beginning is written, there can be a whole lot of middle before getting to the end.  Looked at one way, the largest part of the work is all middle.  But there are other ways to look at it.  Here I like to draw on my programming background.  What I learned over 20+ years in the software industry is that creating a large and complex application can be a lot easier if you approach it as if it were a group of smaller and simpler apps working together.  I can create a program that does nothing else except open a connection to a database, and then close it again.  I can create another program that reads a list of names and addresses from a database table.  I can create a program that adds a new record to the database, and I can create one that sorts a list of names, and one that can print a list from the screen onto paper.  Put those all together and I've got an address book application that allows me to open a database, retrieve my list of contacts, update it and print it out.

The same can be applied to writing a novel.  Writing hundreds of pages is a lot of work.  Just thinking about it is a lot of work.  So I concentrate on smaller chunks.  I write a chapter, or a scene, or a paragraph.  Maybe just a sentence.  Instead of a huge unwritten middle standing between your beginning and some faraway ending, instead there are a lot of smaller chunks.  Don't worry about how many, just concentrate on one of them.  It doesn't even have to be the one that comes next in the story.  Let's say you have written an opening about a young man named Norton, who finds himself having to spend the summer with his grandparents on a farm instead of at camp with his friends.  In the back of your mind, you have this image of Norton running through the woods, being chased by a bear.  You have no idea how far into the story this will happen, or what events transpire to get Norton from his arrival at the farm to the big chase scene.  You sit for an hour, unsure what to write, how to bridge the gap.  My advice?  If it were me, I would just go ahead and write the chase scene.  I say this for many reasons.  One, you will have written something, and I always feel better after a session where I get some words on paper than a session where I just spend the time thinking things over (although I also believe that thinking through the story, especially in the editing phase, can be every bit as productive as writing.)  Two, you will discover things about your character and story that can help fill in the gaps later on.  Maybe Norton escapes the bear by climbing up into a tree house and pulling the ladder up behind him.  Now you can go back to that first day at the farm, where Norton is bored and unhappy, an have his grandfather try to cheer him up by telling him about this great treehouse out in the woods nearby.  The order in which you put the pieces together does not detract from the beauty of the finished puzzle.  And three, never forget one of your goals (and mine) should be to continue to improve as a writer: clichéd or not, practice makes perfect.  If you can't think of a scene to write, then write a scene you are thinking of, and even if you end up cutting it later you've gained some experience from it.

There are other methods to keep things on track while working through the middle.  Some writers create an outline first, so they know what to work on next because the outline tells them.  Outlines don't work well for me, and in any event I find myself with the same issues writing an outline as I do writing a novel.  I'm not sure what comes next, but I think I know what will come some further point down the road.  So if I'm putting together an outline I'm writing a brief description of the scenes I can think of, then trying to think of more scenes to fill the gap so I can plug the holes in the outline.  So it's the same process but on a smaller scale.  So if my advice for beginnings is just to get started already, my advice on middles is to keep going.  Concentrate on small pieces and knock those out, and let the momentum build until there are enough pieces to connect together and form the bridge between Once upon a time and they all lived happily ever after.  Or between It was a dark and stormy night and everyone dies.  Every story is different; start now and write yours.  And post a comment here every once in a while to me know how it's going.

Story Building Part One - Beginnings

If you've ever lived anywhere that freezes over, like New England or Minnesota or Siberia, you've probably had this experience (and if you've only ever been in warm places, lucky you.) Sitting behind the wheel, needing to get somewhere, but the windows are iced over. The heater is on full blast, the dashboard light shows the rear defroster is active, but for the moment you're going nowhere. You're keenly aware of the slowly warming rush of air from the vents, the cold seat on which you sit wrapped in layers, and you really start to notice how much the car needs a good cleaning. There's a gum wrapper on the floor, an empty plastic bottle in a cup holder, and a bit of dust gathering in every nook and cranny of the dashboard. But before long, a small piece of the windshield becomes translucent and you start to see the outside world. You notice the garage door first, not too exciting except that the fact you can see it means you're almost ready to hit the road; things are about to start happening. The clear spot widens and you can see more of your house. The dog is watching you from the front window, no doubt wishing he could come along for the ride even as you wish you could go back inside with him where it's warm. A single bird flies by, and you wonder how long it will be until spring fills the air with them. Neighbors emerge from their houses to get their mail or newspaper or start defrosting their own vehicles. Little by little, you can see more of the world around you, and as that happens you pay less and less attention to the gum wrapper and the plastic bottle and the dust. When enough of the windows are clear, you drop the car into gear and you're off on the day's adventure, your mind on the road and the traffic, all thoughts of cleaning forgotten.

Beginning to write is like that. Not just the start of a new project, but the start of each new session. I often write at night, after the rest of the house is asleep. The dog, laid out on the floor near my wife's side of the bed, snores and occasionally taps the footboard with his restless legs as he chases something in his dreams. The furnace or the air conditioner (depending on the season) kicks on and blows for a bit and shuts off. Somewhere in the distance a truck passes or a siren wails, and in front of me is a blank white screen, the digital equivalent of an empty page, featureless as a frozen windshield. But then a window slowly starts to open and in my mind I can see and hear and smell ... someplace else. If I'm patient, the window widens and bit by bit I can see a story unfold, and when I do, I write it down. I can still look around and see the room I'm writing in, of course, just as I can look around the inside of the car while I'm driving, but most of my attention is on the other side of the window, until it fogs over again and I'm done for the day.

I don't start with an outline. Over the years I've read a lot of articles about the process of writing, and I've paid a lot of attention to how other writers (especially the successful ones) go about it. I'm always curious about how they decorate their writing space, what music they listen to, whether they prefer pen and paper to computers, whether they research first or just wing it. What I've learned is that their processes are theirs. There is no right way, and the only wrong way to be a writer is to not write anything. Long story short, if anyone wants my advice about beginnings, it is simply this: begin today. If you want to be a writer, write something. If you're the kind of writer who needs an outline, start with that. If you're the kind who starts with the ending and works backward, then do that. If you don't know what kind you are yet, try ... everything. Trust that you will figure out what works for you, and what doesn't, along the way. But get started, because you can't know until you try.

I prefer a quiet setting. When I listen to music, it's usually instrumental only, at a fairly low volume. Lyrics get in the way; it can be hard to find the words to describe what I'm seeing through that window to another world when someone else's words are flowing into my ears. Sometimes I'll write longhand but mostly I prefer the laptop because I can type faster than I can write, and I can (and occasionally will) type with my eyes closed. But the rules aren't hard and fast. Sometimes I'll write during the day, and other nights I'll put on my headphones and crank up the tunes while banging out a page or two. Even for this one writer, there's not one right way.

So what do I start with? Whatever comes first. If the fog clears and the action has already started, I try to follow along. If not then I'll concentrate on the characters (who's here? why? what are they waiting for?) or the setting (where are we? what's the weather like? how do I feel about being in this particular place at this particular time?) I go into it knowing -- and more importantly, not caring -- that some of the words I put down at the very start are going to be thrown away later, replaced by something better. I get started with whatever I see first, but that isn't always the best starting point, if that makes sense. Like I said, my advice on beginnings is to just begin. See where it goes, and fix it later. Let the window clear a bit, watch what unfolds on the other side, write it down. That's what works for me. Use the comments below to let me know what works for you. As I said, I'm always curious.

Excerpt from McStretchy Posted

The next book in the Red Cloak Island series is titled McStretchy, and it should be available for purchase in the next few weeks, once the cover art is finished. Click on the Books link above for a synopsis and a link to read the first chapter here for free.  The Books page also contains synopses and excerpt links for the other great Red Cloak Island titles, Captain Kissy-Face and Invisible Max. Check them out, and stay tuned for the announcement when McStretchy becomes available for purchase.