Killing your loved ones

After watching the Will Ferrell movie "Stranger Than Fiction," a question has popped into my head: Do you feel bad when you kill one of your characters? Or, do you have any emotional reaction whatsoever when you kill off a character?

For me, the answer has always been "No." At least so far. There have been characters I've liked, but I've still killed them. A character's death is always planned by me. Usually the death is because it is a plot point for the ongoing story, but I have to admit I have killed a character or two because I had no further use for them and they were just cluttering up things. Is that bad? Or, at least, bad planning? Maybe.

I could see a point where killing off a character might upset me, but I've yet to reach it.

Keep the action rolling

Dialogue can be key for a novelist, especially in today's writing field. In years past, especially pre-20th century, a writer could get away with page after page of exposition and historical facts and other so-called interesting stuff.

Not today. Today, novelists need to work almost like screenwriters. Action and dialogue, those are most important.

Now, I'm talking about writing popular novels, not so much literary works. I'll leave the pondering on that type of writing to college professors.

But writers of the modern novel, those seeking a decent-sized audience, can't afford to meander around with much exposition and writing about feelings and the like. A few authors can get away with this, but most of those will have been around for years.

No, we have to write tight. That's where action and dialogue come in. Both must move the story forward, must continue the plot, much like a movie or one of the old movie serial features like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.

Movement is the key, movement literally and movement in dialogue.

That doesn't mean every book has to be filled with nothing but fight scenes and people yacking, but it does mean the story must continue to flow. The DaVinci Code doesn't have a lot of fighting in it, but it does keep up a pretty good pace.

Just my opinion.

Open discussion on Edmund Dantes

I recently finished re-reading "The Count of Monte Cristo," the first time in a loooong time I had read that book, and something occurred to me ... is Edmund insane?
I don't mean like Charles Manson insane, totally whacked out of his head, but something more akin to Hamlet, or maybe Batman.

Knowing there are at least a couple of Dumas fans that peruse this blog, I officialy open this topic for discussion. Any thoughts, anyone?

No. 10 - Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

Started: April 6
Finished: April 13

Notes: One of the cheap paperbacks I picked up a few weeks ago at a used book store. Only cost me a dollar. And it's from a master writing in 1953. Gots to be good.

Mini review: Reads pretty old-fashioned, from a modern perspective, but still quite intense toward the end. From a modern viewpoint, most of the characters are simplistic, but you need to keep in mind the times and the people you're dealing with. A good read over all.

Selling out

In case you haven't noticed, there is now advertising on my blogs. I'm going to try to keep it to a minimum on this site since this is sort of my personal writing spot, but any other blogs or Web sites I handle are open to advertising.

Yes, some folks would call this selling out. Some might even call me a whore. Some might just be sick and tired of all the advertising in the world. I agree, to all those things. Yes, I am selling out.

Why not? It's not as if I will get rich, maybe only an extra $10 a month or even less. But I'm blogging any way, so why not make a few exra bucks at it.

However, if the ads get annoying, or they cause you to have big page loading problems, please let me know. Yes, if the ads are more trouble than they are worth, I will eventually drop them. But until then, I'll keep at it.

Besides, I'm a writer. We're supposed to sell out.

Bluegrass Festival of Books

On April 21 is the Bluegrass Festival of Books at one of my all-time favorite book stores, Joseph-Beth. I'm kind of excited about this. There are planned to be more than 80 authors there, the biggest being Paula Deen (she of the Savannah, Ga., cooking TV show fame, whom my mother adores).

There are not a lot of big-name authors there, and next to no genre authors expected, but there will be a chance to talk to novelists and non-fiction writers and a few folks from the Writer's Digest books and magazine are expected to be there to talk about getting published.

There are a few sessions and workshops, some free and some not, but I'm hoping to stick my nose into at least one of them.

Who knows? Maybe I'll run into an agent there who will consider my stuff.

The third book, ugh!

Yes, the third book of my trilogy has turned out to be the toughest one to write. But it has also turned out to be the toughest to editr.

For one thing, the plot is a little back and forth. What I mean is, characters are jerked around in ways they definitely don't expect, so there is some runnning around on their parts that might seem totally random at first glance.

Second, is part of the subject matter. I've mentioned this before, but religion comes up in the story, which it had not done hardly in the first two books. Now, let me explain, if I can. The story doesn't become philosophical or spiritual. But religion plays a big role in the politics of some of the nations in my trilogy's world, so ... religion rears its head in my story. I'm not concsiously trying to say anything about organized religion in the story, but it's hard to ignore a humongous church that holds sway over millions of lives within my world.

So, I'm not overly enjoying editing this third book. There's some weird stuff going on that goes beyond normal levels of magic in most fantasy stories. I'm working to tone down all this weirdness, but my big fear is that I'll leave the reading saying, "Huh?"