Day: September 3, 2016

Book Blurbs: A Quick Question

Here is yet another challenge. Once the book is finished, how do you write a blurb that’ll draw attention, be true to the book, and entice others to read it? Sometimes there are character limits, too. It’s work, and yet another skill to learn. QE has some helpful ideas and points to good resources.

Good resources are a valuable tool in the writer’s toolbox.

Corey Truax's avatarCorey Truax

book blurb problems.jpgFor those of you who were worried I was blown away by the Hurricane Hermine, I’m still here.  We weren’t forced to evacuate but we sure did get pounded by wind and rain.  There’s a little bit of flooding here and there, but nothing too extreme.  With that being said, I wanted to jump right into today’s post.  It will be a short one (I’m going to drive around the neighborhood and help pick up debris).

What makes a good book blurb?  If you can get someone to pick up your book thanks to the awesome cover art you’ve won a single battle.  The second battle comes when they flip it over and read the back blurb.  I need to train for the back cover battle.

Now thatWastelander has been drafted and I’ve started working on the other facets of the production, I’ve began to research different book…

View original post 401 more words

1

Finishing a Book is a Skill

Millo Ho’s post is so true. Writing is a continual path of learning in phases. First, how to write fiction – plotting, characters, story arc, pacing, dialogue. And then into editing and revising, making it more dynamic, aligning it all. Finishing novels becomes a powerful challenge. You’ve lived with it, loving it, caring for it, and then, finished with a draft, only to learn as you begin revising it, more work is required. You keep changing hats, from writer to editor to reader to critic, back to writer, moving through the phases.

Yet, this is the same lesson to be learned about everything. Things are rarely fully finished. There’s often more that can be done to improve them, and learning to say, I’m done and accept what you’ve accomplished, is one of the ongoing challenges.

So is learning not to stop too soon. It’s a balance on a rocking sea.

0

The Hip Bone Is Connected to the Tachyon

I’m having fun with science fictional physics, conceiving way out ideas for ‘Long Summer’, the sequel to ‘Returnee’. Part of this is playing with the chip. What’s a chip, you say? This is actually a chi particle. 

The chi particle is the essence of life energy, the spark that brings inanimate matter to life. In my grand theories, there is a formula of balance that I’m still working out involving the need for the universe to maintain an equilibrium between the chi energy and all of the rest. Most importantly for the entire balance of understanding, the chi particle begins in the realms of dark matter.

Additional characteristics for my grand particle begins with the hypothetical and unproven particle, the tachyon. Like the tachyon, the chip travels faster than light, traveling even faster than the tachyon. Its imaginary mass attracts tachyons. Tachyons become knotted with the chips. As knotting happens, the tachyon draws energy from the chip, slowing both the tachyon and chip. But the chip’s mass is not a direct proportion of the tachyon’s mass, but compounds the tachyon’s mass, adding to the knotted chip’s mass. As the chip-tachyon knot slows toward the speed of light, the tachyon gains more energy, slows more and degrades, giving up its mass to the chip. The chip, acquiring actual mass, begins a transition from dark matter to matter and acquires gravitons. The chi knot seeks the proper stew of atoms and conditions to develop and begins evolving as a life form.

This all is pretty preliminary. It has no math underpinnings, and no doubt many people will tell me either, you’re drinking too much coffee, or you’re fucking nuts. They’ll also grimace, appalled by my display of ignorance, but it’s fun for me, and provides further structure for developing my plot and writing the novel. I mean, this is why we call it science fiction.

Sometime, when I’ve advanced my thinking about it more, I’ll post a snapshot of tachyon telepathy. Remember, as Brett learns (eventually), what happens in stasis, doesn’t always stay in stasis.

I’m twenty-six thousand words into ‘Long Summer’. The summer’s computer issues threw me out of my writing – conceiving – imaging rhythm, and it humbled me. I gleaned how much I take for granted the ability and opportunity to sit down and write.

Got my mocha. Time to write like crazy, one more time.

9

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑