Jul 03 2009

Where I Want to Be in September

http://www.writersdigestconference.com/GeneralMenu/

That’s right, New York City. I may finally realize my dream of going to a writer’s conference! This one looks about perfect — it can help me with promoting my self-published books as well as with breaking into the traditional market.

In the meantime, I’m going back down to Lake Erie today to participate in a Fish Fry. On the hour-long drive, I’ll be burying myself in Worlds Unseen — trying to get my head back into the Seventh World so I can start drawing up ideas for The Advent. To all you Americans, I wish a fond happy Fourth of July tomorrow. See you Monday!

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Jul 02 2009

Save Time and Money with a Professional Editor

Published by Rachel under Links: The Resource Kind

After 30 years of rejection, I finally got tired of not knowing why my writing wasn’t working. Before trying to find a publisher or an agent, I sent the novel I’d just finished (or so I thought) off to a professional editor.

Read the whole article on Jane Friedman’s Writer’s Digest blog. (The piece is actually by Jim Adams.) It’s short and pithy and a great defense of freelance editors and all they can do! As a writer and an editor, I liked it.

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Jul 01 2009

day off!

Published by Rachel under Uncategorized

Going for a picnic at Point Pelee to celebrate Canada Day! Happy 142nd birthday, O Land that I Love. See you tomorrow, readers!

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Jun 30 2009

Writing Tip: Just Do It!

Published by Rachel under Writing Tips

Apologies to Nike for stealing their slogan. In their ads it was way too ambiguous (just do WHAT?), but as writing advice, it’s good advice.

Just do it. Just write. Just stop procrastinating, excuse-making, Twittering, procrastinating, reading everybody else’s work, daydreaming about writing, cleaning your desk, and procrastinating. (I know it’s redundant. Shhh. That’s for effect.)

Autumn Procrastination

As my dad pointed out the other day, a book is two pages a day for 100 days. Can you write two pages a day? You can if you’ll just do it. Thinking about writing results in a lot of foggy nothing. Actually writing results in words on a page — words you can edit, revise, play with, enjoy, and eventually meld into a finished project.

Thanks to Debbie Ridpath Ohi, the writer’s cartoonist, for the comic. See more comics (and a lot of other good stuff) at www.inkygirl.com.

2 responses so far

Jun 29 2009

What Are Your Core Values?

Published by Rachel under Ramblings

Years ago my dad called all of his kids together and shared the Franklin-Covey system of planning with us. He asked us to write out our core values, then write out our dreams (building these on our values, not just pulling them out of thin air), our life goals, the plans we had to reach those goals, and the daily activities that would carry out those plans.

That’s a lot to ask of small children, and we were pretty bad at it. But the idea of planning and prioritizing our lives stuck with me and underlies much about the way I live now.

Last week Dad decided that it’s time to do it again, involving all of the kids who’ve been born since those long-ago days (plenty of them) and having us older ones review. I’m finding it challenging and helpful to write out what’s really important to me and the actions I want those values to lead to. I recommend trying it — if not going through the whole system, then at least writing out your core values. List them, describe them, and give an idea of what they look like in action.

It might be some of the most valuable writing you do :).

One response so far

Jun 26 2009

Sort of a Public Thing

Published by Rachel under Links: Books and Authors

Of all the amazing things the Internet has done, one of the most amazing is the way it connects readers and writers. Even I, who am hardly a critical success as an author (yet), get to post about my writing and my books, and I hear from readers and get tremendous satisfaction out of that.

Surfing author-related sites can be a great way to motivate yourself as well. I had a few minutes to surf today (like five — I could spend hours, but then I wouldn’t get any work done), and I thought I’d share my findings.

Debbie Ridpath Ohi of Inkygirl.com and other great sites posts interview scraps from children’s author Lois Lowry, including this quote: “‘Being an author’ is sort of a public thing. Being a writer is what I love.”

Jeffrey Overstreet posts only the tip of the cover for Cal-Raven’s Ladder, causing me to feel very impatient. I read Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight during my second CSFF blog tour (here’s one of my Cyndere posts) and am thoroughly hooked on the series, both for the story and for the sheer beauty of the writing. The covers are pretty good, too :). The rest of the cover is coming later today!

2 responses so far

Jun 25 2009

published: Our Father

Published by Rachel under published articles

The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most repeated in the world, but do we really know its richness? This summer, I helped tour a production called “Father,” exploring the themes of the prayer through music, dance, and narration. In doing so, I realized anew how desperately we need the God who is revealed in it. “Our Father,” published on Boundless.org, is a reflection on the prayer and the experience of sharing it with hurting people. You can read it here.

The narrations in “Our Father,” as in the ballet production, come from my book Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord’s Prayer. You can learn more about it on this page.

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Jun 24 2009

Fantasy in the Real World (Vanish 3)

Published by Rachel under CSFF Blog Tour

Warning: This discussion of Tom Pawlik’s Vanish will spoil a few of the surprises inherent in the book, so if you’re planning to read it (taking into account that several CSFF blgogers have classified this book as “horror,” but without gore, grossness, and gratuitous violence), you may want to skip this post. For now.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had a few issues with the ending. First, I felt it was undeserved — although many of the early details DID come together to make the ending a tight explanation of all that had gone before. Perhaps what I objected to was the role and depiction of God. For most of the book God is a distant person the characters ignore, belittle, or actively oppose. In the end, He is presented as Savior and Judge and Lord — but for that depiction to be really convincing, I would have liked to see Him as a more present character throughout.

Of course, it’s not easy to write about God as a character. That’s why I haven’t written a “Christian novel” yet. I find it so hard to write about God without being trite or unconvincing — unless I transport Him to a fantasy world. In that case, I’m not writing about God at all, but about someone who represents God — as Aslan does. In my Seventh World books (Worlds Unseen and Burning Light), Christ is represented by the King. A fantasy setting creates distance for the reader, so when the King says or does something, it’s clearly my interpretation of what God would say or do, not meant to be taken as a record of His actions the way scripture or a real-life testimony can be.

Becky Miller’s post from yesterday addresses some of these concerns:

There’s also a theological issue that comes into play. It’s one of those tough things to sort through when writing Christian speculative fiction. How much must we pay attention to theology if we are using our imagination? I’ve said before, when we write about what is real, even if it is real in the spiritual world or in Biblical history, we are obligated to stay within the bounds of that which has been revealed. Within those bounds, I think we can speculate. (For example, a story about angels must be true to what the Bible says about angels, but a lot has been left unsaid, so I think we can speculate as long as we aren’t contradicting what the Bible says).

This question of how much we can use our imagination in regards to God and what He has revealed is a question all writers must struggle with. Personally, I hesitate to set a story in the “real world” and have “God” speak in that story. All fiction is fantasy in a sense, but setting fantasy in the real world makes it more difficult to discern the difference between truth and illusion.

Near the end of Vanish, (SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER!) Conner Hayden discovers that nothing he’s experienced has been really real. Chicago is not empty. No one has vanished. Aliens have not invaded. The flashbacks he experiences are brought on not by mind control but by his own memory and guilt as his brain slowly lets go — for Conner, like Mitch and Helen, is dying. They have been existing in a strange world between worlds called Interworld, where demons lurk in the shadows to drag away those who cross from “dying” into “death.”

This is very much fantasy in the real world. Could such a place really exist? If so, do dying Christians also go there — haunted and hunted by demonic creatures and their own pasts — or are they whisked away to some more paradisical version of Interworld? Had Pawlik created Interworld within a fantasy setting, I would have no trouble with it, but in our own world, I find it unconvincing and outside of God’s created order.

As Christians, we spend much of our lives battling Satan’s illusions and trying to distinguish human fantasy from God’s reality. Paradoxically, fiction can help us do this. But where are the limits? How much should we create fantasy in the real world — how helpful is it to do so, and how much might it just confuse people further?

I don’t have answers to this question. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think?

11 responses so far

Jun 23 2009

A Review - Vanish (Day 2)

Published by Rachel under Book Reviews, CSFF Blog Tour

Conner Hayden: divorced lawyer struggling to relate to his teenaged daughter. Mitch Kent: tattooed mechanic on the eve of proposing to his girlfriend. Helen Krause: aging career woman and lonely ex-model.

Three people with nothing in common — except that each is hiding a secret.

Thunder rumbled louder now, low and sustained. Flashes of lightning lit up the night sky. Conner went to the patio doors.

Something wasn’t right. For one thing, no rain had been predicted in the forecast he’d heard earlier. For another, this storm was rolling in from the east. Off Lake Michigan. The clouds churned and billowed like the black, acrid smoke of a chemical fire. Lightning flashed inside the billows. Long, sustained flashes of multiple hues. Red, amber, and blue.

Conner’s frown deepened. He called back into the house. “Rachel? You see this?”

. . . It rolled over the house. No more than a couple hundred feet.

Conner’s mouth went dry. This was no storm . . .

After a mysterious storm rolls over Chicago, Conner, Mitch, and Helen are forced into an unlikely alliance — for they seem to be the only people left on earth, and something in the shadows is stalking them.

Vanish is tightly plotted, tersely written, and a perfectly typecast addition to the genre of supernatural thrillers. It strikes that balance between clear and obtuse that so effectively keeps hearts racing and minds guessing — and it throws in plenty of twists to keep readers on their toes. Few of these are predictable; some are valuable. (The book’s most disturbing image deserves to linger, both for its courageous depiction of a terrible truth and for its revelation of how carefully we hide our own darkness — but enough about that.)

Pawlik’s characters are sympathetic; I was interested enough in their lives that I might have kept reading even if the supernatural hadn’t invaded, and their struggles with life and faith are real. But as in most thrillers, the plot drives this story. It doesn’t at all surprise me that it came out of a writing course (Vanish won the Operation First Novel 2006 contest, sponsored by Jerry B. Jenkins’s Christian Writers Guild). As I read, I could hear a how-to-write-a-thriller primer sounding in my head: Enter late, leave early. Use cliffhangers. Write short chapters. Hide as much as you reveal. Hooks, twists, catalysts, climaxes, strategic moments of quiet. The book is a testimony to how well these techniques can work. Pawlik uses them all deftly, and I was happy to be sucked along.

And then came the ending. To be honest, I didn’t like it — to me, it was too reminiscent of the old cop-out, “And then I woke up, and it was all a dream.”  I didn’t see it coming for a moment, which considering the genre of the book should have been a good thing — but in this case, I felt cheated.

Now that I know Vanish has a sequel, I’m inclined to be more charitable about the ending — Pawlik has set himself up to do some potentially fascinating things. By itself, Vanish is a delightfully scary, page-turning story with better-than-average insight into human nature, a lot of adrenaline, and a weak ending. If you enjoy thrillers and want a summer read with better theology than Jurassic Park, you may want to check this one out.

4 responses so far

Jun 22 2009

Vanish: CSFF Blog Tour

Over dinner recently my cousins and I got into a discussion about why anyone would read a book twice. One declared that she has never done so: “You read books to find out what happens, and once you know what happens, there’s no point in reading it again.”

Others disagreed, including me, and the whole discussion fed into another discussion I’d been having with myself all week — what makes a book a classic? What exactly does “literary” mean? I would definitely classify some of the CSFF authors I’ve reviewed as literary, notably George Bryan Polivka and Jeffrey Overstreet. And I would certainly read their work more than once.

VanishOne thing I do not believe is that all books serve the same purpose and should follow the same rules. When this month’s novel for review arrived in the mail, all misty and mysterious (it has a really cool cover), I pounced on it, mentally overjoyed, and exclaimed “Popcorn!” I was busy and tired and really didn’t want a book I had to think about. Thrillers do provoke some thought, but not the exhausting literary kind. They are best at inspiring adrenaline spikes and obsessive page-turning, but they don’t generally require much from their readers.

To some degree my first impression was right. Vanish was fun to read, light despite its heavy themes, with lots of spiky moments and pages with such wide margins and large print that I had no trouble reading it on the way to and from performances, and at other generally exhausting moments. Pawlik’s Web site says it pretty well: “If you love edge-of-your-seat thrillers with a healthy dose of the weird, the creepy, and the unknown, then jump in and hang on.”

I finished it, dissected it in conversation with my cousin, and told myself that I had been correct. This was a book that one reads to find out what happens. Now that I know, I’m not likely to read it again. The characters serve the plot rather than driving it. Vanish, I told myself, is the epitome of the stand-alone supernatural thriller. The sort of book you read once, enjoy fleetingly, and can’t imagine a sequel to.

Then the CSFF e-mail came in, and blow me down, I found out that Vanish has a sequel. Valley of the Shadow was released in May. So to some degree, I was wrong — this book is not a stand-alone, and its themes may turn out to be more enduring than popcorn. Suddenly I’m very intrigued.

Tomorrow, a proper review. Wednesday — well, I haven’t decided what I’m going to write on Wednesday. For now, check out the author’s Web site:

http://www.tompawlik.com/

Both books on Amazon:

Vanish

Valley of the Shadow

And finally, a last piece of trivia: Vanish won first place in the 2006 Operation First Novel contest sponsored by Tyndale and the Christian Writers Guild.

For some reason that makes perfect sense to me.

See what the rest of the CSFF tour bloggers have to say:

Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Steve Rice
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

6 responses so far

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