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Tessa Gratton Guest Post and Giveaway!

July 21, 2014 by SciFiChick

Creating a Story Arc for a Series
by Tessa Gratton

There are different kinds of series:
– Those that are big stories broken up into pieces of a whole, where no part stands alone and you need all of them to complete the story. Examples are traditional high fantasy trilogies like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.
– Those composed of single stories that follow after each other, each complete to itself, with reoccurring main characters. Examples are the Die Hard movies or almost any murder mystery series, like the Stephanie Plum Mysteries.
– Those with interconnected stories, where each story stands alone, but there’s an overarching narrative that builds from story to story. Examples are the current Marvel movie franchise or Kristen Cashore’s Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue series.

Each sort will be plotted very differently (aside from the fact that different writers would plot the exact same book differently).

I happen to be a reverse-plotter, in that I plot last when I plot at all. Sometimes I don’t even plot until I’m revising a seat-of-the-pants draft. I reverse-engineer my plot to suit the greater needs or character and theme and world. To me, plot is the most malleable element of a story. World and character matter more to me, and plot comes from the interaction of a character with her world. I can shift plot elements as easy as rewriting 40,000 words. It’s harder for me to entirely rewrite an element of world building or change my character’s intrinsic nature or motivations.

The United States of Asgard falls into the third of the above categories. I wrote The Lost Sun as a stand-alone novel originally. By the time I was finished, I knew I wanted to sell it as a series if possible and write more stories. The world was so big, and I was so excited by the possibilities, I had to write a few more novels set there.

In order to put together my proposal, I needed to choose the sort of series it would be. I knew three things:

1) I did not want to write another book from Soren’s POV because his character arc as a young adult was finished.
2) I DID want him to be an important player in the other books.
3) I love romance trilogies where each book has a complete romance, but you revisit the heroes of the previous novel in every new one.

The world of USAsgard really works on two main plot layers already: the plot involving the teenage protagonists and the plot involving the ancient gods who think decades and centuries in advance. It was relatively easy to break the series down onto the same levels. Each individual book would stand alone with regards to the narrator’s plot and character arc, but the series as a whole would have a meta plot revolving around the goddess Freya, who sees the future and meddles in the affairs of humanity to direct Fate as she sees fit.

Initially I pitched USAsgard as a 5 book series. I knew The Lost Sun was book 1, and I knew exactly who the narrator for book 5 would be and what her conflict was. The series was plotted very much like the Avengers movies: 4 introductory stories with new, (hopefully) compelling and sexy and fun characters, culminating in the 5th book where they all come together to save the country.

Every book was meant to be its own story, but there were elements and Easter eggs, hints and subplots that were quietly building up to the finale. Take those elements out and the story wouldn’t suffer, but with them it creates a complicated, inter-connected series.

In the end, there are only 3 novels in the series, which was my own creative decision. It wasn’t because the series was unwieldy or unsupported, it was because I realized when I began write book 3 that it was time for the character and plot I’d intended for the finale, and I wasn’t desperate to tell the stories in the original books 3 and 4. Or at least not so in love with them that I could dedicate a year of my life (minimally) to them. The things that drew me to those stories were themes and toothy ideas to explore in the series world, and those themes and ideas shifted in my imagination to other projects and other worlds. What I needed the United States of Asgard for was the book 5 story, because it’s about faith and godhood and love and fate: things The Lost Sun and The Strange Maid are also about, but the original books 3 and 4 were not.

Book 5 became book 3, and the middle book – The Strange Maid – is its own meaty, complicated middle. I’ll be publishing 3 novellas in the next year based on some of the lost stories and characters, but I’m very happy with the choices I made.

I’m not a plotter, so although I had a skeletal over-arching plot for my entire series, 80% of it was scrapped by the time I finished writing book 2. Someday when I write an honest-to-god high fantasy trilogy I will be must less laissez-faire about series plotting.

Thanks for having me, especially if you read all the way to the bottom here!

Tessa

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Courtesy of Random House Children’s Books, I have a copy of The Strange Maid for one (1) lucky winner!

Contest is open to US and Canadian residents only. No PO Boxes, please. To enter, just fill out the form below. Contest ends August 15. I’ll draw a name on August 16, and notify winner via email.

ENTER DAILY TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCE OF WINNING!

Good luck!

Excerpt and Giveaway: The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma

July 18, 2014 by SciFiChick

The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma Excerpt
by Brian Herbert
Reprinted with permission from Tor Books.

For the environmental health of the American continents, all inhabitants who survived the Corporate War will be relocated onto densely populated human reservations, with the remaining land slated for either collective farms or comprehensive greenforming, returning it to the pristine beauty of nature. As part of his historic Edict 101, our beloved Chairman Rahma Popal has announced, “Anyone who resists will be dealt with severely. He will be recycled.”
—government news flash, March 17, 2043

THE NUCLEAR-POWERED TRUCK flexed its long body around highway turns without slowing, its air whistle keening to ward off wild animals. Inside the passenger dome sat a man and a woman in complementary uniforms—his forest green and hers black, with peace symbols on the lapels. They held hands and gazed out at the sun-mottled trees of autumn, bearing leaves that were a spectacular array of golden-brown hues. This was an old road, bumpy from decay and debris, having fallen into disuse because of the mass exodus of population in the last two decades. It was the year 2063 in the New England Conservancy, and soon there would be no more need for this route.

Ahead of the vehicle and behind it, police cars created a security zone, their strobe lights flashing and fender-mounted weapons glow-ready, while a Greenpol aircraft flew low overhead. For years there had been attacks by disaffected Corporate elements against GSA assets, and the Chairman had ordered extra precautions to secure his valuable equipment and personnel. Greenpol was the special police force he had created, with divisions to stop eco-criminals, prosecute other crimes, and bodyguard his person.

Presently the big armored truck slowed and turned onto the rough, weed-encrusted surface of an abandoned parking lot, where it screeched to a stop. Outriggers shot into position and adjusted for the uneven surface, leveling the great machine mounted on the chassis. The two passengers, both eco-techs, exited the dome and stepped onto a wide turret platform on the vehicle. They secured their stylized, owl-design helmets and dark goggles, then grabbed hold of safety bars. Other crew members rushed to their stations, to operate the complex equipment and monitor the results. They wore black trousers, jackboots, green jackets, and shiny green helmets.

D.B. Jackson Guest Post

July 7, 2014 by SciFiChick

“Making Historical Fantasy Lasagna,” by D.B. Jackson

There were no thieftakers in Boston in the 1760s. There were no conjurers in Boston at that time, either.

Which means that from the outset, my historical fantasy series, the Thieftaker Chronicles, is based not on historical fact, but rather on huge fallacies. Yet, as I have written each book in the series, starting with Thieftaker (Tor Books 2012), and continuing with Thieves’ Quarry (Tor Books, 2013) and my latest release, A Plunder of Souls, which is to be released tomorrow (yay!), I have gone to great lengths to get my historical facts right. Why would I do that? Why strive for accuracy when the books are founded on two conceits that overwhelm every other fact I might find?

Because those fictional elements, and the historical details that act as counterweight to them, are both crucial ingredients in what has been a successful series. Let me explain.

The concept of the series isn’t terribly complicated. Ethan Kaille, my hero, is a thieftaker — a sort of eighteenth century private detective — and a conjurer. Each book in the series revolves around a crime he must solve and a related historical event leading to the Revolutionary War. That’s it. I mean, obviously there is more to each book — character relationships, the twists and turns one would expect from a good mystery, knife fights and magical battles, and walk-ons by several key historical figures from the period. But at a conceptual level, the series is fairly simple. That’s part of what I love about writing these books.

My challenge as the author of the thieftaker novels, is to blend my fictional and factual elements in such a way that my readers cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. I have to make Ethan and his fellow characters seem like natural citizens of 1760s Boston. Their speech can’t be completely of that time, because if it was they would be barely comprehensible to a twenty-first century audience. But I can put in rhetorical flourishes and conversational quirks that will identify the spoken word as being of that period in our history. And I can offer details about clothing, food, weaponry, tools, transportation, etc. that place the stories firmly in the late-colonial period.

But still I am left with those two conceits: thieftakers and conjurers.

Thieftaking was an actual profession, although it was far more prevalent in Europe, making only a brief appearance in early nineteenth century America. But thieftakers tended to find work in the absence of established professional law-enforcement. And in the 1760s, Boston had no police force to speak of. The city did have a sheriff — Stephen Greenleaf, who is a recurring character in the Thieftaker novels and stories — but he commanded no police officers and only had under his authority a small cadre of night watchmen who were mostly incompetent and as likely as not to be corrupt. Boston in the 1760s was a fairly lawless town. In other words, while the city had no thieftakers, conditions there were ripe for the profession to arise.

As for conjurers, I am not going to get into a debate here as to whether there is historical precedent here or elsewhere. Rather, I will keep my discussion limited to people’s beliefs, and as evidenced by the tragic executions in 1692 of twenty so-called “witches” in Salem, Massachusetts and surrounding communities, the people of the Province of Massachusetts Bay certainly believed in witchcraft and black magick. So when I developed my magic system for the thieftaker books, I came up with something that would involve the drawing of blood in a form of sacrifice, communing with spirits (Ethan and other conjurers have spirit guides who help them access their power), and speaking in tongues, in this case Latin incantations. The conjurers in the Thieftaker universe live in constant fear of being hanged as witches, and as a result their magic feels like something that could be endemic to that time and place.

With respect to both thieftaking and conjuring, I sought to use historical circumstance to mitigate my historical inaccuracies. Put another way, while I knew I wasn’t recreating a Boston that actually was, I tried to create a Boston that could have been.

And that brings us to the lasagna. Yeah, you knew we’d get there eventually. My friend, Faith Hunter, one of my co-founders (along with Misty Massey) of the Magical Words blog site (http://magicalwords.net) likes to compare writing a novel to making lasagna. As she points out, when you make lasagna, you don’t put all the cheese in one area, and all the onions and garlic in another, and all the pasta in yet another. That would be pretty awful. Instead, we blend it all together to make something that is delicious throughout. In the same way, we don’t offer our readers blocks of characterization and then blocks of plotting and then blocks of worldbuilding. We interweave all of our narrative elements to create a novel that flows smoothly and that tells a complete tale from beginning to end.

Adding the historical element to the analogy, I wouldn’t want to isolate my historical ingredients any more than I would one of the other ingredients. But more to the point, just as we build a lasagna in layers, I try to write the Thieftaker books the same way, sprinkling the fictional on top of the historical, on top of the fictional, on top of the historical, and so on. The result is something so completely integrated that separating what is “true” from what is “made up” becomes all but impossible. It’s not just that the flavors and textures are blended, but also that they are transformed into a whole that is both different from and more than its component parts.

As with any metaphor, the lasagna-as-book analogy isn’t perfect. But it does get at an essential truth of writing: As with cooking, the ingredients and process are equally important in determining the ultimate success or failure of the final result. Poor quality elements will doom a project, as will slipshod execution. Which is why we strive for excellence in both.

And now, all this talk of lasagna has made me hungry. Buon appetito!

*****
D.B. Jackson is also David B. Coe, the award-winning author of more than a dozen fantasy novels. His first two books as D.B. Jackson, the Revolutionary War era urban fantasies, Thieftaker and Thieves’ Quarry, volumes I and II of the Thieftaker Chronicles, are both available from Tor Books in hardcover and paperback. The third volume, A Plunder of Souls, will be released in hardcover on July 8. The fourth Thieftaker novel, Dead Man’s Reach, is in production and will be out in the summer of 2015. D.B. lives on the Cumberland Plateau with his wife and two teenaged daughters. They’re all smarter and prettier than he is, but they keep him around because he makes a mean vegetarian fajita. When he’s not writing he likes to hike, play guitar, and stalk the perfect image with his camera.

D.B. Jackson

http://www.dbjackson-author.com/blog
http://www.facebook.com/dbjacksonAuthor
Tweets by DBJacksonAuthor
http://www.goodreads.com/dbjackson
http://amazon.com/author/dbjackson

*****

Courtesy of Tor Books, I have a copy of A Plunder of Souls for three (3) lucky winners!

Contest is open to US residents only. No PO Boxes, please. To enter, just fill out the form below. Contest ends August 1. I’ll draw names on August 2, and notify winners via email.

ENTER DAILY TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCE OF WINNING!

Good luck!