Patti O'Shea's Blog

One thing I realized just recently is that when I get into a story, I get into things that are important to the characters in some way. This byproduct interests me and it makes me wonder how this happens. And it makes me wonder if any other writers have the same thing happen to them.

While I was writing The Power of Two I found myself fascinated by Vietnamese culture (Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese) and also interested in the Maldives which is the future site of the Raft Cities in the world of 2176. I downloaded all kinds of computer wallpaper featuring these islands, I actually pay attention to the news whenever the Maldives are mentioned, and I was worrying about them when the tidal wave hit in the Indian Ocean in 2006 (I think).

With Through a Crimson Veil I acquired an interest in Japan. (Mika was half Japanese.) I’d browse sites with Japanese imports and became curious about their tea ceremony–never mind that Mika never drank tea in the book.

It’s been a little less intense with my Light Warrior series, but I still developed an interest in Scottish Gaelic. I actually considered learning the language, but that urge went away when I remembered how difficult it was to learn German.

And it’s happening again. The hero and heroine in the proposal I’m working on are of Polynesian descent and I’m finding myself hugely drawn to all things Polynesian right now. My collection of Polynesian music is growing rapidly as I search out and buy more and more albums (I really didn’t expect the wide variety I found, but it’s way cool!), I’m buying videos and DVDs of dance and history, and I’ve been tempted to buy a skirt like the dancers wear even though I’d probably just have it hanging in a closet after dropping a few hundred dollars on one.

This isn’t all. My hero is into rugby, specifically the New Zealand All Blacks team and now I’m following the team on Twitter! I know nothing about rugby or its players and I doubt I’ll need to know much for the book, but I’m curious now and wanting to learn. I even checked out T-shirts.

It was when I started looking at Polynesian drums with the idea of getting one that it finally dawned on me what was going on and that this had happened before on other books. What is this obsession with all the things that are pieces of who my characters are? It seems to spring up full-blown and intense out of nowhere, although I suppose it must be building in my subconscious for a while before I become aware of it.

In a way, this is pretty cool because it means I’m deeply into my characters. In another way, it’s a little disconcerting to find myself fascinated by things I never paid much attention to before. I actually checked flights to Hawaii yesterday before I remembered I don’t have any vacation time left and the trip was strictly to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center and find someone to pin down and quiz.

You’re thinking well, it’s research, right? Not that much. My h/h were born and raised in California, and while their heritage does play a role in their world view, I certainly don’t need to know how “grass” skirts are made. (You take a straight branch of a wild hibiscus tree, scrape off the outer bark and let it soak in water for about a month. The innermost bark is the lightest in color and that’s what’s used for the skirts. It can take 300-500 hibiscus strips to make one skirt and they weigh 7-8 pounds. The heavier the skirt, the better they sway when a dancer moves her hips.) See what I mean? Have I scared anyone yet?

Sometimes things come together in ways that astound me.

I wanted my method my heroine uses to time travel to the future to be based on science, not a magic necklace or her getting clobbered on the head. I had a thought on how to do this–maybe–and did some cursory reading. There on the Wikipedia page was something I could alter and use. Or that was my plan.

Yesterday as I tried to start this story, I realized I needed more information about the catalyst and started doing more research last night. And as I dug into this farther, I found my time travel method mentioned as a legitimate theory for this device. I think my shriek of glee was probably heard around the world. What I made up (or thought I’d made up) wasn’t only plausible, real scientists had speculated the same thing I’d imagined.

How cool is this???

Now the argument could be made that I’d read this theory earlier and had simply forgotten I’d seen it. Entirely possible. But I like to believe it was serendipity, that I tapped into the collective unconscious and received the idea I needed at the right time.

To quote George Peppard from The A-Team: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

I’m so behind right now, I’m not sure I’m ever going to get caught up!  The reason why there was no blog Thursday night?  I had a choice between writing a post and writing my story.  I chose to write my story.  And today instead of doing the million other things that I needed to get to, I wrote my story.  It feels good to put the writing first and everything else behind it.  Usually it’s the other way around because I feel too guilty letting things sit, but I’m going to learn to give that up because my writing has to come first.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what I decided on the time travel story, and believe it or not, I actually did make a decision this weekend.  It helped to talk with another writer and to listen to her comments and thoughts.  And the plot choice winner is….

Drum roll please.

Setting the time travel on Jarved Nine!

It was the one I was really more excited about writing, but I had logic issues.  After talking it out, I feel confident that I can overcome them and the other potential issues that time traveling to an alien planet will cause.

I have my heroine’s name after a long stretch where I wondered if she’d ever show up.  She adjusted her last name today because I had that wrong.  The hero and I have reached peace on his real first name–he goes by a nickname.  I was trying to get him to use something else, but he disagreed.  He won.  And I think I have the set up for the story.

This, however, wasn’t what I wrote today.  I’m still working on my Polynesian story.  That was the one calling to me, and while I tried to work on the time travel, I just couldn’t find any traction.  This week sometime for sure, though.

Now that Oprah’s talked about Twitter, there will likely be a lot of newcomers over on the service.  As someone who’s been there for a while, I thought I’d mention a few things I’ve learned, a few things that are enough to make me stop following someone, and things that are annoying.

Tips

Don’t automatically follow everyone who follows you.  There are spammers out there who count on auto-followers.  Check out who’s following you and decide from their posts whether or not they’re someone you want to follow back.  If they are a spammer, make sure you click the block link.  That’s how Twitter finds these people and closes them down.

Only follow as many people as you feel you can keep up with.  My limit is around 100, which is where I’m at now, and sometimes even this is overwhelming.  Yes, I feel bad for not following people, but I just can’t keep up with more.  I do see every reply people make to me (that would be @Patti_OShea) so if I’m not following you and you say something to me, I’ll see it, and if necessary, reply back.

Conversely, make sure you’re following enough people to make Twitter interesting.  Too few, and you won’t understand why it’s so much fun.  For me, it was getting into the 25-30+ range that really made it a blast.

You do not have to page backward to read every message that came through while you were at work.  I used to do this, but it’s so time consuming.  Now, if I have a lot of posts backed up, I’ll just read the first page and ignore the rest.  Yes, I’m probably missing someone’s great news or something else that I really want to see, but I just can’t take the time to back up and reread everything that was said while I was away.

Find a Twitter client.  I like Tweetdeck the best once I got used to it–and changed all the colors from the default black.  If you’re using Firefox as your browser, you can get an add-on called Twitterfox.

I think reading through some of the reasons why I stop following people will also provide some tips for Twittering.

Top Reasons Why I Unfollow People and Annoyances

Every post is either promotional in nature or thinly veiled promotion.  Authors are particularly bad at this.  I’m happy to hear about your new release if you’re part of the dialogue on other things as well, but when it’s all about you and your books, I’m clicking the unfollow link.

Don’t Retweet (RT in the Twitter lingo) constantly.  Please.  Only retweet the particularly interesting tweets you see.  Also do not retweet yourself and please don’t repeat yourself.  There was one tweeter who constantly posted the same tweet about his books over and over.  He also repeated other things he said over and over.    For days.  Argh!

Don’t live tweet TV shows.  Ever.  I don’t care about spoilers, but it’s really aggravating to see post after post after post about a television show.  Especially one I don’t watch.  I don’t live tweet the baseball games I’m watching, you don’t live tweet your TV shows, deal?  Once or twice during an hour long show, fine, but there was one woman who was posting 25, 30, 35 times in an hour.  I used to logoff of Twitter while that show was on and then I realized I could just unfollow her.  I did.

If you don’t interact with others, merely post your own tweets, I’m likely to consider unfollowing.  Reply to people.  Start a dialogue.  Congratulate people with good news, commiserate with people who have bad news, contribute to conversation.  It’s fun.  Trust me.

If you’re going to share a link, please offer some kind of explanation about what I’ll be clicking over to see.  Posting a link with “This is great” doesn’t make me want to click a masked URL.  Something like “This is a great video about a singing cat” along with the link makes me more likely to check out what you’re sending.

Positives

And there are a lot of these.

I feel as if I’ve become friends with people that I’d never met online anywhere else.

I feel as if I’ve gotten to know people better that I already knew online, but only in a really superficial way.  It’s been cool to make the connections!

I’ve been able to ask research questions for things that it might not be easy to find the answers to otherwise and get almost instant answers.  I’ve been hugely grateful for the generosity of the Twitter community.

One of my favorite things about Twitter, though, is that I can join in any conversation without feeling as if I’m intruding, leave the conversation without feeling as if I’m slighting anyone, or just follow a conversation without becoming part of it.  It depends what mood I’m in and how busy I am.

This is just plain fun!  Almost like instant messaging with dozens of people at once.  Give Twitter a try, find a few dozen people who post often to follow, and see if you don’t get hooked yourself.

I’ve been putting together the proposal for a trilogy.  A proposal generally encompasses three chapters, a synopsis for the first book, and blurbs for the other two.  One thing I include, though, is a series arc proposal thing.  I don’t know what you’d call it.  A series bible maybe only not as detailed as that, I don’t think.  Anyway, today I finally had a series bible or something worth sending to my agent for feedback and I pasted it into an email because it was so short.

Um, okay.  It seemed short.  I didn’t know exactly how long it was since I didn’t write it in a word processing program.  When I finally pasted it into one this evening, I realized it was five pages.  Ouch!  Not short and definitely should have been sent as a file attachment.  Oops.

In my defense, for me, five pages is short (look how long my books get) and it sure didn’t feel even that long as I wrote it.  I was having fun, I guess, putting together my characters with the big over-arcing story and with their own individual stories and I just lost track of how much writing I was doing.

The reason why it’s fun?  It’s not a synopsis!  Synopses are hell on earth to write and I hate every minute of them, but this arc thing isn’t like that. Of course, I might not think it’s that much fun if my agent thinks it sucks and I have to start all over again, but for today at least, I feel as if I’ve accomplished something and I’m happy with what I came up with.  Tomorrow is another story and I might not feel that way then, so it’s nice to enjoy these moments when I can.

So I knew the story for my first couple, but while I had a second couple and background information on them, they didn’t have a story.  I finally figured out what their deal is–at least a little bit.

Then there’s the third hero.  Poor guy.  No heroine was coming forward for him at all.  It was frustrating, but as I tried to imagine his story, suddenly I started learning things about her with the exception of her name.  For that, I put a placeholder in, just something so I could send it and get feedback.  The only thing is that I just remembered the last time I was suckered into using a name just as a placeholder.  I got stuck with it!

It’s true.  The hero who’ll be in book 1 has a name I don’t like.  He lulled me into a false sense of security.  “Just write the prologue with it,” he said. “You can always replace it when you get my real name.”  Grr.  It was his real name.  By the time I finished the prologue, I conceded defeat.  I was going to have to go with his choice.  Sigh.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if the name really is a placeholder or if this is her name and this was her way of letting me know.  I don’t dislike this name, so it’s not like the other incident, but still….

I was talking about writing a time travel short story earlier, but complaining that my heroine hadn’t shown up yet. She finally made an appearance yesterday and she has attitude! At least she has in the little bit of information she’s given me. We talked about her name–she hates it, and growing up, she used to fight other kids on the playground when they refused to use her preferred nickname. Maybe it’s only her name that she’s got an attitude about–I don’t know.

It’s funny, though, how I have no traction until a character tells me their name. It’s some kind of catalyst for me and gets me going on figuring out who they are and what their story is. I also learned what her job is–she’s in public relations (PR)–and I learned how she gets caught up in the time travel aspect.

You see, I’m not doing any magic necklace time travel thing. There’s going to be some science (and some fiction) behind it and I already have this facet worked out. I just need to research to get a few more details that I can twist.

In the meantime, my hero is becoming iffy about his real name. What that means is that I pushed my feelings onto him and now that my certainty has mellowed, he’s letting me know that I have it wrong. It becomes tougher when they think of themselves by their nicknames, and for some reason I don’t know, he does think of himself by the handle he got tagged with in the army.

Unfortunately, while I have two characters and a time travel setup, I don’t have a story. I thought I did, but I realized that part of the appeal of TT is the fish-out-of-water thing. My idea has this, but not because of the TT. Actually, beyond getting the h/h together, the TT has no bearing at all and that won’t work. So it’s back to mulling and hoping that either the hero or the heroine will give me some inkling of a story that will encompass the TT aspect more fully and give a reader what they’re looking for.

I was going to blog about the Amazon fiasco that erupted today, but so many people have already said things so much better than I can at this point that I think I’ll just include some links and blog about something else.

You can find out the story on the #amazonfail at Booksquare.  There’s also more up at Dear Author and Smart Bitches.  It was also covered on the Los Angeles Times’ Blog.  Amazon has responded as reported in Publishers Weekly that it was a tech glitch, but I have a difficult time believing that.  The books involved were far too targeted for a random technical problem.  Dear Author posted against the tech glitch argument before Amazon even put it forward.

There’s a petition posted here if you’re interested in protesting Amazon’s idiotic stunt.

This didn’t only impact GLBT books or erotic romance, BTW.  One of my books, IN TWILIGHT’S SHADOW, was also de-ranked on Amazon.  Why?  Maybe because Amazon categorized it as Erotic Horror.  Never mind that it’s a paranormal romance between a man and a woman.  Never mind that of all my books, it’s the one with the least amount of heat.  There’s one consummated love scene near the very end of the book and that’s it.  None of this mattered to Amazon.  They just arbitrarily tagged it.  So it’s not just GLBT books or erotic romance.  It could easily hit any romance writer and impact anyone who reads romance as well.

And I said more than I thought I would.

And now for something completely different.

In the last blog, I mentioned that I knew nothing about Troll’s heroine, not even her name. What I didn’t mention is that I was trying to rectify that. I have a sense of her and I thought that might help me hunt down who she is, so I took a pad of paper and started writing down women’s names. This was last Wednesday, but nothing set off any bells and I conceded defeat.

Thursday morning, as I was sitting at the Evil Day Job (EDJ), Grace showed up. Grace was one of the names I’d written down for Troll’s heroine, but that’s not who Grace is. She belongs to the other world/series that I’ve been working on putting together. It didn’t take long to get a sense of who she was and I pegged her for Royce’s heroine since she seemed to fit him the best, but no, she’s going to be Mick’s heroine. Yes, it is one surprise after another sometimes. First, being shocked that a heroine shows up out of the blue when she’s not the one I’m trying to come up with and second, that she’s going to fall for a guy that I totally wouldn’t have guessed.

Information started flowing once I figured out who she was paired up with and it turns out Mick isn’t quite as lackadaisical as he led me to believe. They’re not a bad fit after all. I also discovered that she’s an army brat and that her father knows and respects Mick, although she doesn’t realize that.

It was actually a pretty exciting morning having this coming in. Of course, it’s all about who the h/h are and nothing about the plot for their story, but this is how it works for me. It’s almost always characters first and then I start to get a vague notion of what the book’s about.

Now I just need Royce’s heroine to arrive and then I’ll have all three couples set. No stories for two of them and just a general idea of the over-arc, but it’s a starting point. Of course, it’s Troll’s heroine I need to show up. Please.