prebook « Patti O'Shea's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘prebook’

I Heart Pre-Book

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I love Pre-Book. It’s not my favorite part of the process. I think that’s when the idea first comes in. Then information and ideas are flowing fast and furious and I’m riding an adrenaline wave that is major cool. But Pre-Book is pretty darn awesome, too.

The regular readers of this blog know that Pre-Book is when I look for character pictures, do overview level research for the idea (whether it be for a series or a single book), and start thinking about the flow of the story.

What’s fun about Pre-Book is that I’m taking all the ideas, information, and details and forming them into a cohesive whole. Not everything I have seems to fit when it first appears in my head, but at this stage, things start to make a little more sense. I still get surprised. Oh, boy, do my characters love to spring stuff on my while I’m writing, but to carry my house-building analogy forward, Pre-Book is like surveying the land, learning where the dips and hills are located.

Sometimes Pre-Book is frustrating. I hate it when I have to spend hours and hours looking for character pictures to find the right one. It’s even worse when I have to search multiple days. Been there, done that. I also hate it when the characters don’t give me a name.

Again, regular readers are aware that I don’t get to choose my character’s names. They tell me what they are. But sometimes I actually hear them say their name–that’s my favorite. Other times, I get “My name starts with an R.” Then I end up looking through baby name books and websites. Ryne made me look through every baby name book I owned before I found her name. Because she has a boys’ name! Grr. The last book on my shelf (and let me tell you, my name books are extensive. I must have close to 20.) was the only one that put Ryne in the Girls’ section.

Sometimes, though, the name search is even worse than the “I have a letter” game. Sometimes I just get smug silence. My threats to pick a name for them if they won’t cooperate? Laughed at. Because they know, darn them, that if they go on strike, I get nowhere. I’ve reached a place where I just work on other stories and let the silent ones sit until they’re ready to talk.

Okay, I try to work on other things. It’s hard sometimes because it bugs me that I have unnamed people in my head.

Um, anyway, to get back to where I meant to head, this last weekend was a Pre-Book weekend. On Sunday, it was for two characters that are part of my vampire-demon world. I found pictures for both of them and the process was relatively painless for a change. I blogged about that on Sunday. Monday, I spent the day researching for a completely different story. It was a hugely pleasant weekend.

Tags: prebook, writing
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It’s Pre-Book Time Again

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

I’ve mentioned Pre-Book at least a few times on the blog. It’s that time where I’m exploring a story (or stories) and getting to know the characters. I also research the big picture things I should know and look for pictures of my characters. The pictures are important–sometimes I need them before I even start writing and other times I need to find them before I finish writing three chapters. Sixty pages, though, is the cut off and maybe not so coincidentally, that’s about the length of a proposal.

Last weekend ended up being a picture hunt weekend, and since I have more than one story going through my head, it was for multiple characters.

I already have pictures of my Polynesian couple, although they’re small and difficult to see clearly, but the hero has two friends who have stories and I needed their pictures. Mick (nickname, not real name) was easy to find. Boom! It took maybe a minute. But the third friend, Royce, wasn’t easy. I looked and looked. They were too young, they were too old, they were too blond, they were too dark. On and on it went, and yes, he was there saying no to everyone I found. Even when I was ready to say good enough, he wasn’t.

Deciding the search was fruitless, I went in search of Sin’s picture. If y’all read In the Midnight Hour, you might remember him. He’s the LA troubleshooter who was unfriendly toward Ryne. From the start, I knew he had a story, but I had no clue who his heroine was–until I was writing the book I turned in March 1st.

I already had pictures of Tris because she’s Kel and Logan’s sister and I needed to know what she looked like for Kel’s book, but Sin was going to be a problem, I knew it. He’s too good looking and I had too specific an image of him in my head. That’s never a good combination for an image search.

BTW, just so y’all know, I’m not particularly happy to have a hero named Sin. It makes me grimace every time I think about it–or nearly so. Unfortunately, I don’t get to pick names for my characters. They tell me who they are and I argue and they ignore me until I concede and then life is good. So when he told me his name was Sinclair Duncan, I went, NO! He didn’t care. And when Ryne called him Sin, I said, NO! He didn’t care. I’m stuck with Sin whether I like it or not. His middle name is worse, IMO, but that’s the way it goes some times. My opinion doesn’t matter to any of these people.

Anyway, I digress. I spent two days looking for Sin. Site after site after site. I even had to find new sites because I ran through all the places I have bookmarked on my computer. Finally, at one of my new finds, I found a few pictures that looked promising–for other characters. I saved them and kept looking for Sin and then suddenly, there he was. Dark hair, blue eyes, and great bod. I couldn’t believe it.

I went back to the pictures I saved to look at guys I thought might be characters in other stories–I’ve got about 5 different stories in my head all with chatting people. It’s loud right now! And as I browse the pictures of this guy I thought would make a good Bo, I got a Boom! Royce! Finally!

And as I looked at the picture, I finally got his first name. That was something he wouldn’t even hint at no matter how hard I pressed him or how long I searched. That’s when I knew for sure it was the right picture.

Of course, I don’t have heroines for either Mick or Royce. Not even an inkling of who they might be, but that’s on the back burner to simmer for a while. Sin and Tris have taken over and they’re demanding.

Who am I kidding? All my characters are demanding. I’m mulling, making notes, and thinking about their stories. Pre-Book is fun! It’s infinite possibilities and letting things simmer and unfold naturally. It’s testing out different ideas, seeing if the characters are willing to go that way and starting over when they’re not.

Tags: characters, pictures, prebook
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Adventures in iPhoto

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

My original plan for the blog was to do a slide show of my flower pictures. I have a bunch of shots that I’ve taken in the last few days and some of them turned out really cool. I ran into a small problem, though. I wanted to do it quick and easy on my iMac without having to login to my Windows virtual machine to access the software I normally use. It’s kind of a pain and iPhoto should do everything, right?

Well, maybe if I knew what the heck I was doing. I imported the pictures off the camera okay, but trying to save them was a nightmare. I finally managed to save a picture. That would be singular. One photo. And tried to figure out how to save the others. Somehow instead of getting my pictures in the folder, I imported chat icons. How? I have no clue, but they’re there and I can’t get rid of them. Or at least I gave up trying to get rid of them and returned to moving photos to the folder. It can’t be hard, right? This is a Mac!

My woes continued. Because I accidentally somehow imported the chat icons, my flower pictures were gone because they had been under the Last Imported section. Now the icons were there. I finally managed to locate the edited pictures under the imported in the last year area. Sigh. I went with the drag and drop philosophy and managed to get all my pictures in the folder at last.

Now I thought, let’s resize them all to 400 pixels wide so that they don’t get so big that it’s impossible for people to watch the show. Um, I couldn’t figure out how to resize them at all. I finally clicked on crop and tried the custom feature, but putting 400 in the box made the picture bigger, not smaller, and to make things even better, it doesn’t automatically put in the height for me. What? I just know I want it 400 wide, the program needs to tell me what size the height should be to maintain the proper aspect ratio. Grrr.

I decided to try to create a slide show anyway–for me if no one else. I thought I’d do it in iMovie. I know, but in Windows Movie Maker, it lets me add still photos as well as movie clips and I figured the Mac would let me do the same thing. I want to be able to do that, dang it, because in my spare time (if I ever have any again in my life), I want to play with making book videos for my old books. I had them professionally done for my last three titles and they’re cool! But I can’t justify spending money on the old books. Now, of course, that plan is shot because it appears iMovie will only work with movie clips. If I’m wrong, please tell me where to find out how to add stills.

So I return to iPhoto. Yes, I can make slide shows there. I try to select my pictures as mentioned in the help directions and it doesn’t work. Yep, my photos won’t stay highlighted.

At this point, I gave up and logged into the Windows side of my Mac and did all the cropping and then uploaded the shots to Webshots. I looked at the time, thought about how tired I feel right now and how much other stuff I have left to do yet tonight and thought, the hell with it. I’ll shoot for the next blog posting.

What I wanted to do tonight was research an idea I have for the story that’s in pre-book. Every day the story gels more and more in my mind, but I need to learn a little bit more about one aspect that came to me so I can decide whether or not it’s going to pan out. Didn’t get to that. I also really want to find a picture of my heroine. She’s proving elusive. Thank goodness, Kel is Logan’s identical twin and I can just use the pictures of Logan that I had for the last book, but I’ve already spent two nights looking for his heroine and have come up empty.

Maybe tomorrow.

Tags: adventures, computer, garden, pictures, prebook
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Pre-Book Time

Friday, August 1st, 2008

I’m in pre-book right now. Pre-book comes before the writing of anything–synopsis or story. For me, it involves figuring out what the story is and getting a better grasp on the characters. This is where I try to figure out where the story takes place, what time of year, what the characters look like, what their issues are, and a slew of other things.

Not all of my questions need to be answered for each story. Sometimes it doesn’t really matter what time of year it is, I can just start the story and figure it out from the characters. Are they wearing a jacket? Complaining about being too hot? This can also give me a bead on where the story is happening.

Pre-book can be fun. I love exploring the possibilities, testing different ideas to see if the hero and heroine will accept or reject them. They get final say. It’s also fun to listen to them tell me what’s going on or to get hints of what’s going on from them.

Pre-book can also be frustrating for the exact same reasons it’s fun. I can have a great idea, one I want to use, and have the characters say: no way! Or they can tell me things that I’m not that thrilled to write about. of course, this doesn’t only happen before the book starts.

This particular stretch of pre-book hasn’t been the most productive ever, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, this hero and heroine have been largely quiet while Logan and Shona, from the book I just finished, have been showing me post-book scenes. (Which is another blog topic, but I love getting the after-the-story story from my hero and heroine.) So I’m getting small pieces of information from my pre-book h/h and trying to piece them all together to figure out the story.

Some of the information has left me excited and eager to explore the idea when I get to the story. Other pieces–not so much. And one of the things I thought was going to be a big deal for months is turning out to maybe not be as important as I thought. That’s the frustrating part.

There were a few other things I thought would be different. I planned that the book would take place in Kel’s territory, but it looks as if I’m going to have another book set in Seattle–that’s Logan’s territory. Everything I’m getting on the story says Seattle. This is making me wonder if Kel lost his territory–I don’t know yet and he’s not talking.

I’ve got some other big holes, too. Like the bad guy. Right now, he’s robot-like, but I don’t think he’s some cyborg. I’m just not sure why he’s the way he is, and while I complain about Kel being closemouthed, at least he is giving me information. This villain is totally silent and just looks at me when I ask him questions. When that happens with a hero or heroine, I ask their friends or family, but I just have no sense of others with this bad guy so that’s not a possibility–at least not right now.

This is major because I can’t figure out the story without knowing what the bad guy wants or why he wants it and that’s keeping me in pre-book and not into the actual writing of anything. I just don’t know enough yet.

Tags: prebook, WIP
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