Okay, I just threw this in because I loved it.  Apparently, in Europe they do these re-enactments of Gladiator Games.  And someone had kittens.  Or maybe they all had kittens.  Or maybe, instead of fighting lions, they fought kittens.  Anyway - I liked the photo.


So, I finally made a new cover for Hitman.  For those of you old enough to remember, back in 2008, the print version of the cover looked like this:

Yesterday was my blog day, and it took until noon to remember that it was Wednesday and I was supposed to have posting something 12 hours ago. So let's have some Thursday fun, for everyone else out there who is also struggling with the day of the week (and those of you who do have your head wrapped around which day it is, are welcome too, even if we stare at you like aliens and pat your heads to figure out your secret).

Last week I printed out my whole current manuscript. I've been revising so long I've lost sight of the bigger picture.  I can't remember when clues have been revealed, or what the character's reactions are supposed to be at any given moment.

So I printed out the whole thing and sat down to read it.

In the way of general advice, I've heard over and over again that when you sit to read your manuscript, if you're goal is to read it in one setting or get a big-picture view, you should not be holding a pen. No pen, no pencil, no highlighter -- no taking notes or jotting ideas or fixing words.

Just read, and read it straight through.

This is amazingly hard for me. On the first page, I was immediately struck by one little word change that will perfect the whole scene and if I don't write it down right now I will forget it and never ever get it back. Right? So I cheated and jotted down one note.

Then on the next page, there was one little error that of course I had to mark because who knows if I would notice it next time? I obviously hadn't noticed it the previous times through, and this may be my only chance! So I cheated and jotted down that note.

You can see where this is going. An hour later, I was 10 pages in. I was not getting the big picture. I was being bogged down by the minute wording changes that always bog me down.

Back in college, I was one of those geeks on the speech and debate team. College debate has all these funky rules, left over from the 17th Century British Parliament, where audience members pound the table and yell "for shame" when you offer up a weak argument. One of those rules is that you cannot be holding a pen in your hand while you debate. Apparently, back in the day, when pens were the kind you dipped in ink wells, they were sharp enough to do some damage. Debating with a pen in your hand was the equivalent of waving a sword at your opponent.* After all, you might lunge and pierce them through the neck if you couldn't think of a clever response. But even back then, setting down my pen and leaving it alone was hard for me. I wanted to fiddle with it in my hand while I talked. Which of course, lead to me losing points. Then, like now, my pen was getting in the way of my goal.

So no pens. Got it. Next I tried highlighters. Surely if I have a stack of multi-colored highlighters beside me, I can just highlight the section quickly in the right color and keep reading. Pink if it's a character problem, green if it's a wording problem, you get the idea. But still, I was focused on watching for mistakes and identifying how to fix them, not on how the arc of the story was progressing.

Finally, I laid down my sword, er, ballpoint pen and multi-colored highlighters, locked them away inside, and sat on the sunny deck and read the whole thing. After a few painful moments of going past errors without stopping, I got sucked into the story and the next 200 pages flew by. And it worked - I have a solid sense of the big picture now. It lead to some obvious conclusions about the ending, and gave me the motivation and context to outline the entire new ending and get started. 

What about you? Do you struggle to read your own work without making constant corrections? Does it kill you to see an error and just keep reading without fixing it? What do you do when you need a sense of the big picture? And for our philosophical questions of the day, which is mightier, the pen, the sword, or the highlighter?

*Those days are pretty hazy - I have no clue if any of this about pens and swords is accurate, but it's what I remember. If anybody has more accurate info, I'd love to hear it!

I'll try to keep the gushing short and sweet because we all have things to do and deadlines to attend to today. I also admit my pick of the week will not appeal to those who do not enjoy YA novels...or darker, grittier themes and conflicts. The setting is late Middle Ages, and the star of the novel is a female in a time period where rights and freedoms are few and non-existent.

I thrive on novels where the heroines are clearly marked by their time period and the society they intermingle with, but still rise beyond their circumstances without being anachronistically ridiculous. I'm sure this series rides that edge, so to speak, since these particular heroines are given a bit more freedom and power, in that they are trained assassins. It does make the ordinary girl from this time period at least interesting, when normally her life story would be about her being married to a pig farmer...or under the tyrant-thumb of her ambitious baron of a father.

My disclaimer aside: Oh, I so totally adored DARK TRIUMPH. It was so, so, so dark. And it was so, so, so captivating. And I am so, so, so in love with the Beast, a knight who is a bit crazy, doesn't understand the meaning of limitations, loves killing (if they deserve it, obviously), and is honorable to the point of getting everyone killed at least a dozen times before the book is done.

The heroine is a bit more...pragmatic, has a lot more scars that makes her less trusting and not value herself as a person as much as Beast does, and also loves killing. The latter is one of the Beast's very favorite things about her. He says, "Ismae kills with a sort of earnestness, but not with any real enjoyment." Like Sybella does. I'm not sure why it's funny to me they both love their jobs as trained killers so much, but it does; or maybe it's a sign of my progressive burnout, I envy people who enjoy their work as much as these two do. Doesn't matter. There are doses of clear levity in the novel to help balance out the dark and gritty circumstances and themes throughout.

This is a historical fantasy book, so while some of the characters are historically accurate and some of the events are indeed true, some things have been edited for the time considerations. (War is ever so much more exciting in a novel than it is in real life. There's a lot of boredom in war; and Twitter wasn't around yet to keep everyone apprised of location, plans, or commentary. Though it would be funny to see what the Twitter accounts for this particular time period and historical figures would be, considering the Duchess in question they are protecting is a thirteen-year-old girl, who acts about three times her age and probably did at the time too, since she would be the only person she knew for sure was interested in her well-being.)

If you read the first book in this series (and that would be suggested), this heroine is much darker than her predecessor. She is who she is, and it becomes clear why she is who she is. She's almost an anti-heroine, but there is enough light/good in her to root for her. 

So if you like assassinations, various poisons and weapons in action, burly knights--who aren't conventionally handsome at all, heroines who are capable and have entertaining perspectives about their current situation, and yes, a hero to sigh for--you may too enjoy this book as much as I did.

I can't imagine anyone enjoying this book as much as I did. I *LOVED* this book. I want to canonize the Beast for all heroes to aspire to from henceforth. (See, the book is even contributing to this ridiculous way of speaking.) Go find this book. Be sure to remember to thank me when you're all in a delicious haze of post-novel afterglow.

DARK TRIUMPH by Robin Lafevers.

Terri has been so keyed up to see that band she's been raving about, she forgot all about today's blog. I, of course, have nothing today--though I did spend a wonderful Friday, tooling around St. Charles, popping in and out of old shoppes and getting my British fix. (They have some British shoppes there and I want to buy one of everything. I'm not kidding.)

So let's do a Fast Five today. I mean, what else you going to do, right?

1.) Book you just finished reading.

2.) Book you plan to read next.

3.) Problem/project you're working on this Monday.

4.) The power drink helping you accomplish this.

5.) Best Gossip you heard this weekend.


Me:

1.) DARK TRIUMPH, by Robin Lafevers. (Brilliant).

2.) I'm now reading THE DARK HEROINE.

3.) My desk. It looks like a forest threw up everywhere. So much for our paperless society; and my to-do list is out the wazoo.

4.) Diet Mountain Dew, but I have a spare real-deal Pepsi in the bag if things get bad.

5.) Reese Witherspoon got arrested. Who saw that coming? I'm definitely giving her a pass on this one--she's been a good girl for like God knows how long and suddenly she's defying an officer because she's an "American" and she can stand on American ground. God love her. That was one margarita too many, girlfriend.

I love it when Barbara O'Neal writes books specifically for me. It's like we email weekly and she pops out with these delightful prizes that are exactly what I needed. Of course, we've never spoken, so it's not so much that she knows me so well as she's clairvoyant.

THE GARDEN OF HAPPY ENDINGS is from April of 2012, but I had read her other books that were similar in this vein. Family relationship dynamics, cooking or gardening in some form, women's fiction with lots of growth, but a little romance for the rest of us. I'm pretty sure I've written ecstatically about the others as well--Barbara O'Neal's voice is just like that. She could write the phone book to you in such a way, you'd have a great time reading it.

In this one, besides the family dynamics, the gardening, and the romance, there is a crisis of faith. And boy howdy, do you understand how this could happen for the woman. The first time she turned her back on God--well, that one is important to read as it happens in the story--but the SECOND time she has a crisis of faith, it was because her boyfriend, whom she has walked all over the better part of Spain with, suddenly says, "I can't marry you because I need to become a priest." I. Would. Be. Unglued.

Now many, many years later, she and this ex-fiance are still good friends, the best of friends. And it's when she has her third crisis of faith that the man steps back into her life and forces them both to deal with the past they've still not really reconciled, jealousies, the fact they still love each other, etc, etc. If this woman didn't have enough problems of her own, her own sister finds out--rather abruptly--that her husband had orchestrated a Ponzi scheme and now she has nothing. Not a thing. And being the pampered wife of a multi-millionaire to a poor, shopping at a second hand store is a difficult transition for her. (You want to slap her quite a few times. I was all, "You can't be this shallow!" and then again, I've never been that rich, so quite frankly I could very well be that shallow if given the opportunity. Don't worry. The sister is quite likable and pulls her own weight; it just takes her a while to transition.)

There are a couple romances--both are rather surprising. I just wasn't sure either of them would work out, just due to the conflicts created by the characters and the story, but happily they both do work out. Not in a contrived sort of way, but in a "that was how it was supposed to happen" sort of way.

The unfortunate aspect of the book is that you never get to shank that woman's husband who did the Ponzi scheme. I did find it extremely fascinating that Barbara was able to make us feel compassionate for the sister and the man's daughter, when you were secretly wondering, "How did they not know?" because I know after watching some Ponzi schemes in the news in the last few years, I'm never real concerned how the immediate family members are going to survive day to day. "Oh, boo-hoo, they'll have to eat ramen noodles like the rest of us." Yeah, it's a little more complicated than that. So applaud to Barbara for at least making me see the other side of the horse here, but a boo that we never got to shank him for causing this great big fat mess. Oh, well, there's always the next book. This particular book belonged more to the other sister anyway. Hers was the story that needed to truly resolve.

Oh, and when my Dad asked what this book was about, I said, "It's about a woman who helps a priest make a community garden in an empty lot behind some apartments, and this gang keeps tearing up the garden and threatening the people who live there." Which is true. That's also a huge aspect of the book and I clearly didn't even touch on that. Dad said, "This is why we can't have nice things." Well or something to that effect. 

So any Barbara O'Neal fans? Fans of women's literature? Any crises of faith? Any Ponzi schemes I should know about? Gardening fiction? What are you reading this week?