A.J. Maguire

Tag: AJMaguire

  • Thanksgiving 2013

    With any luck I’ll be out of town for Thanksgiving so I thought I’d better write this post now.

    First of all, I wish all of you a wonderful turkey — uh … I mean Thanksgiving! If you don’t like turkey on Thanksgiving then I wish you a happy “whatever-you-like-to-eat” day. I hope you all relax and enjoy family, friends and possibly shopping (if you’re one of those people who actually goes to the Black Friday things. I don’t, but whatever floats your boat, you know?)

    It is always important to count your blessings and recognize all the good things you have right in front of you. Life is too short to be caught up in all the things you don’t have, so I hope all of you are able to take a moment next week and really appreciate the people and traditions that make up who you are.

    For me, I am grateful for quite a few things but I’ll go ahead and narrow it down to six.

    #1) Always and forever, I am grateful for my son. He brings me more joy and fulfillment than anything else. I might have come reluctantly to the role of parent but now I cannot imagine my life without him.

    #2) I am grateful for my mother. I never fully understood my mother until I became a parent myself. Now that I know the worry and pain that comes with the title of “mother” I am far more appreciative of everything she sacrificed for me while I was growing up.

    #3) I am grateful for my cat. Yes, he’s obnoxious and starts meowing at me whenever I get on the phone — apparently he thinks I should be talking to him instead of whoever might be on the other line. Yes, he sometimes gets a wild hair and goes tearing through the apartment at full speed. And yes, he rage-vomits whenever I take a weekend away, but I’ve come to expect it now and am prepared whenever I come home. But the truth is, when Hazen is asleep and everything is quiet in the house, there’s nothing quite like having my cat on my lap, purring up a storm.

    #4) I am grateful for my writing friends. These include Alpha Readers, Beta Readers, Authors who I’ve had the privilege of Alpha or Beta reading for, and even those many people I follow on Google+ who make me laugh with their comments and struggles on a daily basis. As lonely a job as writing might be, all of these people share the journey of novel creation with me. I might have given up long ago if not for them.

    #5) I’m grateful for my Readers. I super loves all of you! You’re all awesome for taking the time out of your lives to read what I’ve put down on paper.

    #6) I am grateful for school. As exasperating as it might be, and as much as I bemoan all the writing time that school sucks up, it has been an incredible experience to go back to school. I graduate in May and I am excited to see where I’ll end up next.

    There are, of course, many, many, many more things I am thankful for. Things like turkey and mountains and snow and Christmas with a five-year-old (it’s going to be a blast!) I could fill a hundred pages with all the things I am thankful for, but I promised to keep this narrowed down. I hope everyone else feels as overwhelmingly blessed as I do.

    Happy Thanksgiving (several days early). I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

  • NaNoWriMo Week 2 Roundup

    Woot! My NaNo project — tentatively titled Residual Haunting — is just shy of 25k, which means I’m halfway there. I think I might actually win this year.

    I deserve more chocolate.

    I’ll admit that I keep having to shove my internal editor away. There are lots of things I’m going to have to change when I go to edit the story. But I am having a blast.

    The man I thought was my main character turned out to be a secondary character. The man I thought was the secondary character turned out to be the main. And there’s a woman named Rachel who reminds me of a modern Trenna.

    (Trenna fans — Yes, I am still writing on Usurper. She’s currently breaking into a military outpost. You’ll see next year, I promise.)

    I had a eureka moment yesterday for Residual Haunting’s plot, too.

    I love eureka moments. It’s when I discover where the story is going. I don’t know how it all ends yet, but knowing where it is going and knowing what the characters want will help me with that.

    Oh! And I found my monster.

    I knew there was a monster coming to eat people but I didn’t know what it was going to be. I have a friend to thank for directing me to the witiko (thanks, Jared!) and I’m excited to see how I can get it to play out on the page.

    And that’s my NaNo Week 2 Roundup. If I want to stay on task I need to run off and do some writing. Luckily it snowed last night so I’ve got the perfect excuse to stay inside all day.

    To everyone else participating in NaNoWriMo this year … Good luck and keep going!

    And don’t forget to have fun! If you’re not having fun then you’re not doing it right.

  • The End & Thoughts on Serializing Novels

    Well, Persona is finished.

    Or at least a draft of Persona is finished. Here in the next couple of weeks I’ll be searching for an appropriate editor to go through it, and then I’ll edit and edit and … edit some more.

    Until then, I’m in celebratory mode. I’ve got Nantucket Dark Chocolate cookies (from Pepperidge Farm) and I intend to go see Thor 2 at some point over the weekend. I highly encourage everyone to do the same … If not go see the movie, then at least get some cookies.

    It has been quite a journey since June. For those of you who remember or were following along, I started serializing Persona on Wattpad and its own story blog back in June and I posted one chapter per week until … well … until this week.

    So for a little over five months I was committed to drafting a chapter, revising a chapter, and posting a chapter every week. This was, as you can imagine, quite a hectic schedule for someone who already works full time, goes to school full time, and is a single parent.

    Still, it was fun.

    I enjoyed the interaction with readers and I liked the challenge of the schedule (at least at first.) When school starting taking over the bulk of my time I found myself having to be far more lax with the revision portion of the week than I wanted.

    The original plan was to have a blog post once a week with the research information I’d had to look up, but eventually I had to let that go in favor of just getting the next chapter written. I do intend to fix that.

    In fact, after Persona has been properly edited and I can release it as a full book, I thought I’d go ahead and make a “Fact vs. Fiction” edition that will take the chapter by chapter research I’ve done and put it down as a sort of weird appendix thingy.

    So! In reviewing the last five months I can say that I truly enjoyed this process. I’ll probably do it again in the future — after I graduate and preferably with an already completed novel. (Persona was a re-write, and I ended up only using 2 of the original chapters I had written.)

    Also, as a reader myself I can admit that I prefer to have my books all at once. And I know I’m not the only one because there were many people who let me know they wanted to wait until the whole thing was up before they read it. There are even more who want to wait for the physical copy to be available.

    Which, I think, just goes to show you that readers come in all shapes and sizes. Some like the chapter a week approach because it fits into their schedule better. Some like to race through a book over their weekend. Some like to use their Kindles, Nooks, and iPad’s, while others want the feel of paper in their hands.

    I know there are lots of debates about the publishing industry and what books are going to look like in the future, but I think many of these marketers and such are forgetting something very important; there is no one-size-fits-all box for readers to fit in. We are as varied and unique in our reading habits as we are in our personalities.

    For everyone who read Persona on a weekly basis — I uber loves you all! Thank you for sticking with the story for so long!

    For everyone who is now reading it on their digital devices — I uber loves you all! I hope you enjoy Megan’s story and hope to hear from you. (Here is the link, just in case you need it — Persona.)

    For everyone who is waiting for the physical copies — I uber loves you all! I promise I’ll work hard to polish the manuscript and get it to you soon.

    Now, I’m going to run off and keep plugging away at my NaNoWriMo project. With any luck, I’ll actually win this year!

     

  • Writing In A Different Genre

    I am primarily a Fantasy and Science Fiction author.  The three books I have out for sale right now are all fantasy and I do have a science fiction scheduled to be released next year.  So when I started work on my historical fiction novel Persona I felt like a fish out of water.

    Suddenly moving shadows had nothing to do with lurking monsters.  And the idea of genetic enhancements stretching the limitations of the human body wasn’t an option.  Suddenly I had to deal with real people, real problems, and real settings.

    To make matters worse, I chose to limit my point of view character.  Normally I write within two or three characters, but in Persona I limited myself to just one, just Megan.  Because I wanted this to be a “Who am I?” story I wanted the so-called camera lens to be focused entirely on Megan as she struggles through Nazi Germany.

    And these were the best decisions I could ever have made.

    Let me tell you what I’ve learned about the writing craft through this experiment.

    1) My other writings are severely lacking in setting.  Yes, you can see some imagery and I give a sketch of what you’re looking at, but the settings in my other books don’t have the character that it should.

    2) I have learned how to reach deeper into the personality of a character through Megan.  By limiting myself to Megan I can now see how very vague I’ve been with other characters.  (Even my beloved Trenna, though I think she’s purposefully private in many matters.)

    3) The use of a theme-based outline has been supremely enlightening.  Rather than just following the plot to its conclusion, this outline has been able to focus my writing on Megan’s journey to self-discovery.

    I’ll use an example from this weeks posted chapter.  We’re in chapter seven and Megan comes home to find a POW hiding in her bathroom.  That’s all plot and action.  My outline goes further to the main question of the scene; What will Megan do with this man, and what does it say about her when she does it?

    There are more practical issues that I’ve learned during this process as well, most of them having to do with taking ownership of the story and my craft.  But the main thing I want to say is that this decision, to write something outside of my comfort zone, has been incredible.  I highly recommend any author to try it.

    Pick a genre outside of what you normally write and commit yourself to it.  If it’s just a short story then that’s fine, the point is to look at how writing within this new genre is different.

  • The Wattpad Experiment So Far

    All right, I’m a month into the serialization of Persona and I have to admit that I’m loving it.  There is a lot more work involved given that I’m having to write and edit all in the same week, but for some reason this process is really working for me.

    A typical week goes something like this;

    Monday – Review/edit the chapter meant to go up on Tuesday.  Write 1k words on the new chapter.  (I have a 6 chapter buffer so I’ll never be late.)

    Tuesday – Stagger out of bed around 5:45 AM, review the chapter to go up one more time.  Post on Blogger and Wattpad.  Announce on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.  The rest of the writing day (I do have a full time job I have to go to) is spent writing on the newest chapter.

    Wednesday – Type up new chapter and print it out.

    Thursday – Edit.

    Friday – Edit and then save in several places (because I’m terrified of something happening and then not having the post up on time.)

    Saturday and Sunday I don’t write at all.  I enjoy time with my son.  (We’re totally going to the Zoo today.)

    Now, I’m going to go ahead and admit that this process would not work if I hadn’t made an outline of the book months ago.  That outline has been edited and revamped several times due to research — my character gets to survive a bombing in the town she’s residing that I didn’t know about when I first wrote the outline — so it looks kind of messy.

    But this outline is also far different from anything I’ve ever used before.

    Instead of using plot points to guide me through the chapters, I’ve used character arc points.  Remember that Persona is my “Who am I?” story, so every scene is following Megan as she grows and learns more about who she really is.

    Much of Chapters 1 – 4 are things happening to Megan that are beyond her control, such as the boat sinking and who picked her up, but her reactions to these problems are just as important as when she finally gets to start taking action.

    And, in truth, she started taking action in Chapter 3 when she chose to lie.  But she doesn’t really see that in herself yet.

    Anyway, the outline has two columns.  The first column is the normal process.  (And for some reason I still use Roman Numerals when I’m doing this.)  It shows physical action, things that need to happen or things I need to point to that have already happened to help keep a sense of fluidity within the book.

    The second column is all about the arc.  Such as Megan’s confusion of loyalties.  Her mother was German, after all, and she’s not the sort of person to go picking up a gun and choosing one side over another.  She sees too many real people in front of her to allow for that.  This causes a lot of conflict for her.

    When she’s confronted by the POW — Sam Layton, by the way.  If you’re following the serialization then you’ll get to meet him soon — she is also confronted by the fact that she has to choose a side.

    That’s a major arc point.

    Anyway, so far it is a lot of fun.  I’m a little nervous for next month since I have a couple of new classes starting.  Yay for summer school!  But I do have that 6 chapter buffer to sustain me.

  • Fact vs. Fiction – Chapter Four (Persona)

    All right!  Just a quick heads up for anyone who doesn’t know what this is about … My WWII story Persona is being serialized and posted online for free via Wattpad and its story blog.

    Because this is historical fiction I’ve had to do quite a bit of research to help me wade through it.  I know I’ve only touched the surface of what I should know about that time period, but in the meantime this is what I’ve got so far.

    Fact vs. Fiction – Chapter Four

    Fact: Vernacular … you’ll notice VanBuren called Megan Frauline Vonclese in Chapter Three, but here in Chapter Four I’ve dropped it to call her “Miss Vonclese”.  I did that on purpose.  As I’m writing primarily for an English-speaking audience — I speak English, I write in English, I understand things in English — I thought it best to help equate what ‘Frauline’ means roughly in … you guessed it … English.

    Way back in Chapter Two I used the word “Nein” as well, because I wanted to make it clear who was plucking her out of the ocean.  I use German sporadically throughout the book but don’t want to frustrate readers with too much of it. (Remember, I’ve got a primarily English-speaking audience.)

    Fiction:  I don’t go into too much detail with the port authority and everything.  This is for two reasons; one, I’m really not familiar with how the Nazi party would have handled this particular situation; and two, VanBuren is rich enough to circumvent the normal processes anyway.

    However, it’s safe to say that if Megan were a real person and had somehow been rescued by a German vessel in the middle of WWII, she would not have been show this much lenience.  She’d likely be sent to a camp somewhere to wait out the war.  I acknowledge this and then point emphatically at the word “fiction”, asking for … well … some suspension of disbelief.

    Fact:  Frostbite!  This was actually researched for Chapter’s 3 & 4 due to Megan’s lengthy stay in the water.  I learned that, in the event of frostbite, you actually have to keep appendages (such as Megan’s poor feet) in water and slowly acclimate them to warmth over a period of time.

    Also, those parts of the body that have suffered frostbite cannot be used until they are completely healed.  (Which explains why Megan was in bed for all of Chapter Three.)

    Having never suffered frostbite myself, I am only imagining that two to three weeks after the injury Megan would still feel some tenderness on her rescue toes.  Especially given she hasn’t actually been allowed to walk for much of that time while the feet were healing.

    Fiction:  The bakery scene.  Honestly, I’m not sure how good Wilhelmshaven looked after the 1941 bombing of the port town.  I’m not certain they would have kept a bakery open in such a targeted area during the war.

    But I needed a place for Megan to meet up with Schuler.  It’s possible that I could alter this scene in a future revision to show Megan and VanBuren making their way to the train depot instead.

    Author’s Note:  Now that I look at it, the depot does seem like a better place to send her.  I will likely change it. 

  • What I Love to Read – Round Robin Blog Post

    I have boxes of books everywhere in my apartment.  Some are hidden in my closet, some in the storage unit outside, and there’s even one under my bed.  I normally rotate the books on my shelves twice a year just to keep my library choices “fresh”.  So it goes without saying that I love to read.

    When I visit the bookstore I tend to linger in the fantasy/science fiction section.  (That makes sense since I am primarily a fantasy/science fiction author.)  There’s just something about walking on another planet that appeals to me.  I love seeing familiar things made unfamiliar.

    Like dragons, for instance.  How many different variations of dragons are out there now?  Eragon gave us a feathery version, The Smoke Thief gave us a strange misty-version, and there was one I read a while back that had a really cool wyrm hiding in the center of the earth.  (Forgive me, I can’t remember the title of that one.  It’s in one of my buried boxes and I won’t get it out until October.)

    But as much as I love science fiction and fantasy, I also love Ken Follett and all his World War II books like The Key to Rebecca or The Eye of the Needle or, my particular favorite, Jackdaws.  Mr. Follett has a real grasp of strong, complicated women.

    Oh!  And I can’t talk about my favorite books without mentioning Diana Gabaldon and the Outlander series.  Those books let me walk in another time and really breathe life as it once was.

    And finally, when I want to laugh and escape for a little while, I’ll buy a Jennifer Crusie novel.  She’s a romance author but her characters have so much sass and approach life with enough verve that I actually want to sit down and have lunch with them.

    Round Robin Continues!

    Billie A. Williams is a mystery suspense author.  Check out what she loves to read on her Blog at http://printedwords.blogspot.com/.

  • Fact vs. Fiction — Chapter Three (Persona)

    For those following along with the serialization of Persona, here is the Fact vs. Fiction page for Chapter Three.

    So far this whole experience has been incredibly fun!  If you’re just hearing about it, Persona is my WWII novel that is currently being serialized online for free.  You can find it at its Wattpad address or at its story blog.

    But here’s the battle of Fact vs. Fiction in Chapter Three!

     

    Chapter Three – Fact vs. Fiction

     

    Fact:  When I was in high school I took German as my second language.  (We totally watched The Sound of Music and The Great Escape during school.  It was awesome.)  But I remember our teacher Mr. Vanburen (yes, I totally snagged his name because he was one of my favorite teachers and I wanted to immortalize him somehow) said that there were different dialects in the German language.  It is much like anywhere else, I imagine, with different accents coming out.

     

    Doctor Who fans will remember the Ninth Doctor being accused of coming from the north (of Britain) and his response was; “Lots of places have a north!”

     

    So!  The idea of Uncle George’s “language game” isn’t too far-fetched.  It’s a little weird, but that gets explained as time goes on.  Uncle George isn’t the most honest of fellows, after all.

     

    Fiction:  I shoved Megan into a converted storage room on board the ship because I really didn’t know where they would keep a stranded girl on board.  I always imagined it was positioned just beside or inside the sick bay so that Herr Schuler could see to her.  Let’s face it, this sequence of events is very fictional and I doubt they had a manual for what to do when they picked up a half-drowned woman.

     

    Fact:  There really is a place called the Jade Bight.  In Germany it’s called Jadebusen and it’s a bay just south of Wilhelmshaven.  I had to mention it somewhere because, quite frankly, that’s the coolest sounding name in the world.

     

    Fiction:  This is only a quasi-issue because Megan isn’t in the military and really doesn’t know what’s going on, but in the event someone was taken on board a ship like this they would most likely be kept alive.  The whole “remand her into custody of the port authority” is semi-realistic.  VanBuren would need to give her to his superiors, who would then direct her to military intelligence for interrogation and then relocation to a camp.  (More about this in Chapter Four.)

     

    Fact:  My original draft of this story had four other POW’s on board the ship, which Megan was kind of interrogated through because Wycoff forced her into the same room with them and then listened to see if she revealed anything.  She then set about trying to help rescue these four men, which she managed during a bit of a battle, but she still got stuck going to Germany because she had to act as a distraction in order for the men to run.

     

    It was a fun sequence, but after quite a bit of research I dug up the fact that it was very unlikely for prisoners to be taken on board ships like this.  Which meant if I had Megan rescued then I had to dump the other four guys.  I mean, I was already stretching the whole suspension of disbelief, so I needed to trim it down.

     

  • Story Bibles (aka – Consistency, People!)

    A friend of mine uses a Wiki to keep all her files straight while she’s writing a book.  I’ve seen software designed to help maintain little “sticky-notes” to help authors as they’re in the middle of creating their fiction.  Both would fall under what I define as a “story bible”.

    Basically, that’s the spot the author goes to in order to remember all the crap … uh … I mean brilliant details … they have written to help keep their story feeling real.  Because those details are important.  Details are what keep us grounded in a particular work.

    (I heard a rumor George R.R. Martin got skewered for renaming a beloved horse in one of his books.)

    Easy example … Harry Potter’s round-framed glasses.  If those glasses had changed at any point in the books I think Rowling would have been deep-fried by her fans.  You see those glasses and immediately you’re on the lookout for jumping chocolate frogs (also a detail) and people running for a brick pillar, heading for Hogwart’s train (yet another detail).

    Now then … Until I started writing sequels to my books I never kept a story bible.  The characters and worlds were fairly clear in my head and I was stupid enough to think I wouldn’t really need one.

    Saboteur isn’t really a good example of my needing a story bible because it took place in a part of the Dyngannon world that I’d never visited before.  But as I am currently writing the third book in the series (Usurper) and I am revisiting places both in Saboteur and Sedition …

    Yeah.

    I’m wishing I’d went ahead and written one out.

    It’s not so much the characters that worry me — I know who I want to show up where and why and what impact that’s going to have on the story — but the descriptions, the landmarks … those I might have some trouble with.

    My solution?  A notebook.

    I love that people can use technology to make Wiki’s and such, but there is just something about having my scribbles in weird margins, writing running vertical across the page, and using multiple colors that just appeals to me.

    What can I say?  It’s a jumbled mess in my head, it’s going to come out bizarre on the page, too.

    The only exception I have here is the notebook for Tapped.  That story bible is far more organized than any of my others.

    Then again, it does have the outlines and big plot points for 7 novels and novellas in it.  That’s right.  I said 7.  There might even be more than that.  I’m not sure.  I think I could do it in 6 but the whole series has a very episodic feel to it.

    And I’m looking forward to the novellas.  There are at least two of them.  So, technically, I could do the series in 4 books with 2 novellas tacked on.

    I think.

    But really, who wants to put a limit on a series about rescuing refugees?

  • Fact vs. Fiction Chapter Two – Persona

    Chapter Two – Fact vs. Fiction

     

    Fiction:  I have Megan on board the SS Ceramic and for all intents and purposes she’s headed for London to meet her Uncle George.  However the SS Ceramic was actually headed toward Australia, not England.  Which, of course, is a bit of a problem.  But because I wanted to highlight the tragedy of the Ceramic I went ahead and kept it.

    Fact:  The SS Ceramic had just gone past the Azores when it was hit.  Here’s another little site about this event in history — It even has a big picture for you.

     

    Fiction:  Here in Chapter Two I have Megan picked up by the Germans.  Let’s go ahead and admit that this was unlikely to happen.  Granted, Henke of the U-515 did pick up Mr. Munday, but that wasn’t a normal scenario.  (Note that in Chapter One Denton does mention to Megan that prisoners were not often taken on board a ship.)  But as this is a fiction book, I went ahead with this section in the hopes that readers could suspend their disbelief long enough to get Megan into Germany.

    Author’s Note:  Because of how controversial the whole sinking scenario felt to me as the writer, I do have a draft of this novel where Megan is shown already in Germany when the war starts.  I have her in a big rush for the border but by the time she gets there everything has closed down.  However, I like this opening better  and since I’m giving it away for free it I decided to keep it.  

    Fact:  The fate of Sapper Eric Munday!  After being rescued from the sea by the enemy, Sapper Munday was interrogated and then taken as a Prisoner of War, where he remained until the end of the war.  There are some books out there about him (which I admit I have not read but fully intend to.)

    Fiction:  The timeline of the sinking is off.  Apparently Ceramic sustained its first hit somewhere around 8 PM but didn’t actually sink until the final torpedo’s struck it around midnight.  Also, here in the second chapter I have the storm abating in the morning when in fact it was around 8 AM when the really big winds started up and the stranded passengers started capsizing.