A.J. Maguire

Tag: Writing

  • Sequels & Teasers

    I did not finish Usurper by the 2014 deadline. I felt a little bad about that, but then I looked at all I accomplished in 2013 and decided one miss wasn’t going to kill me.

    Besides, I was stuck in Usurper because I knew Trenna and company were going home to Kiavana and I needed to figure out what had changed while they’d been away.

    And boy, a lot has changed.

    When I wrote Saboteur and Nelek had his brief visit home I didn’t have much trouble because … well, because 20 years hadn’t passed and there wasn’t much different. But walking into Kiavana Fortress now has to be both familiar and foreign.

    This is the key to sequels, I think. This mesh of familiar and foreign, the appearance of beloved characters and the surprise of new situations … this is what can make or break a sequel. And it’s supremely hard to do.

    Honestly, I don’t think I quite managed it in Saboteur. In my defense, Nelek isn’t in Kiavana long enough for it to really matter. But in Usurper we get to spend quite a bit of time in the castle, and I am very excited by it.

    Fans of the books should be pleased by what they find. (At least I hope they are. I was.) And because I promised a bit of a teaser on my Facebook page, I’ll post a bit of what I wrote this week.

    —– NOTE: This is an unedited version ——

    Troy dismounted his horse and frowned at the ruins. They’d ridden most of the night, resting the horses just long enough to eat and this was what they were looking for?

    It might have been a manor once but age and weather had crumbled the walls to an almost unrecognizable state. The dilapidated building was situated on a small inlet with a wide, undisturbed lake surrounding it. The forest seemed to be doing its best to overtake the half-collapsed conical towers. Vines and weeds crawled over pale stone, and peppered throughout what he could only assume had once been the courtyard were small trees sprouting between bits of rock.

    He didn’t know whether to be sad that a manor could be reduced to such a state or amazed at the relentless growth slowing eating away at it.

    “What is this place?” Liana asked.

    Her voice was quiet, almost reverent, and when Troy looked at her he saw her shiver. She kept hold of her horse’s reigns but her blue gaze was fixed on the highest wall. She looked unsettled, maybe even frightened, and Troy frowned some more. He looked back at the ruins, trying to see what she saw, but could only find rough rock and greenery. He wondered if something in her Eldur blood was speaking to her but was afraid to ask. He found everything dealing with magic to be deeply troubling.

    “This was my mother’s home,” Nelek said.

    “Grandmother Auliere?” Kaden asked as he dismounted.

    Troy moved to tie his horse to the nearest tree. He felt painfully out of place and needed to do something so he busied himself with unloading his saddle bags. He knew Kaden would scoff at him for thinking it, but when it came to Dyngannon family history he knew he didn’t quite fit. He was human, the son of their mother’s rival, and while Trenna had always called him a sign of peace for the future, his love and involvement in their family could not blot out the past.

    He pulled his sword from the saddle and started strapping it on, barely listening to the conversation behind him.

    “Brenson and I used to spend hours swimming in the lake,” Nelek said. “There’s a river that runs just past Kiavana fortress and ends right here. One of my earliest memories of your mother is in that river. Our camp was overrun and we had to flee.”

    “I didn’t take mother for the running sort,” Liana said.

    “I’m sure your mother would have loved to stay and fight,” Nelek said. “But she was my bodyguard at the time. Her first duty was my safety. So we ran.”

  • Books that Help

    There are many things that have affected my writing over the years. The Army taught me how to capture snippets of scenes on 3×5 cards so as not to lose them. It also gave me my primary character pool — soldiers. (I do so love soldiers. The sense of duty, honor, and respect that goes with them is hard to understand outside of a uniform.)

    I’ve read countless books on how to be a better writer too. My two favorites are Fiction First Aid by Raymond Obstfeld and Fiction Writer’s Brainstormer by James V. Smith Jr. Neither are very well known but both have impacted my writing career in big ways.

    I’ll go ahead and give you a rundown on the three main things I garnered from these books. If you’re an author and you haven’t read them, I encourage you to give them a try. But if you don’t have either the money or the time for another writing craft book then let me give you these three things.

    1) They taught me to view my writing as a craft. 

    “Craft” is a verb. It’s an action, and like any martial arts move you see flaunted on the movie screen it has to be honed in order to be any good. That means practice, and lots of it.

    2) Character boxes

    I adapted this one from Fiction First Aid. On my first pass through the editing process I highlight little boxes around each major and minor character when they show up in the text. Anything that has to do with physical description in particular needs to be drawn out so that I can compare and make certain I haven’t altered anything later in the text.

    I don’t normally have this problem with the main characters, but the people who intersect the story at various points sometimes get lost. These boxes help me find them again and keep them straight.

    3) The Brain Stretch

    This one I adapted from Fiction Writer’s Brainstormer. Near the end of the book Smith gives this worksheet to use to help bring fresh content into your writing. I call it “the brain stretch” and I try to use it once or twice a year.

    It’s a challenge. You find a certain number of expressions, puns, emotional moments, and what have you. I took some of his suggestions out and put my own in so I’ll give you a sample from the one I am working on this month;

    – List 10 characters in 100 words or less.

    – Write the “nugget” for your current work in progress. (The “nugget” is the main thrust of your story in 100 words or less.)

    – List 10 expressions you’ve either heard or read and how you might use them in fiction. (Normally I just write the character most likely to use said expression off to the side.)

    That’s just a sampling of what I’ve adapted this “brain stretch” into. Sometimes I use what I’ve found but often it’s just a way to reset my mind. By the time I’m done with it I feel more capable of doing the work in front of me.

    So! If you haven’t read either of those two books I highly recommend them. But I also have to give the disclaimer that what worked for me won’t necessarily work for you. There’s a reason why the examples I gave above are adaptations of what I read; I’m different from those two authors and had to tweak those exercises to fit me.

    Which, I think, brings me to a fourth lesson they taught me …

    4) Don’t be afraid to adapt teachings into something you can work with.

    In the end, it’s your craft. Other people might write, but only I can write like A.J. Maguire.

  • Round Robin Discussion – Growth as a Writer

    This month’s Round Robin discussion is on how we have each grown as writers!

    Every book I write is an adventure. I learn something new about the craft of writing and how I can hone my own style with each chapter. I’ve learned that I can’t have an outline at the beginning of a book, but that I can’t finish a book without an outline either.

    It sounds strange, I know. But I think Brandon Sanderson has mentioned that he does the same thing so I think I’m in good company here.

    I need the freedom of not knowing where the book is going in order to pay attention to the characters on the page. And then, once I feel I know those characters and their motivations, that’s when I need to find out where the story is going and build toward it.

    Subsequently, I’ve learned that I have to write my outline in a notebook with a base color – often blue. And then I add to it in different colors; red for plot issues, green for character arc questions, purple for graphics like setting, and sometimes pink for mechanical and/or magic questions that need to be addressed in the storyline.

    It’s a mess when you look at it, but it’s a mess that makes my brain happy. Somehow, in the middle of all those colors and questions, that outline is able to carry me through to the end of the book.

    Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned comes from the fact that I’ve been in school for the past three years. So many people say they don’t have time to write and, let’s be honest here, it doesn’t look like I should have the time to write either. Between a full-time job, a full schedule at school, and being a single parent, writing should be impossible.

    But I’ve learned that if you love something enough, you’ll make room for it somewhere.

    So if you truly love writing, you’ll find the time to do it. Even if you’re scribbling notes on the back of a receipt from Barnes & Noble, you’re writing. Even if all you’ve got is twenty minutes on your lunch break with a notepad, that’s twenty minutes more time with pen to page and you’re writing.

    I’ll graduate in May 2014, which will free up a lot of time to write. I’m hoping that with all this new time I’ll be able to get at least four drafts done before 2015 hits us. (That’s four separate stories, not four drafts of the same story.) I have a pretty full publication schedule in 2014 as well, which will require my attention in the marketing department.

    Five or ten years from now I hope to still be telling stories. For me it’s not about the sales so much as it’s about telling a compelling story that challenges who I am as a person. If I’m not challenged by what I’m writing then I’m not going deep enough into the characters on the page. Maybe in the middle of challenging myself I’ll be able to challenge someone else. We can all be better people, we just have to find the inspiration to spark us into movement.

    The Round Robin Continues with author Connie Vines at her blog. So hop on over there and check out how Connie has grown as an author!

  • A Look At 2014

    Woot! It’s time to make my list of things for next year!

    Really, I love this post. It gets me all excited for what I’m about to work on. I did spend a lot of time playing with this new computer and its handy little calendar, so I have a lot of big ideas to put up here.

    So, without further ado, here is my list for 2014.

    #1) Graduate. (That’s right, people. In May 2014 I will officially graduate from Northwest Nazarene University with my Bachelor of Arts.)

    #2) Submit Persona to the ABNA contest in January. (That’s the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. It’s worth a shot, you know?)

    #3) Implement edits from developmental editor (Yay, Gabriel Fitzpatrick!) on Tapped. (Yes, that book I finished last year that went out to Alpha/Beta readers and a supremely wonderful editor will be edited during the first 5 months of 2014. It wouldn’t normally take that long to do edits but … you know … I’ll still be in school around that time.)

    #4) Finish Residual Haunting. (Yep, that’s the novel I started for NaNoWriMo this year.)

    #5) Revamp the synopsis and query letters for the revised Tapped novel. And then Send. Out. Those. Queries. (Non-negotiable there.)

    #6) (Starting in September) Revise Persona and start formatting it for publication.

    #7) Participate in NaNoWriMo again. (Hopefully I’ll win, too. I won’t be in school anymore so I won’t have that excuse if I lose.)

    #8) On December 2, 2014 Persona will be released as my first self-published novel. (This would be my big, scary, impossible goal for the year. I’ve never released something on my own and it’s going to be a challenge.)

    #9) I would really, really, really like it if I could climb a mountain. (Let’s hope that I get a car that works and the state of Idaho doesn’t catch fire again.)

    #10) If I can swing it, I would love to be a Secret Santa for someone next year. I’ve had one this year and it has been wonderful fun.

    … And there you have it. My goals for 2014.

    There are a lot more on there than last year, and most of them have to do with writing. Yes, that is deliberate. After graduating I intend to make a big professional push in that direction. That’ll mean marketing and all that jazz as well — which I admit I have no idea how to do.

    But I figure I went to school so I could do what I love. And what I love is telling stories that examine who we are as people, that expose both the ugly parts of us and the beauty we are capable of. The degree that I’ll have is really just another tool to help me tell those stories.

    So here I am rolling up my sleeves, getting ready for one awesome 2014. I hope everyone is as excited as I am for the future.

  • Good Lord, is 2013 almost over?

    Looking at my blog schedule I realized that I have all of 3 weeks left in the year. 3 weeks and 2013 is over!

    Well, three weeks and a few days if we want to be technical. But since the end of this year is actually going to be supremely crazy for me (5-year-old + Christmas = Mayhem) I thought I’d better write my year-in-review now. Because honestly, apart from making New Years goals this happens to be one of my absolute favorite posts to make. (Uber loves and thanks go out to Lisa Cohen for getting me hooked on this.)

    So! What did I say I wanted to do in the year 2013?

    1) Submit my edited copy of Dead Magic to DDP on my deadline of March 1st.

    There’s a big check mark in that particular box. Dead Magic was sent in, edited twice over by the fine people at DDP, and will be released in 2014.

    2) Finish Usurper.

    To be totally honest, I’m still working on this one. But if I follow my schedule I will have it done on December 3oth. Which is cutting it a little close but … eh … at least it’ll have a completed draft.

    3) World Build and (hopefully) complete Tapped.

    Another big check mark. Tapped has a completed draft AND went through the hands of an editor. I’ll be editing Tapped using the editor’s notes starting January 2nd.

    4) Climb 2 Mountains.

    …….. Well, you see, my car broke. I couldn’t drive up to the mountains in a car that kept breaking, so I couldn’t climb any mountains. But I totally made up for this, I swear!

    Those are the 4 goals I planned out for 2013. Here’s what I did in addition to all of that;

    1) Re-wrote and serialized my first historical fiction — Hurray Persona!

    2) Participated (and lost) NaNoWriMo, leaving me with 37 thousand words of a truly entertaining ghost/science fiction story.

    3) Edited Deviation per DDP notes — subsequently Deviation will also be released in 2014.

    4) Wrote a short story for a new DDP anthology — which I imagine will come out soon. (The Nano-Fisherman’s Wife)

    5) Wrote another short story for a completely different anthology which will hopefully come out around Christmastime. (Countdown to Goodbye)

    6) Started lifting weights. (This is not a joke. I totally have started lifted weights and my arms look incredible. If I weren’t allergic to the whole “selfie” picture thing I would totally post one just of my biceps.)

    7) Started researching the Civil War era for a prospective historical novel.

    And that’s all on top of the whole school work thing. Which, by the way, I will graduate in the Spring. But I’ll post next week about all the fun things I get to do in 2014. For now, I’m just happy to see what I managed to accomplish in 2013. It was truly a year of hard work, but it was work I enjoyed doing so that made it worth all the hours in front of an empty page.

    I hope everyone else had a wonderful year and I’m looking forward to a fruitful 2014.

  • New Computer Fun

    Well, it’s actually been a couple weeks since I got this computer but I wanted to wait a while to discuss it since it has Windows 8 and a ton of bells and whistles that I’ve been playing with. And I should probably note that I don’t buy computers for fun, my old Acer was having fan issues so I needed a new laptop.

    I shall miss the Acer. I shall miss all the Star Trek I played on its 13″ screen.

    I shall now enjoy Star Trek on a 17″ screen. (A screen that makes it look like I’m really right there with the Borg trying to assimilate me. My geek-self might have squeed.)

    I like Windows 8. I like all the pretty tabs — I think they’re called jewels — on the start screen. (I didn’t like that I had to get an Audible technician on the phone to figure out how to get my downloads delivered straight to my iTunes again, but I think that has more to do with me being clueless than the system itself.)

    And I love the calendar.

    In fact, I love that calendar so much I went through and mapped out almost all of 2014 for my writing goals. (Hey, I’ve just about finished all of my 2013 goals so I’m allowed to look ahead.)

    I’ll be graduating in May so the last 7 months of 2014 are going to free up a crap ton of time for me. Which means more time for writing, editing and even the dreaded marketing that everyone whimpers about. (I’ll probably whimper about it too when I finally sink my teeth into it.)

    By the end of this month I’ll have finished the first draft of Usurper. And yes, I was nerdy enough to map out December on the calendar too.

    I can’t help it! It’s pretty and easy to use and I really don’t know what all the fuss was about when Windows 8 first showed up. I heard several people complain about it when they first got it but now that I’ve used this computer for a while I’m going to have to assume that those who complained are mostly people who “know what they like” instead of “liking what they know.”

    In short, I have a shiny new toy. It’s pretty and I love using it. Hopefully it spur me into writing faster and with more quality. (But more than likely it will just tempt me into hours and hours of Star Trek.)

  • Congratulations to all NaNoWriMo Participants

    I hope you all had as much fun as I did writing during the month of November. I do so love National Novel Writing Month and I was so happy to have the chance to participate this year … even though I lost.

    I was short by about 14,000 words which if I hadn’t gone to visit family for the last week of November I would have managed to surpass. But in the end I really, really, really needed four days away from the computer screen. (Remember, I work in front of a computer, do homework in front a computer, and transcribe my novels onto a computer, I think I deserve a little down time every now and then.)

    As much as I would love to continue working on Residual/Print (I can’t decide on a title yet) I have to set the book aside to finish up work on Usurper. I know Trenna fans will be happy to hear that her third novel will come out late next year. I promise she’s just as sassy as ever and has a riot in this third installment.

    For Residual/Print/I’ll-figure-out-the-title-someday I have to admit that I had a blast writing it. This would be my first try at a semi-horror type novel. I did scare myself once while I was in the middle of writing it, and not because I had forgotten to save the manuscript to my USB device.

    In fact, it was late at night and I was in the middle of a particularly creepy scene when my cat leapt onto the back of my chair and scared the skittles out of me. It took a good minute for my heart to calm down and I decided I’d better finish that scene before I went to bed.

    To everyone who participated this year — Congratulations!

    Even if you didn’t win, you sat down and got words on paper and that is just plain amazing. We all know it’s a crappy first draft — everything starts as a crappy first draft — but now there’s something to work with.

    Well done! And I hope you had as much fun as I did. (Without having your cat scare the skittles out of you.)

  • 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!