Surrey International Writers Conference Report by Nancy M Bell

Wow, I can't believe another year has passed and SIWC2014 is over. As always I had a wonderful and informative time soaking in the advice and information provided by the presenters and visiting with old friends. Not to mention making tons of new ones. I flew into Abbotsford airport on Thursday morning with my friend Vicki Barrow and was met by Sharon Clayton who was kind enough to come and collect us. Thursday afternoon was spent in a Masters Class with Jack Whyte where 12 lucky people (this class fills up REALLY fast every year) get three pages of their work critiqued by Jack and then the rest of the class weighs in with their opinion too. I always learn so much and pick up so many nuances of the craft from listening to everyone's work and the comments generated by it.

Thursday night I lounged a bit and then met up with my friend Sara Benfit from Portland. This is our time to catch up with each other and have a good natter. Sara does three Masters Classes on the Thursday. Kudos to her, she has way more stamina than I do. LOL

Vicki, Me and Sharon

Friday morning started with a key note address by Peter Rubie. Then we were off to our workshops. I attended "Navigating Online Promotion and Social Media" with Sarah Wendell. It was a blast! Sarah is a dynamic presenter and immensely amusing. Also, love those shoes, girl! Sarah wore these cool heels with three bows up the front-- very awesome! Other workshops offered at the same time were: Elevator Pitches, Setting: More than Creating a Sense of Place with Hallie Ephron, Building the Romance Novel with Elizabeth Boyle, Tough language, Tender Wisdoms with Amber Dawn, Intro to Speculative Fiction with Danika Dinsmore, Catcher in the Wry: Writing for Teens with Anita Daher, Creating Narrative Drive with Roberta Rich and Live the Dream as a Travel Writer with Lucas Aykroyd. Whew! And that's just the morning session! From 1:30 to 3 I attended A Dozen Stories: Discussing what works with Peter Rubie. This was billed as a manuscript discussion but ended up being more about how to pitch to an agent. Still very informative. There were again numerous other workshops but I won't bore you by listing them all! From 3:30 to 5 I attended a workshop with Michael Slade entitled Northern Gothic. It was very informative and Michael is a wonderful engaging speaker.

Friday night is costume night! This year the theme was Secrets, Lies and Bad Guys. I went as Mata Hari and Vicki was Black Jack Randall from Outlander. Her red great coat was AMAZING. It was a hilarious night. The crowning jewel of the evening is Michael Slade's Shock Theatre where he and a star studded cast perform some weird and wonderful spooky play done like an old radio show. The cast includes Jack Whyte, Anne Perry, Diana Gabaldon, kc Dyer and Michael Slade. In keeping with the Hallowe'en season, a pumpkin is always smashed at some point near the end. Last year Robert Dugoni wore the pumpkin on his head and dashed about before smashing it on the board provided. Always a huge hit and not to be missed if you attend this wonderful conference.

Mata Hari and Black Jack Randall

My take on Mata Hari's jeweled bra. I gifted it to Madame Zamboni played by MC Carol as she gazed into her crystal ball and commented on Mata Hari's "44's"

Saturday starts off in the Guildford Ballroom again with a keynote by Cory Doctorow. Then it was off to New Ideas in Social Media with Sean Cranbury, followed by lunch, and then Public Speaking for Writers with Robin Spano. This was a great workshop where everyone got to practice speaking to the group and answering off the cuff interview questions. How not to put your foot in your mouth 101 I dubbed it. LOL I missed the very popular SIWC Idol session where writers submit one page of their work anonymously and pages are picked at random and read by Jack Whyte to a panel of agents who give it a Yay or a Nay. Then it was off to Back Story with Anne Perry. Another great informative workshop.

Saturday evening is the Huge Book Signing event. My friend Sara Durham and I were part of it and had a great time. Tons of people show up as the event is open to the public. Lots of laughter and good conversation. A long long line of people waited patiently for Diana Gabaldon to sign their books, as well as a good turnout for Anne Perry and Jack Whyte. It is always wonderful to talk to readers and share my books with them.

I opted out of dinner to visit with a dear friend of mine who has had some health challenges this fall and this was the only time we could get together. We have a joy filled evening catching up at the ABC restaurant which we closed down! It was raining like cats and dogs and I was very grateful Arlen and Lynne picked me up and delivered me back to the hotel. Once back at the hotel I made my way up to Jack Whyte's book launch party. His third book in the Guardians of Scotland trilogy was set to release on November 4, 2014. But we had the wonderful opportunity to purchase it in advance of that date and Jack very graciously signed many copies. He also bought a small dram of Scotch for those present. YUM!

Sunday morning, everyone is a wee bit weary by now, but still energized by the keynote by Laura Bradbury. It seems like the weekend just began and now it's time to say goodbye for another year! Kathy Chung, event co-ordinator does a fantastic job each year and 2014 was no exception. Kudos to Kathy and the SIWC Board. A huge hoard of volunteers ensure the event runs like clockwork. Sunday morning workshop was Public Readings and Developing your Authentic Voice with Sean Cranbury, then on to Action Scenes with Jack Whyte. Then it's time for the final luncheon and good-byes. If you want to find more about this great experience you can visit the SIWC website.

On another note: If you're looking for a Christmas gift for the romance lover on your list... My romance Christmas Storm: A Longview Romance has just released. You can find out more at my author page at Books We Love.

Looking At Edits To Dread Or Not To Dread by Janet Lane Walters

I've been published as an author for 46 years and I've been receiving edits from publishers for that long. The first thing that happens when these arrive is that feeling that you've made a lot of mistakes or that someone wants to change your story. Not so. Over the years I've seen a lot of changes in this process. I've also learned to take a lot of deep breaths before looking to see what I've done wrong. There isn't usually too much except for some dreadful habits I have.

Habit one is forgetting the question marks. I'm improving with this but there are also times when the question is asked but not punctuated. Another is typing sentences and leaving words out. Somehow in one's head the words are there no matter how many times you read them.

In the past four days I've done the edits for three books. Two because they were going to be published and one because I needed to clean it up and make it current to be re-released some day. In this one though it had been edited by me and by an editor or two I found one glaring mistake. His look bred contempt. But it said His look bread contempt. I either wanted to laugh or cry but I made the changes. On the other books there were comments like "Did you mean this?" After reading the passage, I wasn't sure what I meant. There were other comments about adding some details, especially since one of the books was the third of a trilogy and one does need to let the reader know who the mentioned people were and exactly what part they had or would play in the story.

So now I'll talk about how edits were received in the "old days." When I wrote short stories, I never received any edits. The editor made the changes they wanted done. I seldom found anything that was changed to make the story less than mine. Then I moved to writing novels.

Writing novels began in the days of sending off the entire mss. in a box and receiving it back for edits in a different box or in an envelope. The first few times, there were comments written on the pages, meaning one had to look at every page and decipher what the editor meant. Some of these editors rivaled physicians in the way they wrote. Then there was a revolution and the sticky notes came out and the mss. received was decorated. Some editors used different colors for different things. Little notes were discovered on these sticky things.

Now we come to today. Edits come via download and they still contain the color coded material. except you have to know how to take the notes away. This was a learning curve for me but I have mastered the process. Doesn't mean I love receiving the edits but the one thing I have learned is that these edits always make for a better and stronger story.

A final word of advice. When they arrive, take a deep breath and then start slowly. The second word of advice is do not accept all changes because you might miss something vital. Just go down the colored notes one by one and figure what needs to be done.

Just in case you're interested, the two books I was doing for Books We Love Ltd came out this weekend. Pursuing Michael West MD and Toth's priest.

My Hobby by Roseanne Dowell

I thought I'd talk a little about one of my hobbies instead of writing. That's right, you won't find anything about any of my books on this blog. It's all about my hobby.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m not writing is embroidery. Another is quilting. I've found a way to combine the two. First, I made baby quilts for my nieces. White on white, I machine embroidered them with the darning stitch so I had control. They turned out really pretty, but I really love to hand embroider. That’s when I discovered red-work. During a quilting shop-hop, one of the stores highlighted red-work. For those who don’t know what red-work is – it’s embroidery done in all red floss. Just the outline of the picture, not filled in like other embroidery patterns. Anyway, I fell in love with it.

Every year I make something for Christmas (usually a Santa) for my children and give it to them on Thanksgiving. Sometimes it’s ceramic, sometimes wood. I found a Santa pattern and did it all in red-work, framed it and gave it to them one year.

That’s when I decided to make a baby quilt for each of my grandchildren – not for them, but for their first born, my great grandchildren. I'd already made lap quilts for each of my children and grandchildren. 
But where to find patterns? I started out with coloring books for designs. I traced the images onto 12x12 squares of muslin and embroidered them.  After I finished embroidering the squares, I cut sashing and sewed them together. For the backing I used various fabrics, not nursery print. None of the quilts have nursery fabric in them at all. 
I also used patterns from zoo animals to Winnie the Pooh.

Eventually, I found transfer books and used them for designs, much easier than tracing the. I just ironed them on. 
I looked everywhere for baby designs. It took several years, but they're all finished. I have 14 grandchildren, that’s a lot of baby quilts. Most of the quilts are done in red work, but several are done with various colors of embroidery floss, too. 

I also made quilts for my niece’s twins. One of the patterns is kittens and the other is bunnies. She had a girl and boy, so I thought the bunnies would be good for him. Recently, she had another child. A boy–so I just finished q baby animals one for him. 

So far I've given my first grandchild’s quilt to my oldest granddaughter, who had a baby boy, my first great grandchild. 

I recently found out another granddaughter is having a baby in May, so another quilt will be delivered at her shower in April. We don't know the sex yet, but the quilts aren't gender specific. 
I've marked each quilt with the name of the grandchild they’re supposed to go to in case I’m not around to give it to them. My youngest grandchild is only four. I'm already in my sixties, there's a pretty good chance I won't see him married, let alone his children.
My daughters have been instructed to pass them out. I hope I’m still around to give each child their quilt, but if I’m not they’ll each have a piece of me for their children. I hope they treasure them as much as I do. Below is a collage of a few of the ones I made.

 To store them, I put them in large store bought quilt bag. Yes, I bought a quilt for my bed. But I did make one too, I embroidered wild flowers in each square – and yes, I filled them in, not just outlined. I use it on my bed in the summer. It took over a year to embroider all the flowers, but it was worth it. Besides, I have nothing better to do in the evening while I’m watching TV. That’s the nice thing about embroidery, you can sit in front of the TV and still work on it. The hard part was quilting it.

So now you know a little more about me. I'm not just an author, I'm a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother.  I enjoy writing, but my family is my first love. 

Find all of Roseanne's books at Books We Love or Amazon

Two Sides to the Cover

By Michelle Lee

BWL Art Director

On the one hand ...

As a fiction writer, you probably already know that research is vitally important.  For example, if you are focusing on a specific time period, you want to use historically accurate words.  Your characters need to feel, to the reader, like they are coming alive - and are authentic.

You polish your work, pouring all of your love and attention and determination into it, and almost grudgingly hand it over to a publisher.  And then the fun begins.

You get a cover concept back - and *gasp* the clothing isn't exactly right.  The waist of the dress is too high, the sleeves not poofy enough, or even worse, the dress isn't flaring enough at the bottom to be a ball gown.

All that research - and for what?

* * *

The other side of the story ...

A cover art form comes in, and after looking it over, the task seems almost impossible.  Finding a couple, wearing the exact clothing in the exact colors, with the perfect hair and eye color, and without modern looking manicures on the woman.

How on earth are you going to come up with a cover that perfectly encompasses all of those details, with stock art.   Especially considering you are not a historical scholar.

The answer is - you aren't.  Which means you are going to disappoint the author in some way (even if it is only a small detail).  And that is a very hard thing to accept on a day to day basis - but it is the reality of the job.

* * *

As an author, I know how important cover art is in not only branding your books, but also giving hints (at a quick glance) of what the story is all about.  I know how frustrating it can be trying to get your vision for the cover across in a two-page form.  I know the agony of waiting for the cover art to come in.  And I know the frustration when details are slightly off.

As a cover artist, I am very familiar with the hours that can be spent (and quite often just wasted) trying to find the perfect image for a cover.  Sometimes the angle is off and it won't merge well with the background, or the model has a very obvious french manicure, yet is posing in Renaissance clothing.  You want to create something both you, and the author, can be proud of ... and yet ... the images just won't cooperate.

* * *

I guess what I am trying to explain with all of this is ... the cover artist-author relationship is a lot like any other relationship.  There has to be some compromise to it.  A lot of understanding.  And the product of the relationship - the cover art - might be slightly flawed by not being perfectly accurate but it is a reflection of both the artists efforts to provide a reflection of the author's hard work and the author's work itself.  So before you get frustrated at the details, take a step back and look at the overall picture.

And ask yourself these simple questions:

* does it overall reflect the tone or feel of the story?
* is is quality and something you would be proud to have showcasing your hard work?
* is is obvious that the artist tried to meet your needs?
* will this cover help your book sell? (and will reader feel it is an accurate - within reason - reflection of the story)

If your answer is no to any of these questions, then you should feel the right to request some serious revisions to the cover, or a complete start over.

But if you answered yes to them all ... ask yourself this ... does that one little inconsistency, that one historically inaccurate detail detract from the overall cover, and is it realistically likely that a better image will be found?

* * *

If you are interested in other rambling about cover art by Michelle Lee, check out the following Inside BWL Blog Posts:
Alas Poor Images, I Cannot Find You
Fonts, Fonts, and More Fonts

and other Behind The Cover Art posts ...

* * *

Michelle Lee is a self-taught cover artist who has an opinion on pretty much everything, and a love of the natural world that often means tidbits and trivia are shared on a whim.  You can check out her portfolio at: Stardust Creations

The Rewards of Random Reading by Sheila Claydon

When I go on holiday I rarely read the books I take with me. Instead I read the books previous holiday makers have left behind. Crammed onto shelves in the hotel reception area, scattered on tables in the guest lounge, stacked beside the TV in the villa or apartment...wherever we happen to be staying there are always abandoned books. And what treasures they are. On holiday I've discovered authors I've never heard of, learned new things, been reminded of  long forgotten stories, looked at situations in a different way and, in the reading, remembered why a new book is always such a joy.

Of course reading on holiday has an added bonus because it's one of the few times it's possible to read a book  from cover to cover in an afternoon.  On my last holiday I read The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and in the process learned a whole lot more about the American Deep South in the early part of the twentieth century. By the time I finished it I was so entranced that I followed it up by listening to a podcast of the actress Whoopi Goldberg being interviewed on the UK Radio programme Desert Island Discs. Whoopi Goldberg won so many acclaims for acting in the Steven Speilberg film of The Color Purple that I wanted to find out more about her, and thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I did just that. Apparently she was so deeply affected when she read the story that she wrote to the author asking for a part if a film was ever made of the book. Alice Walker wrote back about two months later to tell her she had sent  the necessary paperwork to the studios. The film script for The Color Purple was then written specifically for Whoopi Goldberg. It was her first big motion picture. The rest is history.

After I'd allowed myself enough time to think about what I'd just read, I turned to something that I thought would be very different but which turned out to be linked in the strangest way. This was Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson who is a well known British author. It is a semi-fictional autobiography. I know this sounds like an enigma but I assure you it's true. To understand what I mean, however, you'll have to read it.

Like Celie in The Color Purple, Jeanette Winterson is someone who lives on the edge and who also spends much of her life searching for love as well as for a lost love. I didn't see the similarities while I was reading because  one was about a black community in the American Deep South in the 1920s while the other was set in the 1960s in a poor northern town in the UK. In both books, however, the main character was lonesome and abandoned, and immensely brave.  It was only afterwards that the similarities became clear, and that is another benefit of this random holiday reading...there is far more time to think.

There were other books too, more random choices, and while I read them an amazing thing happened. In each one of those holiday books I discovered a fact that was crucial to the novel I had just started writing.  I had an outline clear in my head and the first two chapters written but what I didn't have was the detail. I needed to research a lot of things if I was to get my facts right but it was hot and sunny and I was on holiday, so I decided to concentrate on enjoying myself and worry about the detail when I returned home. Ignoring that little voice in my head that said I should at least think about my story,  I just chose those random books and settled down to read.

I had no plan...I knew very little about them. I wasn't even sure I was going to enjoy them, but although I didn't realize it, they had a plan for me. In each book I read I discovered a nugget of information that I needed to flesh out my own story. I was also confronted by a new way of looking at a situation, something that made me reconsider how one of my characters was going to react. After two weeks of reading these random stories my research was complete without any effort on my part...so to every writer whose book I read in that villa in the sun, thank you. And to every holiday maker who has ever left a book behind, thank you. Random reading has much to commend it.

This link will take you to Sheila Claydon's titles, including her latest release, Book 3 of her Pathways Trilogy,  Saving Katy Gray 
 http://bookswelove.net/claydon.phpsheilaclaydon.com