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Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

Where do we get ideas for our stories?

We’d like to give you a peek into how we create our short stories. Technically, most of our stories are flash fiction, loosely defined as 1000 words or less. Short stories usually run 1000 to 7500 words.

Orion belongs to a writing group that meets every two weeks and conspires to come up with three prompts to use in a piece for the next meeting.

Once we get the prompts, we spend a day or two mulling them over. Usually, we come up with a few ideas for stories that could include all of the prompts. After a bit of discussion, we sketch out a rough outline, mostly detailing the dialogue, with a few character actions. Once that is done, we dig into whatever research is needed.

Sigh! I should tell you that research is often a black hole from which most writers have great difficulty escaping. One topic leads to another, one website to twelve others, and on and on, falling down the internet rabbit hole!

The funny thing is, much of what we find isn’t even included in our story. This research helps us to understand the character or the setting or some other aspect of the story. For example, for the short story ARROWHEAD, we did extensive research on adopting a child from China. Our research resulted in maybe eight lines in the finished story. However, the knowledge we gained about the subject influenced how we wrote the entire story and the way the characters felt and acted.

The (Bird) Brains of the Outfit

Orion and I have been writing together off and on for over twenty years. Ever since we started writing full time though, we’ve had another very opinionated, if uncredited, writing partner: my feathered companion, Abigail. Here’s her story….

I had just lost my job and had lost my fifteen-year-old kitty, Kalki, a few months beforehand. Depressed and killing time before a doctor’s appointment, I wandered into a pet store in Berkeley called Your Basic Bird. I’ve always wanted a companion bird but had never found one that I connected to. The birds were always pretty, but I never got that ‘click’ I’ve gotten with all my other pets. (more…)

What’s it like to write collaboratively?

We thought we’d share with you, our faithful readers, how we write. We are going to do a series of blog posts showing you our writing process. Along the way, we’ll share some of the flash fiction we’ve written over the last couple of years that are unconnected to our Third War novels.

We’ll cover such things as where we get our idea, how we actually collaborate to write our stories, and how we handle disagreements. We hope you enjoy the ride!

Writers Cooperative of the Pacific Northwest

Kyros and I belong to the Writers Cooperative of the Pacific Northwest here in Everett, WA. This group isn’t focused on helping you write better (that’s our Kickstart Writers Group) but, rather, they help you with the ins and outs of publishing your writing and marketing your products.

Recently, the Cooperative held a book launch party at the University Book Store in Mill Creek. While it wasn’t as well attended as last year’s event, it did provide a chance for the authors to meet the public. Another event is planned for Saturday, May 13, in downtown Olympia.

Past meetings have covered such diverse topics as: how to build your website, how to conduct yourself at an interview (Orion was the guinea pig for this demo and thoroughly enjoyed it!), and how to present yourself to the public.

Matthew Buza is their technical guru and a writer of YA fantasy. He is also responsible for their website. You don’t have to be a member to read the daily offerings of stories, blog posts, poetry, and other works by the group.

If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, this group is worth checking out. If not, you can just drop by and read content from some of the best writers the Pacific Northwest.

The Audible Book Is Finished!

Yay! It’s taken us two weeks to go over the recording and make corrections. Now we only have to jump through Audible and Amazon’s hoops to get it published.

We hope to have the Audible version available on Amazon around Thanksgiving. The plan is to offer free copies of the Kindle version of Dreaming of Xeres at the time we go live with the Audible version.

Stay tuned!

We’re Making An Audiobook!

We were writing Chapter 2 when we stopped to work on the audio book for Book 1.

What an interesting process. First, we had to determine the parameters for the voice we’d like, then what we were willing to pay per hour. We submitted our requirements on Audible.com and got two responses, each with a demo attached. We listened, debated, and rejected them. So, we listened to other narrators on the board. Then one stood out in the field as perfect: Chris Lang. We LOVED his demo, but he was wayyy out of our price range. When we contacted him and he read our blurb, he signed on to our project anyway, because he believed in our book. His goal is to do the audible versions of all the sequels. Oh, and Orion had to add a new sheet on our spreadsheet: a pronunciation guide.

We have the proof recording now, so we have to listen to it, all 13+ hours of it, then work with Chris on changes. You’re gonna love this audiobook. Chris has such a good grasp of our characters that we find ourselves wrapped up in listening that we’re anxious to see how a scene or chapter ends, even though we wrote it!

 

Writing A Sequel

We never realized how much harder it is to write a sequel. When you’re writing book 1, you can make things up as you go, but when you get to book 2, you have to make sure you don’t contradict anything from book 1, tell the story for book 2, and also drop hints and pieces for book 3. So many moving parts! Thankfully we have huge spreadsheets full of information so we don’t have to rely on just our feeble memories. And there’s always the search function in Scrivener.

We also use the spreadsheets for the layouts of buildings/apartments/offices, so we can visualize what our characters are doing. Each new setting needs a new diagram.

We have a page for forum characters, which we’ve found very useful. If we need a new character for a short story or Book 2, we have a pool of ready-made people to choose from. (We had a great time creating over one hundred forum characters in the first place.)

Perhaps the richest spreadsheet is the links page. It’s where we keep links from our internet explorations. Here’s an interesting one on how to disappear completely: http://www.wikihow.com/Disappear-Completely.

 

GLAWS Writers Conference

Wow, did we have a good time at our first writers conference! Orion flew to San Francisco to join Kyros (and see his new house), then drove down to Los Angeles for GLAWS, the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society Conference. Panels were mixed for us. Some were on things we already knew. Others had us furiously taking notes. One had us write from a prompt, then read it out loud. We both enjoyed that one, since we write stories from prompts every week. (Some of them are the short stories we’ve posted here on the blog.) The speakers at lunch-time were interesting and we made some new contacts. The only problem arose on Saturday and Sunday, when the air conditioning went out. It was in the 90s all weekend and the windows were painted shut! We all suffered together.

All in all, it was a very interesting experience. We’ll probably do GLAWS again next year. With us living in two different states, it’s hard to coordinate our schedules to attend one.

A Glimpse Into Our World.

We’re hard at work on Book 2: Running to the Past. But we thought we’d share a little behind the scenes of what it takes to write a book like Dreaming of Xeres.

First, you would be amazed at the research we did during the writing of the book! Sometimes we’d spend days researching (aka: down the rabbit hole!) before we had all the pieces we needed for a scene or chapter. Some of the areas we researched were:

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