storytelling

Way back when I reviewed Diana Norman's The Vizard Mask, here. There's a new comment to that review as of today:

I am selling a copy of The Vizard Mask on eBay. The opening price was £2.99 and the the lates is is £12.50 plus p&p; (which isn't cheap as it's a heavy book) from a buyer in USA. What is so good about this book?

I guess she didn't actually read my review, but it's still nice to know there's a copy out there on ebay, for those of you who have written to ask me how to find one. FYI.

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Here's what my editor in Australia has to say about the pub date:

...we will be publishing FIRE ALONG THE SKY in Australia and New Zealand in October this year, hot on the heels of the US pub date. (Under the 30-day copyright legislation in ANZ we must publish our edition within 30 days of the US pub so we can't drag our heels - not that we'd want to with all those fans beating down our doors).

So there you go, end of September or early October.

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here are some of the things I try to get things moving when I'm stuck rewriting the same paragraph or section again and again:

(1) read it out loud. It's really amazing how things jump out at you when you try this. Usually I end up striking out whole phrases. I'll read it out loud until it sounds right to my ear. I can even have the computer read it aloud to me, but the intonation is so funny that mostly I save this for when I'm in desperate need of a laugh.

(2) get rid of prepositional phrases. I've found that if a sentence isn't working, it's often because I've stuck too much in it. Five pounds of potatoes in a two pound bag, tra la.

(3) in an extreme case, I print a passage out, and then use a pen to cross out every adjective and adverb, along with every prepositional phrase. What's left? The bones, if there are any. Once I identify those, I can usually figure out what to put back in.

(4) I ask myself the crucial question, which is not so much what happens next but why does this happen next (and following from that) does this need to happen at all?

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