Writing Believable Magic

Posted on 16th May 2012 in publishing thoughts, the writing life

I don’t like to toot my own horn very often because I’m far from being a perfect author. Anyone who has read my blog or who follows me on Twitter knows that I am, shall we say, romantically obtuse when it comes to laying on the oatmeal in a story.

Buuuut … I write really freaking good magic. I mean, really really good stuff that you can almost see when you close your eyes. There’s a lot of urban fantasy out there where the magic isn’t explained very well and where a sorceress, witch, wizard or what have you simply “throws a hex on them” or “I nailed him with a jolt of supernatural fury”.

For me, it’s about writing what a jolt of supernatural fury actually looks and feels like. What it does when it is unleashed. How it affects the target and also the person slinging the magic. But that’s not all – not my a long shot. For every kind of magic, there must be a system or rules otherwise nobody is going to buy it. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden (who rocks, period) uses “will” as the fountain from which magic springs. That’s a really believable system and one of the things that Butcher does better than any other writer in urban fantasy today, is that he shows the cost of slinging the aforementioned magic.

In other words, Butcher kicks the living crap out of Harry Dresden in each of this Dresden Files books.

I’m not going to explain the magic system in POLTERGEEKS, but what I will say is that what I came up with is original. Spontaneous Human Combustion can occur and magic can be seen, touch, tasted, smelled and felt because it is a force so unlike anything our senses are used to experiencing.  How do I pull it off? Well, I close my eyes when I think about a scene and then I visualize what the magic looks like.

What color is it?

Is it moving?

Can it be shaped into something? Are there tendrils or wispy fingers of energy. How do they interact with the person slinging the magic but also something as simple  as perhaps an evening breeze. That’s what I’m talking about – magic is unreal because we can’t experience it so the writer really does need to show the living hell out of the magic as opposed to simply stating that a magical event occurred. I’ll also write down on a sheet of paper what physical form I might want to make a spell or a curse to take.

  • A column of pure energy that flows like ….
  • An inky black cloud of malice that stirred and bubbled across the gravel like …
  • I gathered the wispy tendrils of magical energy into a tight bind ….

I try to visualize magic as Silly Putty and I make shapes with it in my mind and I try to put it to paper.

So, there you have it. My secrets to writing believable magic and you know, as authors when we’re talking about the supernatural we’re asking the reader to suspend belief as they flip the pages of our books. The least we can do is to help them experience the closest possible match to what we authors are seeing in our mind’s eye. I think we owe readers that much.

Because there is a lot of badly written magic out there and hey, it’s magic so, you  know … we need to make it magical.

 

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Fun with the Canada Revenue Agency

Posted on 14th May 2012 in rants

See that form? That’s a form I need to get stamped by the Canada Revenue Agency so that my literary agent can release funds to me for a book I wrote that comes out in October. I sent this form in to their office in Regina in March and the Canada Revenue Agency lost it.  I called them last week to check on why I hadn’t received it and they said they would have to do a search. The guy last week told me it would take 5-7 days to do the search. I called them today, a different person told me that it would take 30 days to process the search.

It gets better. (Worse, actually)

I asked the lady on the phone if there was anyone I could take new forms to locally to get them stamped. She put me into a queue for 30 minutes to something called “the next level”. A man answered and informed me that it would take 30 days to find the lost forms. I told him that I knew that and asked if I could go to the Saskatoon office of the Canada Revenue Agency to get them stamped. He then, and I shit you not, WENT TO THE CANADA REVENUE AGENCY WEBSITE TO SEE IF IT COULD BE DONE AT THE SASKATOON OFFICE!!

Of course the website said it couldn’t be done. I knew this because, gasp, I was staring at the website at the same time! So I asked him where the closest Canada Revenue Agency Office might be where I could go in person to get a tax exemption form stamped. The guy on the phone told me “the closest CRA office where you could get it done would be Ottawa”. For those unaware, Ottawa is Canada’s national capital and it’s more than 2000 kilometers (1400 miles) from where I live.

All.

For.

A.

@#$%%

Stamp.

This is what we’re paying for in the way of the highest taxes in North America. This is Canada’s public service. Full wages and benefits and a pension plan and job security and …. nobody in my city is qualified to put a stamp on a piece of paper the UK Tax Office needs to prove that I am in fact, Canadian.

It’s this kind of crap that reinforces my steadfast believe that the entire civil service should be privatized. Thought everyone should know about this. They lost the forms, not me. I am trapped in a bureaucratic loop that is starting to feel very much like The Matrix.

 

#### UPDATE ####

Canada Revenue Agency called me back (odd because I did not give them my number) to inform me they found the missing forms and they were mailed today. Anyone want to figure that one out??? I did notice a slew of Government of Canada IP addresses visiting my website within an hour of this posting coming out and it appearing on Twitter.

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Reason #8932 of why I adore my mother.

Posted on 9th May 2012 in cool beans!

Below is an email from my mother that I just received a few moments ago – there are typos because Mom’s 78 year old vision is going. But it’s a wonderful memory of something that she experienced sixty seven years ago.

 

i found it strange that cbc was the only newea service that mentioned that yesterday was the end of ww2 and today is the actual sigbibg of the surrender by the various generals. has too juch time passed? i remember that day like it was yesterday. My father had been gone for a month or so and that day i was in grade six and we had the day off school so I rode a free street car and bus up to my friends place and we went to the rcaf barracks on avenue road where there were tons of people and they burned a fuge effigy of Hitler and Mussolini. Memory is amazing isn’t ity===mom

 

Mom, you rock.

Also, I still like Iron Maiden so get over it. :)

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Cover Reveal – And this time I mean it!

Posted on 2nd May 2012 in cool beans!

Here’s the cover for my forthcoming YA debut POLTERGEEKS! (After a few minor tweaks.) It’s a gorgeous, GORGEOUS cover and I’m just blown away by the quality of the artwork. Paul Young from Artist’s Partners in the UK is the mastermind behind the cover and I couldn’t be more happy with the results! What do you think? Would this stop you in your tracks at your local bookstore?

 

 

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Cover Reveal! Check it!

Posted on 1st May 2012 in poltergeeks

Courtesy of Strange Chemistry Books, here’s the cover for my forthcoming POLTERGEEKS. From Strange Chemistry’s site:

After you seemed so appreciative of the little tasters we gave you of the Blackwood and Shift cover art as it progressed, we thought that we would do the same with POLTERGEEKS (coming in October, written by Sean Cummings).

We have asked the artist to do some funky stuff with the background to the piece and obviously there is no lettering on it at all – but meet Julie, the main character. Julie is a sassy teen witch, embroiled in a life and death showdown with a Dark Power, and we are thrilled to see that the artist (which is one Paul Young) has captured Julie’s look of determination brilliantly.

Also? Julie is a jeans and t-shirt gal, and we’re proud to show her in such!

 

I don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled with cover artist Paul Young’s work on this!

 

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Still more bad joo-joo in Mrs. Gilbert’s Kitchen

Posted on 18th April 2012 in oooo video!, poltergeeks

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WTF is happening at the Prince of Peace Cemetery?????

Posted on 14th April 2012 in cool beans!, oooo video!, poltergeeks

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WTF is happening at Mrs. Gilbert’s house?????

Posted on 13th April 2012 in cool beans!, young adult books

There are worse things that can happen to little old ladies in Julie Richardson’s neighborhood on a Sunday morning. Check out these cool promotional clips for my forthcoming YA thriller POLTERGEEKS!

 

 

Discuss!

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My Letter To A Completed Project

Posted on 2nd April 2012 in the writing life, Uncategorized

 

April 2, 2012

Dear Poltergeeks:

This past weekend I completed final changes on you for my dear editor at Strange Chemistry Books. These were the last changes on a two-year project from the time I queried my equally dear agent Jenny Savill. This led to a fairly intensive revisions process whilst Jenny, her assistant Ella Kahn and I got used to working together. I know, Poltergeeks, I know … you were there through all of it.  Remember when I did that first draft of you back in September 2009? Remember how you started off as a cool idea that summer and how it led to a flurry of writing over a thirty-five day period during which I pumped out that first, innocent draft of you?

We’ve come a long way, Poltergeeks – the two of us. And I know there were difficult times … I know. Remember how I sucked at writing romance and that you needed to have romantic elements to make the book more realistic for teens? Remember how Jenny told me to print you off and highlight everything that even smelled romantic with a pink highlighter and then rewrite it so that it made more sense? All of this was before I even signed with her – she and Ella made me a better writer and you know, Poltergeeks, you should thank them because you don’t bear much resemblance to that first draft from September 2009.

So here we are, Poltergeeks. This weekend my fabulous editor Amanda told me that you and me … well, we’re done now. There’s nothing more I can do to you. Soon you will go through the final touches before you get published. Soon you will have incredible cover art … we’ll actually get to see what Julie looks like. It’s like a prom dress,that cover art. You’re going to the prom Poltergeeks, except it doesn’t happen in May or June … for you it will be in October.

I’m a sentimental kind of guy, Poltergeeks. It’s why I’m writing this letter to you – I kind of feel like that lost looking parent who has just sent their child off to his/her first day of school. So much awaits you, Poltergeeks … you might be a hit. You’re going to get reviewed, there’s going to be a blog tour, giveaways, the list goes on. People are going to see you at the bookstore and grab you and spin you over to read the back cover blurb. They’re going to spend their hard earned money to buy you and they might like you enough to recommend you to a friend or two.

And I promise not to have a writer meltdown if there are any bad reviews. I promise not to make an ass of myself because after querying more than thirty agents, after going through six sets of revisions before my agent actually started to try and sell you. After working closely with an editor for the last two months, I’ve learned that publishing is so darned subjective. You might be a great book to some, a not so great book to others – to me, though, dear Poltergeeks … you’re the book that got me an agent and that’s a huge milestone. You’re the book that people are adding on Goodreads and at least a couple of people have already pre-ordered on Amazon. Pretty cool, huh?

So off you go now, Poltergeeks. Our journey is complete. It’s been a whirlwind two years of hard work and I send you out to the universe. My work on you is done and I’m very grateful to everyone who helped me make you what you are today. It’s bittersweet, I suppose … but you’re a big book now and I have to write your sequel. So go on now … scoot, Poltergeeks. You’re free of me at last.

 

Best Wishes,

Sean!

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It’s the end of the world … or at least a synopsis!

Posted on 14th March 2012 in the writing life, Uncategorized

 

I’m currently working on the follow-up to my forthcoming POLTERGEEKS - it’s called STUDENT BODIES. I have an outline and I’m plugging away at the first few chapters – it starts off with a mother-daughter argument and an assassination attempt at the C-Train station.  It gets pretty dark (according to my outline, at least) from then on. But … the book isn’t yet complete. Hell, it’s not even 1/3 complete in the very first draft … and I have to write a synopsis. The. Dreaded. Synopsis.

I’ve written them for my other books, but that was AFTER I wrote the book. Now I have to write one before the book is done and that presents a number of challenges because when you have a completed work, you can easily assemble the key points in a synopsis – they’re right before your eyes. At the present time, the key points for STUDENT BODIES are just bullet points on a sheet of paper and sort of a movie inside my head. (Yeah, I know … all writers are weird. I am their King.)

Not sure what a synopsis looks like? Well, here’s an excerpt from the synopsis to my novel UNSEEN WORLD. (I wrote it in 2006.)

Book Title: UNSEEN WORLD

Word Count: 80,000

Synopsis:

MARSHALL CONRAD is a forty-something curmudgeon who strives to draw as little attention to himself as possible. He lives alone in a two bedroom apartment and likes to walk his obese Siamese cat on a leash in the evenings. He’s got a nosy upstairs neighbor named MARNIE BRINDLE and she’s taken to clicking snap shots ofMarshallwith her cell phone camera.

And he’s a superhero. Sort of.

He’s just saved the wife of prominent local Congressman Byron Aldrich and someone snapped a picture of Marshal lcarrying Mrs. Aldrich off to safety. The picture was then e-mailed it to the Drudge Report and suddenly Marshall Conrad is an instant celebrity. A national tabloid has posted a $1million-dollar reward for further proof of Greenfield’s so-called “superhero” and the town is filling up with crackpots and conspiracy theorists, not to mention the paparazzi.

It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. He’s been adept at staying out of sight during his ten year career as a crime fighter, and the last thing Marshall needs is a national audience for an apocalyptic showdown with a being from the UNSEEN WORLD. All hell is going to break looks at the apex of the summer solstice and Marshall writes a blog to warn the world if he winds up dead.

So I’m not an authority on writing a synopsis but I do know that authors lose a lot of sleep over writing them. What I can offer as advice if you’re putting one together is this: go back to your outline (assuming it follows your book correctly) and use the outline as opposed to the manuscript. Why? Because you’ll go nuts flipping forward and back over all the pages you’ve typed into MS Word to find those key areas that make the story flow.  At the same time, your synopsis can’t ever read as follows:

“This happened. And then this happened. This also happened and then finally this happened.”

Your synopsis needs an element of drama to make it work – and remember, a synopsis is in large part a selling tool. Whether you’re selling your book to an agent or a publisher or whether your agent is selling a yet to be written work to an editor. Because of this, it’s gotta look polished. It needs to flow all its own and most importantly, it should to read a lot like an expanded back cover of a novel – if the back cover is designed to give a snapshot of a book with enough drama to get a consumer to buy your book, then a synopsis needs to be the back cover on steroids.

How big should your synopsis be? Well that will depend on how big your story is. Most of the stuff I write is between 70-80K words and I don’t think I’ve ever written a synopsis with less then ten pages – all single spaced. There’s a lot of stuff to cover in your synopsis so it really needs to bring the reader through all the key points in your novel and there must be a satisfying conclusion as well – just like your book itself.

So there you have it – my hard and fast rules for writing a synopsis. It doesn’t have to be a painful exercise and while they aren’t fun to write, the synopsis is a key piece of the “getting published” puzzle.

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Book Review: BLACKBIRDS by Chuck Wendig

Posted on 6th March 2012 in reviews

 

Look at that cover art … just gaze upon its über awesomeness for just one second and then ask yourself: what the hell kind of fantasy novel has a cover like this? You’d be hard pressed to find one in an era when book covers featuring a strong female protagonist employ the same tired old characteristics – the chick in leather pants, her body twisted in some unnatural yet sexy pose. She might have a gun, or a sword, or a chainsaw for that matter. A lot of those covers look the same and frankly, a lot of those books read the same too – but not BLACKBIRDS by Chuck Wendig. None of them even come close.

You know, I wanted to think this was an urban fantasy, but it’s not. It’s not horror, either. It’s just plain old dark and twisted stuff with a protagonist who is D-A-M-A-G-E-D G-O-O-D-S.

Miriam Black is badder than Anita Blake before she decided to start boinking everything with two legs in the supernatural world. She’s tougher than Jim Butcher’s chainsaw-wielding Karrin Murphy as she kicks Chlorofiend ass at Walmart. She’s just plain … messed. Period. End of story.

Who is Miriam? She’s an enigma. I read the entire book in two days and all I can tell you is that if I had the ability to see someone’s death in Vista Vision every time my skin brushed up against there’s, I’d be pretty screwed up too. And that’s Miriam in a nutshell: messed in the head. Pushing back the craziness of her screwed up world with whiskey, cigarettes and sex. She’s hitchhiking as the book begins – sporting a shiner from a guy who is now laying dead in a seedy hotel room. She’s picked up by a trucker named Louis, and surprise, surprise – he’s not a creep! (Miriam thinks pretty much everyone is a creep and she’s expecting to wind up raped by the trucker.) It turns out that he might be the last decent human being on earth it would seem, but Miriam can’t exhale with this guy. She learns that he’s going to be tortured to death in thirty days – tortured for information about Miriam.

There are bad guys aplenty in this book. Each wants a piece of Miriam and Wendig does a killer  job of showing that pretty much everyone is twisted and messed up in their own way. Why they want a piece of Miriam is something I’m not going to reveal because adding spoilers to a review for a book this good would be a kick in the nuts. You just can’t know what’s going to happen because there’s so much shit flying in BLACKBIRDS that you have to keep your wits about you or you’ll miss something. Rarely does a book come along where the main character is so bleak, hopeless, hilarious, damaged, broken and so bloody well written that you can see it on a movie screen as you turn each page. (In my version, Juliette Lewis is Miriam - nobody does messed up better than Juliette Lewis… absolutely nobody.)

She isn’t a “chosen one”. She’s not on a mission from God. She’s not anything other than this brilliantly dark character with a curse – though she never once claims that her power is any kind of curse. She doesn’t embrace it or blame it for her lot in life. Actually, the reasons for her ability to see people’s deaths isn’t explained and that’s just fine with me because there’s a back story to this character that’s yet to be revealed. To know why Miriam Black is what she is would be too convenient, so don’t go looking for a reason because you won’t find one.

This is a dark and disturbing book. You want a happy ending but how can anyone have a happy ending when they carry the kind of weight that Miriam Black has been carrying? How can you even dare to think about anything resembling a normal life when you’re on the run. And that’s really what Miriam is doing from the very first sentence: running from bad guys, running from the truth of her life, running from this thing that she is.

Read this book. Trust me. BLACKBIRDS takes you for a late night cruise down a dark and twisted road without the benefit of headlights. Something bad is just around the bend. You can feel it coming and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop it.

Blackbirds is published by Angry Robot Books and doesn’t come out until April. My copy was made available by the publisher.

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Now What? The Process of Writing a Sequel.

Posted on 23rd February 2012 in the writing life

I’ve just completed the second round of edits for my forthcoming YA debut, POLTERGEEKS.  It was a pretty instructive process because though I already have three books to my credit, I haven’t worked this closely with an editor before. Instructive in that despite the fact that editor Amanda Rutter*got* the book, she was brilliant at helping me strengthen the narrative and flush out key elements in my characters. Very simply, she helped me see things in the story that I couldn’t see … changes that were desperately needed to make the book work better. Next comes copy editing and then proof reading and then … well, I guess you get to be the judge when the book comes out in October.

In the meantime, I’ve started working on the second book in the series. It’s going to be called STUDENT BODIES. It started out as an idea (all books do) and then the idea made it’s way to a back cover blurb. You see, lots of authors plan out their next book in lots of ways, for me, it always starts with an idea of what the reader would see on the back cover of the book at their local book store. The next stage is to write out a very short synopsis of what I *think* is going to happen – maybe a page or two. Then I do what I like to call “the all powerful, all knowing bullet point outline.” I literally take a sheet of lined paper and write out bullet point by bullet point what I’d like to have happen in the manuscript. Once I’ve done that I start to write out a first line of what I hope will eventually become a killer book.

And you have to write a good first line for a book. It’s a MUST. In my first novel SHADE FRIGHT, the first line is “My boyfriend drives a dump truck”. (I’m still not convinced that was the best first line ever.)  In UNSEEN WORLD, the story begins with “My name is Marshall Conrad and the world as you know it is a lie.” In POLTERGEEKS …. well, you’ll just have to wait and see.

I know authors who outline an entire book with post-it notes and use that for their process. Frankly, I can’t do that – I’m just not that organized. In fact, I’d probably go a little bit nuts because for me at least, an outline needs to be flexible enough to allow for plot twists and surprises. Very often, I will finish as chapter and then re-read it, look at my bullet point outline and then say “I wish I’d thought of this from the outset.” In short, writing a book provides for surprises when you’re the guy writing it because so much of what you’re writing depends on how you feel or whether you’re getting enough sleep. I’d love to hear from other authors to find out if how they’re feeling at a particular point in time dramatically influences the project they’re working on. I can’t see how it doesn’t.

So that’s where I’m at with STUDENT BODIES. A few chapters in, already surprised by how some of it differs from my original idea and excited about where this story is going to wind up. I have a great team behind me in my agent and her assistant and I have a great editor at Strange Chemistry Books. I need to get the book written by June, I think. That will give enough time for my agent and me to revise before we deliver the completed project to Amanda and the editing process begins anew.

So, here I go. Writing a sequel that will hopefully deliver a punch that will resonate with readers when it finally hits bookstores.

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