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Judging a book by its cover

BookcoverCCCIn less than a month, I’ll have a cover out there in reader land. And I’ve been reading a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

If you google using the search term ‘creating professional book covers,’ you’ll find heaps of superb advice. I particularly liked Sherry Thomas’s article about the process Courtney Milan took her and other authors through when they were creating Midnight Scandals.

It’s fascinating to read, and raised issues I’ve never thought of. How would my covers look in greyscale? How about in tiny, tiny format on a Goodreads ‘What I’ve been reading’ post?

If you’re creating a cover, read the post. And here’s an article from Courtney Milan about typography on book covers. And here are 300 fonts that work for book covers, divided by genre.

Meanwhile, I have five book covers on my books page. I’ve asked for permission to use the photo on three of them, and I intend to do a photo shoot to get the right photo for the two Redepenning books, but I think the typography is moving in the right direction. What do you think?

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Making a joyful noise to the Lord

Thomas_Webster_-_A_Village_ChoirFrom the beginning of the 18th century until the spread of the church organ in the mid 19th century, many villages had a quire (choir) of psalm singers. Often called ‘West Gallery Singers’ because they sat in the west gallery above the rear end of the nave, they sang the psalms and other selections from the Book of Common Prayer to tunes composed by local teachers and quire members.

In 1700, the nave was already ‘owned’ by the more affluent members of the congregation. Galleries to the north and south were built to seat the poorer members of the flock, and the west gallery became home to the singers and musicians.

And they took their job seriously. Here’s an extract from the Rules of a quire in Kent:

1773 Oct. 28th Ann agreement made for the Company of Psalm singers in Kenardington. We Do gree to forfitt two pence on all Sundays for not being at Church in Divine Sarvis time to joyn to sing to the praise an glory of GOD and to meet on Sunday Evening at Six o’clock and forfitt one penny and to meet on all Thursday evenings at Six o’clock or forfitt one penny for each Neglect of not being there at the time. The mony to be gathered by One Whom the Company apoint for that purpus and the forfitt mony to be Spent on January 1st 1774 at a place apointed by the Company. Agreed and aproved of by us Who have hear unto Sett our Names.

Wm Chittenden
Thos Noakes
Wm Durrant
Thos Kingsnorth
Jn Austen
Thos Tolhurst X his mark
lsaac Dadson X his mark		 Thos Leads X his mark
Wm Hills
James Backer
Thos Hampton
Henry Holit
Wm Jones X his mark
James Huld

And here’s what they might have sounded like.

They used their skills in other settings, too:

There is no doubt that the mixed groups of instrumentalists and singers which we refer to as ‘quires’ to distinguish them for the organ-driven, surpliced latter-day groups, became very important in parish life. Those who played for the singing in church would also have played a major part in parish social life on feast days, high days and holidays. They had status within parish society, the nature of their jobs often gave them a measure of independence, and they were not infrequently in conflict with the parson or the squire. Their music often travelled far and wide, and in surprising forms. For example, few people today realise that when they sing the Yorkshire anthem ‘On Ilkley Moor Bah’t ‘At’ they are actually singing a west gallery hymn called ‘Cranbrook’, composed by the Canterbury shoemaker Thomas Clark who alone wrote hundreds of such splendid tunes.

The following far more secular song (just listen to the repeated chorus) might well have been sung on the village green on the night of the Whitsunale celebration that is a central event in Farewell to Kindness. If I do a book trailer, this is the song I want in the background. I couldn’t find a version sung by a West Gallery quire, but this one is pretty and the words are clear.

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Much of the material for this article and all the quotes came from the West Gallery Music Association.

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Candle’s Christmas Chair – in which our hero and heroine meet after 3 years

Bath chairFirst few 100 words from WIP – a short story I want to give away for Christmas.

‘”Tha’ wants to talk to Min about they chairs,” said the man in the office, and directed Candle Avery  to the far corner of the carriage-maker’s yard.

Candle strode through the light rain, dodging or leaping the worst of the mud and puddles. Min. Short for Benjamin, perhaps? Or Dominic?

No, he concluded, as his eyes adjusted to the light inside the shed. The delightful posterior presented to his eyes belonged to neither a Benjamin nor a Dominic. The overalls were masculine, but the curves they covered were not.

She was on a ladder, leaning so far into a bank of shelves that lined the wall opposite the door that her upper half was hidden, but he had no objection to the current view–said delightful posterior at his eye level and neatly outlined as she stretched, a pair of trim ankles showing between the top of her sensible half boots and the hems of the overalls.

“Botheration.” Whatever she was reaching for up there, it was not obliging her by coming to her hand. Perhaps his lofty height might be of service?

“May I help, Ma’am?” he asked.

There was a crash as she jerked upright at the sound of his voice, and hit her head on the shelf above. As she flinched backward from the collision, the ladder tipped sideways, spilling its occupant into Candle’s hastily outstretched arms.

The curves were everything he thought, and the face lived up to them. A Venus in miniature, black curls spilling from the kerchief that held them away from the heart-shaped face, that quintessentially English complexion known as peaches and cream, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes.

Grey eyes that had haunted his dreams for three long years, ever since she had bedazzled him at a house party for the amusement of her friends, and then left without saying goodbye.

Grey eyes that turned stormy as he held her a moment too long. He hastily set her down.

“Miss Bradshaw.”

“Captain Avery. No, it is Lord Avery, now, is it not? My condolences on the death of your father.

He bowed his acknowledgement, his mind racing. Bradshaw Carriages. He hadn’t made the connection. Had he known when he was courting her that she was a carriage-maker’s daughter? He didn’t remember anyone mentioning it.

But he did remember that her friends called her Minnie. Miss Minnie Bradshaw. Min.

#*#

Lord Avery was broader than she remembered. He’d been little more than a boy at that horrid house party, but even then the tallest man she had ever met. Isolated and nervous in that crowd of scheming cats who only invited her to humiliate her, she’d believed him when he claimed to care.

With him at her side, she’d braved the crush at the ball. Short as she was, she usually found such occasions overwhelming. People looked over her, bumped into her, ignored her. But Lord Avery – Captain Avery he’d been then – kept her safe. She’d even, for the first time in her life, been enjoying herself at a ball. Right up until she overheard his best friend explaining that Avery despised her common origins and was only courting her for her money.

That had been Min’s last venture into the aristocratic world her parents had educated her for. She’d come home to Bath, and told her mother that she would marry, if marry she ever did, in her own class. But none of her suitors had ever measured up to the tall red-headed guards officer who even now, standing here in her workshop, turned her knees to jelly.

What was he doing in her workshop? Why would he tracked her down?

“Can I help you, Lord Avery?” She couldn’t do much about the colour that pinked her cheeks, or the way her heart pounded. But she could, and did, keep her voice level and and her tone cool.

He was immediately all business. “I am after a chair, Miss Bradshaw. It is still Miss Bradshaw?”

She nodded, seething. How dare he comment on her marital status. She wanted to tell him that she’d refused five proposals in the last three years. But he was continuing:  “The Master at the Pump Rooms told me that Bradshaw’s makes the best chairs in Bath, and the man in the office sent me here.”

“I see. And what sort of a chair do you require?”

His brows drew together. “An invalid’s chair. That is what you make, is it not? What your father makes, I mean?”

He might as well know the whole of it. She was not ashamed. And if his eyes turned cold and scornful, what was that to her? She was, no doubt, just imagining the warmth she saw. As she had imagined his admiration so long ago.

“You were right the first time, Lord Avery. I design the chairs. And I make each prototype for my assistants to copy.”

“I say,” he said, “good for you!” And he smiled at her. She remembered those smiles. And, though her mind knew he couldn’t be trusted, her foolish heart didn’t believe her.

Excerpt 2 posted on 25 November.

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The happy endings myth

happy endingOne of the criticisms I’ve heard of romance novels is that they have happy endings, and ‘happy endings are not realistic’.

The critics are, of course, quite right. Happy endings do not happen in reality. And neither do sad endings. In fact, endings of any kind are a totally artificial construct. My personal story didn’t begin with my conception; my conception was simply an event in the story of my parents, and my story is an integral part of that. Nor will it end at my death. What I’ve made (children, garden, quilts, books) will carry on after me.

Whenever we write and whatever we write, we impose an artificial structure on reality. We choose a point and call that the beginning. And we choose another point and call that the end.

In the continuing story that was the life of my fictional character Stephen Redepenning, I could have chosen a different place to start and to stop. I could, perhaps, have started with the intrepid young adventurer boarding a ship for Canada. I could have followed with the adventure of his life as he found a place in the wilderness, entered into a trade agreement with locals that he sealed by marrying one of their daughters, and built his own small fur trapping empire. I could have ended as he stood in the smoking ruins of his log cabin, looking at the graves of his wife and children and swearing vengeance on their murderers.

It might have been a good story. But it isn’t the part of his life that I chose to tell.

I like stories that end on an upward trajectory, not a downward trajectory. If I like the protagonists, I want them to have hope. I want to feel that they have a chance for a happy future. To me, the end of the story is more about the writer giving me food for what happens next. In my imagination, the story continues.

(And, if I don’t like the protagonists, I have no objection to someone else in the story having the happy ending. Hamlet’s tragedy turned out rather well for Fortinbras.)

The romance novel’s ‘happily ever after’ is not about perfect resolution of all problems; it’s about convincing the reader that the protagonists will support each other through whatever problems arise. Romeo and Juliet was always going to be a tragedy, not because the lovers died, but because of the type of character that Romeo was. If they’d lived, he would have been on to the next hot chick within a month or two.

But Bassanio and Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, face trials together and win through, and we’re confident that they’ll be able to continue to do so.

I met my PRH at a prayer meeting nearly 46 years ago. Our lives together have hit rough patches here and there, with internal and external trials. But facing them as a couple has made us stronger. Whatever happens in the years left to us, we’ll cope. Now that’s a happy ending.

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Candle’s Christmas Chair

bath chair#2In Farewell to Kindness, Lord and Lady Avery are at the assembly where Alex comes a cropper in his Bath chair. Lady Avery rushes up to inspect the pieces. It transpires that she was the chair’s designer.

How, I wondered, did Viscount Avery come to marry Minerva Bradshaw, Bath chair designer and daughter of a Bath carriage maker?

Candle’s Christmas Chair is the result. I have my plot outline, and one and a half character sketches. I should begin writing this weekend.

I plan it as a short story or novella. If I can stick to the plan, it’ll be out for Christmas (just). Five weeks? We’ll see.

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When you break eggs, make omelettes

I’ve set myself a challenge in the epilogue of Farewell to Kindness. My secondary character David, who is hero of the book I plan to write next, is reported to be missing. No-one has heard from him for four months.

I don’t know where that came from. It was in the plan to send him searching for his heroine, known in Farewell to Kindness as Mist. But four months? Where did she go? Where did he go? What is holding them up and why? I have absolutely no idea. And I don’t know how the answers are going to affect the already plotted chapter outline of Encouraging Prudence.

I started Farewell to Kindness thinking I was a planner. And I am. But the bits of the book that excite me most are the ones that came out of nowhere and insisted on changing all of my carefully structured plans. My main villain turned out to be someone quite different to who I intended, the book ended a month earlier than intended and in a different locale, and several characters that weren’t even in the first draft demanded their own place in the 3rd.

I’m tentatively learning to trust my subconscious. When I find I’ve dropped a whole heap of eggs all over my plot, I’m learning to give a cheer and enjoy the ensuing omelette.

I came across this article by Juliet Marillier that talks about characters taking overeggs. What she says rings true to me:

So here I am, getting to the pointy end of this manuscript with my characters in increasing peril from external sources and at the same time beset by internal conflict (there’s a strong thread in the Shadowfell books about conscience and responsibility – can lies, deception and violence be justified if they’re the only way to achieve a greater good?) I know already that my two protagonists can’t come out of the story without significant psychological damage. And now one of those protagonists has started making choices I didn’t plan for him. Awful choices. Crazy, unwise choices. What’s going on?

I find while I’m writing the last part of a book, the part where I ratchet up the tension and present my characters with impossible choices, I sleep fitfully, dream vividly, and think about the story and characters most of the time, often to the detriment of whatever else I’m supposed to be doing. I get a lot of ‘brain churn’, a not-especially-helpful overload of story details bubbling around in my mind. I become quite disturbed when my characters have to face terrifying situations or sink into a mass of dark thoughts. Perhaps that’s because their stories, though fictional and including fantasy elements, are not so different from the situations some people still face in our world, in places where tyrannical regimes use terror as a tool of control. Or perhaps it’s because my protagonists feel like real people to me, and I, the author/God of this creation, have chosen to subject them to hell on earth. Now one of them is challenging me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.Go on, push me. Push me to the edge. See how much more I can take before I jump.

Characters don’t exist independently, of course, however real they may become to us. They are indeed all in our minds. If another writer came to me for advice on the situation outlined above, I’d say keep writing, let the character have his head, finish the novel, then go back and rewrite that section if you’re not happy with it. If a character seems to be pushing or pulling hard, chances are that’s the natural direction for the story to take. If the guy is in your head all the time, urging you on, what you write may well be inspired.

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Getting rid of filter words

Image is from: http://inkslingereditorialservices.com/category/mechanics-of-writing/get-out-of-the-way/

Image is from: http://inkslingereditorialservices.com/category/mechanics-of-writing/get-out-of-the-way/

‘Show. Don’t tell.’ Every writer has heard this mantra. I hadn’t, though, heard of filter words till recently. Filter words are verbs that take the reader one step away from experiencing life as your POV character. Leah Wohl-Pollack of Invisible Ink Editing gives this list:

  • to see
  • to hear
  • to think
  • to touch
  • to wonder
  • to realize
  • to watch
  • to look
  • to seem
  • to feel (or feel like)
  • can/could/couldn’t
  • to decide
  • to know
  • to sound like
  • to notice
  • to be able to
  • to note
  • to experience
  • to remember

I’ve been through my draft evaluating each filter word as I find it. Here’s one passage before the changes:

She felt torn between railing at him for his arrogance and blurting out how uncomfortable she was with the constant prickly awareness he induced in her. Silence seemed safe. She said nothing as he coaxed the horses onto the bridge, then turned to pass the mill.

This became:

Should she rail at him for his arrogance? Blurt out how uncomfortable he made her? She was constantly aware of him; every nerve ending on edge and a strange hollow warmth in the pit of her stomach. Silence seemed safer. She kept her eyes turned away from on his strong hands as he coaxed the horses onto the bridge, then turned to pass the mill.

It’s a great tip. For more, just google ‘filter words’.

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Why do I need a beta reader?

betasThe third draft of Farewell to Kindness will be finished this weekend; probably later today. Some wonderful people have volunteered to read it for me, and I’ve been fishing around for clues on what I should say when I brief them. I found a fabulous resource by Belinda Polland at Small Blue Dog Publishing. It explains what a beta reader is, and why we need one. It then goes on to link to more articles about how to find beta readers and how to brief them. Great stuff. Here’s Belinda’s list of reasons:

The fact is, we spend so much time on our own manuscripts that we can’t see them objectively — no matter how diligently we self-edit. These can be some of the outcomes (there are plenty more):

  • We create anticipation or an expectation early in the book, but forget to deliver on it.
  • We describe events in a way that is clear to us but not clear to a reader who can’t see the pictures in our head. (At least, we hope they can’t see them. Are you looking inside my head??? Eek!)
  • We leave out vital steps in an explanation and don’t realise it, because we know what we mean.
  • The characters in our books (whether fictional, or real as in a memoir or non-fiction anecdote) are not convincing, because we know them so well we don’t realise we haven’t developed them thoroughly on paper.