Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Reinvigorating my Pins -- Not the Kind with Needles

 I've had a nearly dormant presence on Pinterest for quite a while. There's no excuse for letting my Pinterest account flounder other than the usual -- there are only so many hours in a day. 

It's like anything else in the writing profession (or life); what you focus on gets done. Today, the Independent Book Publishers' Association sponsored a zoom session on Pinterest. I thought it might be the kick in the pants (excuse me, incentive) for me to update my Pinterest presence. It was.

I had no idea how out-of-date my pins were. Now, after an afternoon of updates, I don't need to be ashamed of old graphics and outdated covers. More work to do, of course, and more to learn about how to do it.

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Sunday, February 25, 2024

Thoughts on Audiobooks with KDP Virtual Voice

Audiobooks are my reading passion; probably 90 percent of the books I 'read' are performed by talented narrators. That has made it all the more joyful to have many of my books made into audiobooks.

I ran into a hitch with the family history mysteries, however. Approximately fifteen narrators (producers) auditioned tor the first book in the series, with my promise of doing all five books. I found the perfect person through Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX). 

And then the delays started. They sounded reasonable. A bad respiratory infection, seasonal holiday interruptions. Pretty soon a year passed and almost nothing had been done. ACX permitted me to cancel the contract. 

It takes a huge amount of time to listen to a lot of auditions. I was about to start the process again when KDP developed the Virtual Voice program. I discounted it at first, but decided to explore. 

KDP has tons of guidance, but here are a few salient points. 

  • Understand that ebooks are the source, and they must have a table of contents and be reflowable (largely text, not something like cookbooks).
  • Listen to the samples of male and female computer voice options in American and British English, with several age ranges. Pick one that seems best for your book's characters.
  • Recognize that while the virtual voice distinguishes punctuation, it cannot convey excitement or sadness with exaggerated changes in tone or inflection. It definitely would not work for foreign accents, as would be needed for M.C. Beaton's books, which are set in Scotland.
  • Review the created audiobook to be sure you like the pronunciation of names or any nontraditional words.
  • Rejoice that you have the option to correct the virtual voice's diction by giving it phonetic spellings of words that are mispronounced. For example, I describe my character Jolie Gentil's name as having French pronunciation (soft J and G, final L not spoken). I told the virtual voice that it should be pronounced Zho-lee Zhan-tee. It complied.

I'm fortunate that my mysteries can be presented in fairly straightforward narrations. Since I can't use a narrator with the talent of Jim Dale, who does the Harry Potter audiobooks, I have generally asked narrators not to attempt distinct voices for my characters. I ask for straightforward narration with good inflections and a steady volume. 

My book In the Shadow of Light used a lot of Spanish accents and I had a fabulous narrator who did traditional American and Spanish-accented English. Such a book would not be a candidate for Virtual Voice.

A talented narrator is clearly the best option. However, the nearly-instant creation of a Virtual Voice audiobook could work in some circumstances. You can explore without committing to publish. What's more flexible than that?

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Monday, February 12, 2024

Back to the Drawing Board...Keyboard

I'm not generally missing in action for a month. I'd like to say I was deep into a mystery and finished it. Not. 

I had colon cancer surgery and received my stage afterwards -- 2A. Way better than stages with bigger numbers. I meeting with an oncologist today to discuss chemo options. The surgeon said, and I quote, "It won't be the horrible kind."

There, I'm done. I'm not big on talking about illness details. I'm willing to listen if someone else needs to talk about their situation, but I'm generally more private. That said, I will tell the world when the chemo is done and I'm entirely out of the woods. 

At this point, you can say, "Tell the world? Who does she think she is, King Charles?" 

My Newest Book Project

I'm written several chapters of another Jolie Gentil mystery and am ready to move ahead more quickly. The break was good in that when I came back to it, I realized my choice of an opening scene would not draw in readers. 

Initially, the first chapter featured a scene with Jolie, Scoobie, their kids, and best friends at a high school football game. It relayed some important components of the book, but intuition tells me a lot of people won't keep reading if they think the book is too family-focused. Plus, nobody got killed.

I constantly consider the balance of personal life and mystery solving. So many TV shows became too much like soap operators, in my opinion, after lead characters got married. House comes to mind. It went from being a tightly presented, funny medical mystery series to one that focused on personal problems. Boring. I'm trying to avoid that.

Okay, back to work. More gripping blog posts to come, I hope for a long time.

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Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Impact of A Character's Looks on their Lives

By Elaine L. Orr

A person's physical features affect them and those they interact with. This can seem obvious -- someone who loses a limb makes a number of adaptations. They might also quit sports activities, which were very important until now. That could foster resentment and even change some close relationships -- former team members become "only" buddies. A sense of exclusion builds.

A character's negative emotions -- anger, grief, fear, resentment -- play a major role in antagonists' motives. Big changes aside, how much do our everyday attributes affect who we are? A parent with a gorgeous girl or boy could often hear, "She could be a model. He could be an actor." The child comes to expect the compliments.

I believe it can be easier for good-looking children and adults to make friends, get hired, and find dates. If you're thinking that speaks to a certain human shallowness, you're right. 

I've never forgotten a secretary in the counseling office at my high school. She was not attractive in a traditional sense, but was universally liked for her helpfulness and upbeat attitude. She said, "My mother said not everyone can be good looking, but they can always wear a smile and good perfume." I wish I could remember the context of her comment. 

The phrase "beauty is only skin deep" is something I heard my own mother say many times. But not everyone grew up hearing that perspective. Other parents may have called people ugly, fat, or stupid. Probably not to someone's face, since nasty insults are generally thrown out by spineless cowards. Still, their kids learned it's okay to make hurtful comments and it affects how they see and treat people.

Authors describe characters through what they wear, say, do, or think. 

The kid with buck teeth and a limp can grow into someone who blends into the shadows or a tough guy (or gal) whose adult persona will take on anyone who looks at them with a smirk. An author could reveal the tough guy's past -- or not. Readers don't have to know why a night club bouncer likes that job, only that they tossed the hero out on their ass when they tried to gain entry.

The same bouncer may open the door for someone with a low-cut dress, good figure, and big smile. Or broad shoulders and a jersey with the emblem of a favorite team.  My point is that the glamorous woman or handsome man expects to be welcomed. They approach life with the poise of someone used to getting their way because their good looks helped foster success all their life.

It's an author's challenge to show if or how physical appearance has affected a character. In Deep Freeze, a Virgil Flowers novel by John Sandford, the murdered female banker was very pretty (though not the prettiest in high school), born into wealth, hung out with the cool kids in high school and at the country club, got glamorous jobs, and came back home to run the bank. 

Readers never know what she thinks, only how the ways she acted -- condescending, sometimes mean to those in lesser circumstances -- may have affected her death. (Hint, it was probably the arrogance.) 

Would she have been different without a life of good looks and clothes? Yes, other factors would make a difference. But it's the comment of a high school alum she snubbed that says a lot. That woman is portrayed a average, if now dowdy, and worked as a bookkeeper in a boot factory. She says she and her husband (shown as caring parents) volunteered at the food pantry and served as bell ringers collecting funds for the poor. She wasn't bragging, she simply characterized this as contributing a lot more than any check the dead woman had written to get her name on a publicized list of donors.

Looks don't matter if you're dead, of course. 

Awkward, not-so-handsome characters can come out ahead. Think of Bert in The Big Bang Theory. He's meant to look ungainly and badly dressed (though no guy in that series is a fashion trendsetter), and he works in a field (geology) that the main character mocks. But Bert gets a MacArthur Grant. (Sometimes called Genius Grants, there's no application process and it's a lot of cash to someone who achieves a lot). My sense is producer Chuck Lorre has thumbed his nose at stereotypes in a big way.

Stereotypes begin with fables, which portray the ugly stepsisters and handsome prince in Cinderella, The challenge with more subtle writing is to convey characters and motives through more than appearances.

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Sunday, December 31, 2023

New Year's Resolutions are so Passé

By Elaine L. Orr

I should probably make a few anyway. 

I attended a class on time management in my early thirties, and the lecturer said something like, "If you find you work much more efficiently as a deadline approaches, it means you don't work efficiently the rest of the time."

I took it to heart. It absolutely does not mean I always organize my life more efficiently, but it does mean that I am mindful about starting a project or task earlier than the last possible moment. Which I had been known to do. And could get away with because once I got started, I worked fast and well. 

But that's not good enough when you want to write more than two books per year. An author can write quickly sometimes, but the ability to write two to three thousand words a day is not enough. Stories aren't simply pounded on a keyboard. They grow holistically.

What I can do is write at least 1,000 words per day. That's two single-spaced pages. Using my technique of (when desperate) writing scenes out of order, 1,000 words per day is ALWAYS possible.

Today I started a new novel in the Jolie Gentil series. My goal will be 1,500 to 2,000 words daily, and I will be finished in mid-February. Full stop, no excuses.

Take that, New Year's Resolutions. And Happy Damn New Year.

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A Few Things I've Learned Using TikTok

 By Elaine L. Orr

A better blog post would be what I have left to learn. Except I probably don't have the vocabulary to make that list.

I have always liked taking photos, even back when we had to pay to develop film. This was especially true when I traveled -- and I have the albums to prove it. I didn't get into making short movies (we didn't say videos) as a teen or young adult, in part (probably) because the people I saw doing it were guys. And it was a relatively expensive hobby.

As an author, I need to reach readers in ways they like -- which means videos they can watch on their phones. It's not just younger readers who use them -- anyone can watch a short video while waiting to pick up a kid after school or sitting in a physician's waiting room.

The key is to create a video people want to watch. Digression: My husband and I were in a community writers' group in the mid-1990s, and people were discussing what they tried to achieve in their writing. The last person said what really mattered was to "write something catchy." To this day, my husband can be walking through a room in which I'm writing and tell me to be sure it's catchy. I said it was a digression.

General advice: Don't worry about your background beyond making it neat and uncomplicated. We have less space in an apartment than we did in a house, so there's no space for a single-use room or designated area. However, a corner of the dining room table, with books behind me, works fine. 

A Few Things I've Learned

  • Find a friend or family member to hold the camera -- at least the first few times. If you're trying to do a selfie, you'll have to focus on more than your content.
  • If your friend or family members wants to do a lot of stage direction, go back to selfies.
  • Take videos in landscape mode. Ignore this if you know how to edit videos (as in rotate a portrait video to become landscape). 
  • I find that ClipChamp (a free Microsoft program) is easier than other software to rotate and add captions, but I still forget a lot in between each use.
  • Do lots of Google searches when software stumps you. One of the responses will be understandable for a novice.
  • Check to be sure you're holding your book right side up, that your hair is combed, and (for me) lipstick is fresh. (I look like a ghost without it.)
  • Don't aim for perfection! You want to look professional (or funny -- whatever), but it's not an audition tape for a movie. Perfection can be the enemy of the good. 
  • Make many TikTok videos about things other than your books. I like gardening, and one of my sleuths is a gardener. I posted photos of the day we had ten purple Morning Glories and did a demonstration on harvesting marigold and zinnia seeds to plant next year. My post with the most views was one I titled, "Who said the mall is dead?" I took it from the 2nd floor of the White Oaks Mall, showing Santa and decorated trees below. Who knew?
  • Make adding videos a habit. Even if you only do it once per week, you have to appear regularly to have much impact.
  • Don't forget to add hashtags that relate to your book, its location, or content. Don't forget to include #booktok.

That's it for now. If you want to see my videos, here's a recent one. https://bit.ly/3S1a78U. My TikTok site is https://www.tiktok.com/@authorelaineorr/.

Don't stop with TikTok. Lots of sites let you add videos. The more you do it, the more comfortable you'll be.

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Friday, December 15, 2023

My Elephant in the Room

By Elaine L. Orr

The expression, the elephant in the room means a problem that is not discussed because it's uncomfortable to do so. 

In business, if a meeting features a company's new product (let's say generic spell check for writers), it may be announced in glowing terms. However, you and a couple other staff have tested the program and found that it changes the spelling of some common words to naughty expressions. Developers are frantically working to fix that. 

You glance at your colleague with a knowing smile, "I notice President Flimflam is avoiding the elephant in the room." (And wouldn't you love to know how to code software to do something like that?)

The elephant-in-the-room concept can be useful in fiction. A houseguest has just discovered Uncle Cluster in the wine cellar, passed out with a corkscrew and his favorite bottle of wine in his lap. Since the guest has been sent to retrieve the exact bottle, she gently lifts it from Uncle Cluster's lap and goes back to the party.

Upstairs, people are politely commenting on the uncle's absence. Perhaps he's simply running late. Maybe he's having car trouble. Uncle Cluster's drinking problem is the elephant in the room. And in this case, a character knows about it but conceals his whereabouts. Interesting...

I have my own elephant in the room. In 2014, I published a post called "Linda Rae and the Nellie Chronicles." I highlighted the life of my fun-loving cousin Linda, who died at 62 of colon cancer. She had never had a colonoscopy, and she'd actually had symptoms. My advice was, "Don't let your life end before it should because you didn't have time for a cancer screening."

Nine years later, after my sixth colonoscopy, I learned I have colon cancer. It can't be more than 3.5 years old, because I had none at my last screening. (Linda's doctors told her she'd had it for at least 10 years.) 

Because the illness runs so strongly in my mom's family (grandmother, uncle, and two first cousins who were not that uncle's daughters), I have been vigilant. This time I also had to be mildly adamant. The GI doctor (new to me) advised I could wait five years, which would comport with current guidelines for someone who 'only' had one precancerous polyp in 2020. I insisted and, when I explained the family history, he readily agreed on three years.

The cancer may be ensconced in my colon. If it has spread some, it won't be much. I learn my surgery date next week.

I'm optimistic because I had those six screenings. In fact, my husband tells me not to be so damn chipper. Much harder on him than on me.

I'm not going to write about this a lot. I hope in a  year or so to report that I am cancer-free. 

I'll end with what I said about screenings back in 2014. Do it. Now. 

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