War: What is it Good For?

I’ll tell you what it’s good for: boring your audience. I put down another book today, and it saddened me. I had started taking an interest in the plot because the approach was unique. Once I was intrigued by the initial main characters, the plot took another turn.

New characters were gathering in the face of war against a dark force. I shuddered in remembrance of Tolkien’s epic battle at Helm’s Deep. What he did was well done, to be certain, but it seems I relive that battle over and over again in so many fantasy books. Unless done right, engaging war in book is a bad idea. I’ll tell you why it disengaged me. This may sound something like a rant, so I apologize...but not really.

1. Cliches. My eyes bleed upon the description of bright armor, colorful surcoats, and unrestrained bravado from flat characters. I don’t need a paragraph-long description of what these people are wearing if they’ll be dead in a page or two. What’s more, if these characters are fodder, I will not come to care about them in the next few pages as they are slaughtered. Oh, and the typical war-lingo will cause me to roll my bleeding eyes. The same old lines, the same old tactics...why should I waste my time?

2. Too Many People. Again, I have no reason to care for the victims of war. Unless I’ve been following a few specific characters for a length of the book, I have no reason to care about reinforcements coming, the fall of the flag, or the bloody stains upon the weaponry. I have yet to find war engaging because it is on such a grand scale. I can read about the most horrific death to befall someone on the battlefield, and all I gain is another yawn. Solution: follow a few specific characters, and get into their heads. Be realistic with their emotions, if they’re scared, how they view the battlefield. Connect the reader by making it personal and taking a perspective.

3. No Purpose to the Action. People die in war, and unless there is a new and interesting way to portray this, I see no point in describing your typical battlefield. I swear, there must be some unwritten code writers feel they must follow: if you have war in your book, you must describe all action that takes place. Why? Because if you don’t, I won’t understand that there’s fighting going on? Again, keep me with those main characters and give me their struggles—even if they’re not in the heat of the battle. Every scene should have a purpose, and every scene should be significant. If I can’t tell you why the scene was important, it doesn’t need to be there.

I know I’m a picky reader, but there are elements in a book that really rub me the wrong way. (That was a clichéd expression, by the way). War is one of those elements. It’s right up there with book covers portraying the hero beefed up on steroids, half-naked, tangling with some fearsome beast of fantastical origin. But that’s another rant for another day.

-Stefanie

Selling Your Soul...Digitally

Raven’s Heart: A Tale from the World of Secramore has finally become a reality. I’ll spare you all the grueling—horrific is a better word—details surrounding its inception. Stef already went down that path and saved me the trouble. Are we excited to have our republished work? You bet! This single volume novel is what we had originally intended—a true vision, if you will. Unfortunately, staring at boxes of our beloved book quickly loses its luster, and they do us little good sitting against a wall, unread. Time for phase two in the writing world: promotion.

Rather, I will discuss one portion of promotion since my wife has gone ahead and written a similar blog on that as well. (Narrows eyes in her direction.) Online promotion—love it or hate it—is the future for us independent authors. Sure we have to “get out there” and sell to the public in person, but there is a whole other world to explore, a vast, pixilated plane known as “cyberspace.” The internet is a fantastic tool, as we—mostly me—are learning, and it has great potential for those of us trying to break into the writing world. Here’s a list of some the ways we promote:

• Website: a fantastic way for potential readers to reach and learn about our world.
• eBooks: Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and Sony E-reader are the way of the future, like it or not.
• Online forums: KindleBoards is a great place to meet other indie authors and promote.
• Facebook/Twitter/Myspace: Social outlets, as well as other ways to promote.

There are other avenues, but they would fall under these four categories. I’ve listed the main ones we frequent. Every Day! Yes, the life of a struggling writer not only consists of working a day job or two or three, a social life—when we’re lucky enough to locate a couple free hours—writing, of course, but also spending countless hours promoting online. And that’s after we created the digital version of our book ourselves—again, mostly me. Notice I left out sleep, but who’s got time for that?

Most of this online promotion has progressed over time since all of it had to be discovered, learned, or suggested to us by people we’ve met in writing forums. All of these tools have come in handy, and we’ve learned a lot, but there is a dark side. When promoting—this includes online and offline—begins to cut into our lives and writing time, we begin to wonder if there is such a thing as too much advertising. We’re definitely committed to doing all that we can to bring our work into the world, but at what cost? We aren’t full-time authors, but we have to pretend that we are in order to be noticed. How do we juggle two lives?

The answer? Suck it up! We authors are so hard on ourselves.

Seriously, despite the fact that all of our days speed by, our energy wanes, we struggle to devote ourselves entirely to our writing, and deadlines are always looming, we must persevere. We must if we are to be taken seriously. Thank goodness I have a writing partner on which to lay my weary head. I don’t know how solo authors do it.

Anyway! Sorry about that metal detour. No one ever told us that being an indie author would be a breeze. Thankfully there is a world of people—most of whom we’ve never met—just like us who are only too willing to help our cause. We try to return the favor as often as we can. I’ll leave this on a positive note. I look at online promotion like this: if we hadn’t explored the digital universe, we never would have made so many friends, learned so many ways to promote our work, gone to GenCon, and created an ebook. Oh, and BTW: 31 copies sold so far!

-Matt