Dear Author Dearest

 

DEAR AUTHOR DEAREST:

Do your stories grow organically or do you know the certain capstone events and develop stories around them? OR Do you write more character-centric or plot/event-centric?

I consider myself an organic/character-centric writer for sure. Story usually starts with a ‘what if’ for me. Pretty Dark Nothing, for example, started with the question ­­– What if a teenage girl’s inner demons came to life and nobody else could see them? From there, I move on to character. Everything grows from there as I ask question after question. What would this girl be like? What is her personality? What kind of friends would she have? What kind of background/family/house would they live in? What are her flaws? What does she want out of life? Why is she being haunted by demons nobody else can see? How does this affect her decision making, her relationships, her life? The story develops from these answers as the answers spark ideas for scenes. I do this for all the characters, even minor ones, and use a character interview and personality tests to help me make them real to me. I consider all of this pre-work. Some writers outline as pre-work, but I prefer this kind of brainstorming to a hard outline. I love discovering what happens along with my characters. It’s exciting to me and tends to create more chances for the unexpected to happen. That being said, before I ever put words to page, I usually have at least some idea of the ending and maybe one or two high moments, but not much. The story flows out of action and reaction for me. Throw my character in a situation and see what happens.

DEAR AUTHOR DEAREST, 

Any chance you would be willing to share your winning query with readers?

Yes! Here is the query that got me several full requests, and ultimately, a two book deal for Pretty Dark Nothing. Best advice I can give is to try to get the maximum impact possible out of every sentence. Find the absolute best words to communicate the essence of your story without going into too much detail. It’s a hard balance, but focusing on what happens rather than who it happens to, helps. Also, don’t put in info about sub plots or secondary characters. Another thing that really helps is to tailor each and every query you send out. It’s a lot of work, but I promise it’s worth it in the end. And without further ado, here’s my example.

Dear X,

Your wish list states you are currently looking for paranormal romance in a high-school setting with something other than vampires or demon love interests. My completed 60,000 word YA paranormal romance, Touched by Darkness, does have demons in it, but not the sexy bad boy kind. Quinn’s demons are shadowy beasts and not the least bit loveable.

Seventeen-year-old Quinn hasn’t slept in twenty three days. Not since the demons killed her Sentinel. Without his protection they freely enter her dreams, whisper of her death and feed on her fears and self-doubt. Now, she’s on academic probation, benched from cheerleading, and popping caffeine pills to keep them away. The demons are ruining her life until Aaron, an amnesiac with a psychic ability, accidentally enters her thoughts. He’s the light in her darkness and she’s the key to his past, but the last thing the demons want is for them to be together. If Aaron remembers his life as Kaemon, Quinn’s dead Sentinel now living inside the stolen body of the boy known as Aaron Collier, their combined power could tip the scales for good. To keep them apart, the demons must convince Quinn that Aaron will turn his back on her, that he’ll confirm her worst fear; that she’s crazy. Quinn must learn to trust her heart before the demons lead her to her death. In the end, it’s her choice: Love or lies, faith or fear, darkness or destiny.

I’m a member of SCBWI and a graduate of the Institute of Children’s Literature. I’ve been a guest blogger for the award winning Writer Unboxed website, am founder of the newly launched Hugs and Chocolate blog for YA writers. I also frequent twitter @HeatherLReid, Facebook and my own website.

I hope you enjoy Touched by Darkness. I would be happy to send partials or the completed manuscript if you should like to see them. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Heather L. Reid

DEAR AUTHOR DEAREST, 

What has been the most challenging part of getting your book from draft zero to published for you?

Great question! There were so many challenges getting from draft zero to published writer, including throwing out half the novel and starting over, that it’s hard to pick one in particular. I guess, looking back, the hardest thing was deciding when to start querying. On one hand, I worried I would query before the book was perfect, on the other; I feared I was holding on so tight that I would squeeze all the heart from my story. There had been so many revisions already. So many tweaks, input, critiques, ideas, and changes had gone into the quest to make it publishing perfect, that I wasn’t sure if the story was better or worse for it. But at some point you have to let go, take a leap of faith, and see what happens, right? For me, that moment came when I realized I was playing with sentences and word choice and no longer working on the big picture. The major issues, as far as I could see, had been dealt with. Now I was nit-picking my novel to death to make it perfect and I couldn’t see any significant changes. At this point, I had done all I could do with the skills I had. It was time to take a deep breath, and leap. I got a lot of rejections, and made a few more little tweaks before I got the deal, but in the end, I’m glad I listened to my gut and took that chance.

Thank you to all of my followers who took the time to ask me your burning questions. It was hard choosing three, but I’m happy to respond to any other questions here in the comments, so ask away! If you have something you don’t want to ask on a public forum. You can also find me online on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or My Website.  Feel free to private message me and I’ll do my best to answer your question.

Heather L. Reid is both American and British and has called six different cities in three different countries, home. Her strong sense of wanderlust and craving for a new adventure mean you might find her wandering the moors of her beloved Scotland, exploring haunted castles, or hiking through a magical forest in search of fairies and sprites. When she’s not venturing into the unknown in her real life, she loves getting lost in the worlds of video games or curling up by the fire with good story. For now, this native Texan is back in the Lone Star State, settling down with her Scottish husband and working on the sequel to her Young Adult paranormal debut, PRETTY DARK NOTHING.

The Frustration of a Blank Page by Heather Reid

The cursor winks, mocking me as it looms above the blank page.

“Come on. Do it. Write something.”

Dark and evil it blinks, a beacon of my own inadequacy, each beat a challenge.

“I dare you.”

Fear grips me, anger too.  My mind is blank. I wipe sweat from my forehead with a sleeve. I take a sip of water, to ease the dryness in my mouth. Ideas swirl through my thoughts, I grab at them, one by one examining them in my mind, then throw each back into the ether. None of them are good enough. None of them worthy of the demands of that damned cursor. I curse. Damn you. I look at the clock. 12:20 pm. Time and the cursor are in cahoots with their taunts.

It’s Wednesday already and this week has been a train wreck of distractions, stress, and personal tragedy. My writing goals sit un-attained and all I really want to do is give the cursor the finger and escape into a game of Dragon Age and devour a bar of chocolate.

“Quitter.” The cursor sneers.

Heat rises in my cheeks. I grit my teeth. I am not a quitter.

There’s only one thing that can guarantee our failure, and that’s if we quit.–Craig Breedlove

The cursor stares at me, shocked.

Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I start to write.

Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until have accomplished a purpose – not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.–Anne Sullivan

 Not my own words, at first.

Other people and things can stop you temporarily. You’re the only one who can do it permanently. –Zig Ziglar

I will not let the blank page, that blinking cursor, win.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about-face which turns us from failure to success.–Dorthea Brande

Act as if it were impossible to fail, act as if it were impossible to fail, act as if it were impossible to fail…the mantra for today. The thing that’s getting me through this blank page is the encouragement found in the words and the works of others. It’s the friends that I’ve made online, the support from my peers and family and the belief that I have a calling. This passion for the written word isn’t for naught. There is poetry in my soul aching to be released. I must learn to trust it. I grab onto that idea. I hold it close and let it feed me the determination to never give up, to act as if it were impossible to fail. I open myself up and let the words pour onto the page, without fear, without limits. What is there to lose?

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.–Beverly Sills

What talisman or formula do you use to break the inertia and frustration of the blank page? I would love to hear your thoughts. Keep writing, all! Harness the poetry and the passion in your soul and never give up.

Heather Reid's FAVORITE FIRST LINES - Compare to your TOP TEN

As writers, it’s drilled into our heads that the first line in a book is the most important line. We toil and fret over every word. We wonder if it’s strong enough to hook an agent, and editor, a reader. This is the thing that keeps us up at night and taunts our muse to madness. Instead of listing my favorite first lines, I decided instead to go back to ten of my favorite books to see how the authors I fangirl over started their books.

‘I bear a deep red stain that runs from my left shoulder down to my right hip, a trail left by the herbwitch’s poison that my mother used to try to expel me from her womb. – Grave Mercy by Robin LeFevers

‘A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” – Dune by Frank Herbert

‘It is so appropriate to color hope yellow, like the sun we seldom saw.’ Flowers In The Attic by V.C. Andrews.

‘Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told she would kill her true love.’ The Raven Boys- Maggie Stiefvater

‘My pen falters, then falls from my knuckly grip, leaving a worm’s trail of ink across Fedwren’s paper. – Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

‘The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river.’ Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel

‘Jack Torrence thought: Officious little prick.’ The Shining by Stephen King

“We shouldn’t go back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. – Game of Thrones by George RR Martin.

‘It is a truth, universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

And last, but not least. . .

‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ – A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L’Engle

This one took me by surprise. Really? How could one of my all-time favorite children’s book and a classic start with a line that is often parodied and scolded as a huge no-no? Upon further research, I found that she chose this cliché on purpose, echoing the first line from 19th-century novelists, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “Wrinkle”. Goes to show, if you’re going to break a rule, you better have a good reason.

What are the first lines from your favorite books? How do they stack up to today’s standars?

 Heather L. Reid

Pretty Dark Nothing, Month9Books, April, 2013
Book 2 (Title to be announced), Month9Books, 2014

Website
Blog
Facebook
Twitter
Goodreads

Teaser Tuesday: PRETTY DARK NOTHING by Heather L. Reid

It’s teaser Tuesday and I’m excited to share an excerpt from the first book in the PRETTY DARK series, PRETTY DARK NOTHING, with all of you. The second book, PRETTY DARK SACRIFICE releases this September. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy!

It’s time to choose: Love or lies, faith or fear, darkness or destiny.

In my debut paranormal thriller, Seventeen-year-old Quinn hasn’t slept a full night in twenty-three days. She’s terrified of the demons that stalk her dreams, pull her into a deep dark nothingness and whisper hauntingly of her death. Exhausted, Quinn dozes off in the school hallway, and Aaron, an amnesiac with a psychic ability, accidentally enters her nightmare. If Quinn can learn to trust her heart, and Aaron can discover the secret locked away in his fragile memory, their combined power could banish the darkness back to the underworld for good. That is, unless the demons kill them first.

Excerpt from Quinn’s Point of View:

The dark ring of fog surrounded Quinn, moonlight eerily absorbed by its gray green mist. Something cold and damp brushed her leg. It felt like a human hand, a dead human hand, the moistness of its earthen grave still clung to its rotting flesh. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. She shuddered as the corporal mist found her palm, inched its way between fingers, and seized both of her wrists, binding them together. Jerking away from the smoke’s grasp only succeeded in it tightening the grip of living rope until pain danced across every nerve.

Before she could blink, two new wraith vines shot from the darkness, grabbing her legs and slamming her to the forest floor. She clawed at the ground as the tendrils dragged her into the fog. Dirt lodged under her fingernails. The earthy decay, disturbed from its winter slumber, filled her nostrils.

“We’re coming for you, Quinn,” the fog hissed.

Earth to earth. The image of her parents throwing a handful of dirt over her coffin as it was lowered into the ground came unbidden to her mind. Tears slid from her eyes. She didn’t want to die.

More tendrils slithered toward her, swirling and changing into dozens of dark shadow masses. They crowded around, their bodies blacker than the surrounding night.

“You can’t get away. He doesn’t protect you anymore.” The dark shadows reached for her. “There’s no escape, Quinn. Earth to earth. Everyone dies. Some sooner than others.”

Want to read more? You can find PRETTY DARK NOTHING here:  

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Exploring the Darker Side of Pretty Dark Nothing

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain

I don’t remember when they started—the dreams of faceless entities, of black figures standing by my bed whispering in the deep shadows of my childhood room. Sometimes I would wake from their dark grasp and find my six-year-old self standing at the end of my parent’s bed, or in the kitchen, or walking down the hallway. Other times I would suffer from sleep paralysis, trapped between dream and reality, a scream trapped in my throat.

Some nights, fear gripped me so tight I thought my lungs were being crushed under the weight of it. Books kept me company, kept me awake, kept me from falling into the arms of the monsters waiting for me on the other side of sleep as I huddled under the covers with a flashlight, stuffed animals standing guard around my bed.

A bible stayed tucked beneath my pillow, a cross around my neck, anything to ward off the evil stalking my dreams. The darkness both terrified and fascinated me and as I grew, I found myself drawn to all the shadowy terror my dreams were made of.

Childhood stories were replaced with novels by Christopher Pike, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Lois Duncan, and V.C.Andrews. My mother would often catch me reading non-fiction about the occult, hauntings, demons, tarot, spirit boards, anything mystical, but she never made me feel ashamed of my obsession. Perhaps she sensed I was seeking a way to make sense of it all, to rationalize the irrational. For how can you recognize the light if you don’t understand the darkness?

The more I shined a light on my darkness, the quicker the nightmares faded. I still don’t understand what caused them or what they meant, but one day they no longer held power over me. The fear may be gone, but the shadows of those nightmares have never truly left me. I guess it’s not surprising that those experiences, so vividly etched upon my imagination and tightly twined around my soul, would find their way into my own writing. With the sun watching my back and the darkness in front of me, I delved into the world of the tainted, broken, haunted — first with short stories and dark poetry and then into the novel that would become my debut, Pretty Dark Nothing.

In Pretty Dark Nothing, I wanted to write about a girl facing her own darkness. What would happen if her nightmares manifested in her reality and she was the only one who could see them? How would fear, the self-awareness that what she was seeing might be real, but shouldn’t be, affect her everyday life, her relationships, her ability to trust herself, to trust others, and to make decisions.

I chose demons as metaphors for the darkness that lives inside all of us, the personification of that still small voice inside that perpetuates negative thought and twists the truth. They feed on the darkness living inside humans and exploit and magnify the insecurities and self-doubt they find and use it to gain power and create chaos.

While I’ve never seen a live demon, I hope my night terrors have been put to good use, to create a story rich in creepy atmosphere and emotional brokenness. I admit that at times it’s been terrifying to conjure up old nightmares and pick at the scars of fear left on my psyche, to bleed some of my own darkness onto the page, but watching Quinn fight demons helped me remember to always be wary of my own.