Author: Karen Sandler

A Broken Ankle, a Writing Career, and Playing the Long Game

A few weeks ago, I fractured my right fibula (the smaller bone on the outside of your ankle). I wasn’t doing anything particularly fun or dangerous. I was kind of trotting toward a local pet store, planning to ask to use the bathroom. I leapt up onto the sidewalk, and when the outer edge of my boot hit a groove in the concrete, my foot rolled under. Crunch.

I’d hoped it was just a sprain, in fact had to be talked into going to the doctor. I’m now in an attractive (not) “cam boot” that keeps my ankle stable. The boot is far better than a cast because I can take it off to shower, or to scratch an itch.

But here’s the thing–I’m a fairly active person. I’m in the habit of working out at the gym 3 times a week, dancing at least once a week, and before I sold my mare, I was riding 3-4 times a week. I was in the middle of horse-shopping for a new horse (which I blogged about here). In fact, that day I broke my ankle, my trainer and I were about to head out to try a horse. My trainer thinks it was fate that it happened since the horse we were going to check out wasn’t a good match for me.

Even still, it’s maddening not to be able to continue my usual level of activity and to see my calf muscle shrink. I’m exercising as much as I’m allowed to (I can go to the gym if I wear the boot and can do some strengthening exercises without the boot on). But I have to balance letting the ankle heal with my desire to get back to normal. In other words, much of the process is a waiting game.

Waiting is also a huge part of any author’s career. Take the Tankborn Trilogy. After the long process of writing the first book, Tankborn, I had to wait to hear back from agents. Once I had representation, I had to wait through the process of marketing the book to publishers. Once the book sold to Tu Books, I had to go through the complex process of the rewrite, then wait to see the gorgeous cover art, then wait again until the first book was released in September 2011.

The decision to go to the second and third books of the trilogy took some time, then more writing, more editing, more waiting for release dates. Awakening came out in April 2013, and I have to wait until spring 2014 for Rebellion, the final book of the trilogy.

Same deal with the Janelle Watkins mystery series that starts with the book Clean Burn. After all the waiting, it’s hard to believe that it’s going to be released in the US in less than a month. Back when Exhibit A first gave it the thumbs up was nearly a year ago. Which is kind of blisteringly fast from first offer to release. But it doesn’t seem that way when you’re dying to see the book on the shelves.

But just like I can’t make that ankle heal any faster, no matter how much I will that bone to knit, I can’t make the cycle of book to shelf happen any quicker. Writing and publishing is a long game, whether it’s via the traditional path that the Tankborn Trilogy and Janelle Watkins mysteries have followed or the indie-pubbed trail that my other books have traveled. And just as I can support my healing by eating right and exercising properly, I can support my writing career by writing the best books I can, polish them in as many rewrites as necessary, and do my best to get the word out so those books land in the hands of as many readers as possible.

July 29, 2013
The Magical Formula for a Bestseller (Sorry, there isn’t one)

Some writer friends of mine just got back from the national conference of Romance Writers of America. This is a huge conference, jam-packed with workshops on both the craft and business of writing. When I was a member of RWA, I attended the conference nearly every year.

This year, as I’m sure has been done in previous years, two mega-bestselling authors presented a workshop on writing bestselling novels, this one titled, Secrets of the Bestselling Sisterhood. I’m sure there were many nuggets of great information doled out, and I’ll venture to guess that “write the book of your heart” and “write the best story you can” might have been mentioned once or twice.

With all due respect to those two bestselling authors (who have both worked hard for their success), I have a few thoughts of my own about how one writes a bestselling book. And unlike those folks writing expensive how-to books and pricey workshops that purport to reveal the holy grail of how to craft that next big breakout book, I’m willing to share my opinion for free.

And here it is: There is no recipe. There is no checklist. There is no magical formula to follow that will guarantee a book you’ve written will become a bestseller. We can analyze the heck out of the bestselling novels flying off the shelves of bookstores and selling like hotcakes on Amazon. But none of that analysis will give you a guidebook to follow that will lead to equal success for your book.

The problem with bestsellerdom is that any knowledge gleaned from studying what’s been successful is that it’s hindsight, rear view mirror stuff. You’ll only learn what worked for those particular books. Just putting a boy wizard, a girl crushing on a vampire, or a dystopic future into your story is not a magic wand. There are so many intangibles about bestsellers that are impossible to quantify.

So what’s an author to do? If you want a chance at bestsellerdom (as opposed to 100% certainty), there are some things you can do to improve your odds. These suggestions are along the lines of setting yourself up for success. Like a runner whose goal is to cross the finish line first in their next marathon. A serious runner will train in the months leading up to a race as opposed to being a couch potato right up until race day.

So here are some odds-increasing steps for an author:

1) Write high concept

Write a story you can describe in one succinct sentence. An orphan boy discovers he’s a wizard and is sent off to a wizardry school to learn magic. An annual lottery forces teens to fight each other to the death in a gladiator-style competition. It makes the book easier to market and for the reader to more immediately grasp what the story is about.

2) Write visually

Write scenes you can imagine on a movie screen. Think action, not internal narrative. Make it easy for a producer who happens to pick up your book to envision the movie your book could become. Make it so riveting for your reader she can’t put your book down.

3) Write relatable, likeable characters

Likeable doesn’t mean sweetness and light, namby-pamby nice guys/girls. It means interesting characters, people who are heroic in spite of themselves. Write characters the reader would love to be, to exchange places with. Or, if it’s a harrowing story (like The Hunger Games), write characters so real their plight will grab the reader’s emotional jugular and make them feel as if they’re experiencing what the characters are experiencing.

4) Write fabulous prose

Yes, there are crappily written bestsellers. But yours doesn’t have to be one of them. Particularly if this is your first book, your chances of getting an editor past the first page (or a reader checking out a sample of your indie published book) might hinge on whether said page is riddled with errors.

5) Work denking hard

Write like a maniac. Write lots of books. Most of the big bestselling authors out there didn’t start that way with their first book. It took time and many books to become an overnight sensation.

6) Get lucky

You make a book video, a world-renowned blogger spots it, and it goes viral. You write a blog post about your book and a celebrity stumbles across your blog, picks up and reads the book, and tweets it to her zillions of followers. You end up sitting next to Steven Spielberg’s nephew on a plane and he’s enchanted by your story concept.

Obviously you only have control over items 1-5. And none of the above may help your book become a bestseller. There are plenty of books out there that are high concept, have wonderful, visual scenes, great characters, and beautiful prose, but never became bestsellers. There are books that don’t follow these rules that surprise by becoming big hits.

I admit, too, this isn’t an exhaustive list. I bet you could come up with your own reasons why you enjoyed the last bestseller you read. Or maybe you read a book before it hit big and you just knew it was going to end up on the New York Times and USA Today lists. Tell me what you think are some of the elements of a bestselling novel. #SFWApro

July 22, 2013
Ghost Town Inspiration (How Bodie Became a Book)

Years ago, my mom and stepdad owned a family restaurant in the Eastern Sierras that overlooked Mono Lake. The Mono Inn was four miles north of the small town of Lee Vining, and Lee Vining was about a half mile from the “back gate” to Yosemite National Park.

The restaurant was also about 20 miles south of Bodie State Historic Park, a gold rush/silver mining ghost town. When we would visit my mom and stepdad, at the restaurant, we’d often take a side trip to Bodie. The ghost town is in a “state of arrested decay,” its few surviving wooden structures all that are left of a once bustling town. You can read more about the old ghost town here.

Bodie is quite an evocative place. Empty buildings scattered across the lunar-like landscape, some of the structures with the original furnishings inside. Back when I used to visit the town, there were only two ways in–a road that was dirt for several miles, and another that was paved up to the last two miles, then it was dirt as well. The idea was that when you were inside the “bowl” of the town of Bodie, there would be no signs of modern civilization.

You can see from the photo at left (that’s me with my older son) that the bowl of Bodie is a wild and lonely place. It’s thoroughly snowed-in in the winter. The town actually burned down three times in its heyday (once thanks to a young boy playing with matches) and was considered quite a lawless place. It’s rumored that a young girl whose family was taking her there wrote in her diary, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”

Many years later, after my stepdad had died and my mom sold the restaurant, I found myself wanting to write a children’s book. I’d been writing romances that weren’t appropriate for kids, and I wanted to create something that my own boys could read. Besides photos I’d taken, I had read quite a bit about Bodie and decided to use it as a jumping off point for a story.

I considered writing historical fiction. But I love stories with an SF/F/paranormal angle. So I wrote a middle grade time travel adventure in which four 7th graders are thrown from present day Sacramento into 1880’s Bodie due to the antics of a mischievous cat and a malfunctioning computer. I made my cast of characters multi-ethnic. The main character, Kevin, is white, Naomi, the girl Kevin has a crush on, is Chinese-American, Tanya is Black, and Michael is Hispanic (and also ADD). My original plan was to write a story from the POV of each of them, but I never got past this first book.

I eventually sold the book to Hard Shell Word Factory (now an imprint of Mundania Press). They used the photo above of the Cain house for the cover, putting a cobalt blue glass bottle into the window of the house. Here’s the paper version of the book on Amazon showing the old cover.

When I got the rights back to the book, I republished it under my own name as the ebook Timewrecked. I really love this book. I love its adventuresome view of the gold rush era, told through the eyes of modern day kids. I love that it’s such a fantastic teaching tool for 4th grade California history. I’m tickled about its multi-ethnic cast. And here’s the best part–the Timewrecked ebook is free. That’s right, just go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple and you can download it for freebies.

If you’re a teacher who’d like to have me do a Skype visit or if you’re local enough to Northern California that I can drive to be there in person, just go here to request an appearance. I do still have paper copies available for students to purchase.

July 14, 2013
The Trials and Tribulations of Book Surgery

Have you ever had a problem right in the middle of a sewing, craft or home improvement project? You’ve just realized you sewed the sleeve on inside out, or your embroidery thread is tangled in the middle of a satin stitch, or you’ve made the cut on your crown molding at the wrong angle. So you have to grab the seam ripper to remove that sleeve, turn it right-side-out and re-sew. Or snip the embroidery thread below the tangle and get that little short bit back underneath your work. Or schlep to the home improvement store for more crown molding and cut it right this time.

It’s a groan-worthy experience, both because you’ve just spent X amount of time in wasted effort and because you have to spend Y amount of time to make it right (can you tell I was a math major?). That’s about the time I start to yell at my sewing machine (and the poor thing is an inanimate object), saying a few choice words not suitable for polite company. I sometimes feel like chucking the whole thing into the garbage bin, but I never do it. That would truly be a waste because I know with just a little more effort, I’ll soon have a nice shirt/skirt/pair of shorts to wear.

This is sort of what’s going on with the young adult paranormal book I’ve been working on. After I finished the most recent rewrite, I knew it needed another pair of eyes. So I did a beta-read trade with another author. She had some excellent feedback, some of which I’d already figured out, some that was more of a doh moment. Like I have far too many characters, and several can be eliminated and their actions shifted to the truly important main and secondary characters.

But to make the changes my beta reader suggested requires some major surgery of the book. Large chunks will be able to remain the same, but they’ll have to be detached with that seam ripper, rearranged the proper way and re-knitted into the story. It’s a good-sized book, rather like a massive quilt, and it’ll be a challenge keeping straight what goes where, particularly with the elimination of several characters.

It’s like I’ve got my book gutted and on the operating table, but I’m still not sure where all the parts go. I am truly grateful for my beta reader’s feedback. I’m excited by the prospect of making the book better. But wow, what a messy project.

I’m really just starting out reassembling this odd garment of a story. I only have a small window to work on it since I’m carving out time before I my editor returns the edited manuscript for Rebellion, the third book of the Tankborn trilogy. I probably don’t have quite enough time to get the YA paranormal rewrite done before I have to shift to Rebellion and then my second Janelle Watkins mystery. It will be so nice to finish it eventually though, to get those last seams pressed and the final bit of embroidery around the neckline. Then I’ll sit back, admire my work…and send it to another beta reader.

So what projects have you got going, writing, craft, or other? Have they been a straightforward or a tricky job? Share your stories.

#SFWApro

July 9, 2013
Horse Shopping, Or, Choosing Among Writing Projects
I recently sold my beautiful Andalusian/Morgan mare, Belle. She and I had been together for eight years, and we learned a lot from each other. Now she’s off to a new home, helping another rider learn the fine points of dressage.

So I’m horse shopping. I have a clear idea of what I want in a new horse: not too young, not too old. Not located too far away (not going to check out that great horse in Vermont). I definitely want an easy-going gelding. Size matters–neither a 13H pony nor an 18H draft horse will do. And there’s only so much I can spend (sadly, I’m not independently wealthy yet). Which means it might take a while to find the perfect partner. But here are some of my current options:

This is Sequoia Mambo Man, an 8-year-old, 15.2H palomino Morgan. Very cute, and sounds like the easy-going temperament I’m looking for. But not a whole lot of miles under saddle yet.

This is Bentley, a 6-year-old, 15.3H Quarter Horse Paint. I don’t jump like you see Bentley doing in the picture, but I’ve seen videos of him ridden dressage too. He seems to have a decent amount of training under his belt.

This is SQR Kato, a 9-year-old, 15.1H bay Arabian. The owner says he’s very quiet, and he looks quite talented as a dressage horse. This one seems to have the most training of the three.

There are a few others I have my eye on, but you get the idea.

So what does this have to do with choosing writing projects? Well, imagine that you’ve just finished a book (let’s call it THE BEST BOOK EVER). Finished as in, TBBE is completely polished to a quality where your agent is now shopping it around, or you’ve submitted to your editor. Or if you’re an indie-pubbed author, TBBE is completely vetted and ready to be uploaded to the various online booksellers.

Now what do you do? All those story ideas that have been shoved to the back burner while you were getting TBBE to a publishable stage are now competing for your attention. Do you work on that hysterically funny romantic comedy you’ve been dying to start? The young adult paranormal that wakes you up in the middle of the night, the scenes so clear they’re begging to be written? Or that thriller that’s so powerful you can visualize it as not only a novel, but a film?

How do you decide? One way is to do it the way I will probably choose amongst those horses I told you about. I will probably use something like the following checklist:
- Which one do you feel the strongest about, with which one do you have the strongest connection? Just as it will be easier for me to work with a horse I really like, it will be much easier for you to spend the months it takes to write a novel if the concept is one you feel connected to and excited about.
- Which one is the most developed? With a horse, I’ll consider how many months or years of training or under-saddle work he’s done. With a story idea, you have to think about how well fleshed out the plot is, how developed the characters are, and how comprehensively you’ve imagined the settings or world of the characters.
- Which one is most likely to get you where you want to go? With a horse, the one that’s best trained and has the conformation and movement for dressage would be my best choice. When it comes to story ideas, you really have to look at the reality of your career and the marketplace. Have you got two books of a thriller series out that’s just begging for a third, but you’re considering detouring into a romantic fantasy novel? Maybe not the best choice, career-wise. Better to write that third thriller, and get back to the romantic fantasy later.
It’s possible to fall in love with the wrong horse, and quite possible to become enamored with a story idea that’s not to your advantage to pursue. Go into both transactions with a level head, a clear eye, and you’re sure to make the right choice. And remember, with story ideas (unlike horses), the one you set aside will always be waiting for you to explore later.

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July 1, 2013