Having had some disappointing reads lately, here are five reasons I usually will set a promising novel aiside.

Frustrating Plotlines

Sometimes, it seems like the plot is too frustrating. I read for entertainment. I don’t need frustrating plotlines to elevate my already-high blood pressure. I especially hate it when I figure something out, but the author refuses to let the character figure the same thing out. I am now reading a book where the character has come to a conclusion that I just know is wrong. But the character is convinced she is right. I just know she is going to spend the next four hundred pages clinging to her mistaken conclusion only to figure out she was wrong at the last minute, and then save the day. How do I know this? Because that’s what happened in Book One. Retread. I’m not sure if I want to finish the book and see if I am wrong.

Amoral Characters

I finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I started reading the second book, but I set it aside. Why? Because I’m having trouble feeling any empathy for the main character. She is totally amoral and is now sleeping with a sixteen year old boy. Romance publishers would never dare go near such a plotline. The only thing that seems to fire up her sense of right and wrong is brutality toward woman. Which, of course, she experiences for herself. Which brings me to another set-aside reason …

Excess Brutality

The first book in the Millennium Trilogy almost got set aside because of the sexual brutality. I’m only a few chapters into the second book, and already I can foresee the author upping the brutality for book 2. I’m just not sure I want to suffer through it.

Monologues

I recently rated a book a 3 on Goodreads instead of a 4 because in the end, the character didn’t figure it out. Instead, the reader had to be served up the explanations of the plot in the form of villain monologues. The really good writers always have their characters figure out the mystery, thus avoiding this trap. Monologues rarely cause me to actually set aside the book, because hey–I’m almost at the ending anyway. But still. Grr.

Authorial Over-Indulgence

Sometimes, when the author becomes more and more successful, they over-indulge. Their stories become longer, but not with added substance–with added fluff. Tension is still important even if you are a successful author. Every scene must still count. You can’t drag things out–neither the tension of the story’s climatic resolution, nor the plot itself over book after book after book. Are these authors in love with their own words? I think nothing of abandoning a series at book 5 and toting the entire set to the used book store once the plot starts flatlining. Conversely, after reading an entertaining trilogy, I’ll always check out the author’s next series. So really, there’s nothing to be afraid of in actually, yanno, getting to the end.

In order to end on a more positive note, I promise to do a companion post on “Five Reasons I Keep Turning the Pages”. In the meantime, please share some of the reasons you have set some recent reads aside.

Certain hobbies don’t take a lot of time or effort. By far my oldest hobby is scrutinizing my pocket change for special coins. And this time of year—right about now—is the absolute best time of year to find old, special coins. Why? My theory is that coin stashes have been emptied nationwide to help fund Christmas. So January is the best time to find those recently-recirculated coins.

To start, empty your pockets and coin purses and throw them on a desk.

Pennies

You will notice you have two types of pennies. Nice, dark, coppery looking ones with a uniform color, and crummy, old-looking ones that are blotchy, pitted and icky. The old-looking, crummy ones are actually the newer coins. Toss them aside. They are no longer even made of copper anymore, which is why they look so yucky. I don’t even like handling them.

Of the nice coppery ones, turn them to the reverse. The wheat-back coins are definite keepers. The rest are a toss-up. With each year, as more and more copper coins are taken out of circulation, these coins are going be worth more and more. If you stumble across a penny that you have mistaken for a dime because it is silvery, definitely keep it. It is probably a steel penny that was manufactured during WWII.

In 2009, the Lincoln Penny took on a whole new meaning when four coins were minted with various likenesses of Lincoln. Marring this event was the crappy composition of the coin. If you can find some nice ones, be sure to preserve them in plastic.

Sample coins – click to enlarge

Nickels

During 2004 and 2005, a series of special coins were made you might want to collect yourself a set. They aren’t worth anything, but it is a good practice to keep a sample of any special edition coin.

Other than that, nickels aren’t very special. They’re made of … well, nickel, and aren’t very exciting.

Dimes

You might find a dime that is more silvery looking than the others. Check it out. If it is 1964 or earlier, immediately set it aside. It is 90% silver. Nowadays, they are actually copper coated in nickel. You will notice that real silver coins make a silvery ping when you bounce them on a table, or when they jingle with other coins. If you ever hear anything unusual in your change, scrutinize every coin.

If you find a dime with a woman on the front, not only should you set it aside, you should seal it in plastic. Liberty dimes were last minted during WWII.

Of additional interest are unclad dimes. These are dimes that look like pennies because they never got their nickel coating. Most of these have been stripped artificially, but if they are all coppery with no suspicious ring of silver around the ribbed edge of the dime, it may be an actual unclad dime.

Quarters

Quarters were also mostly silver before 1965. So check out any old quarter. The recent state quarters aren’t worth very much, but it might be worth the trouble to collect yourself a set.

Starting this year, another multiyear set is being issued, the America the Beautiful Quarters program. These quarters feature national parks. Coin sets for 2011 are still available at the Mint.

Of interest are bicentennial quarters. These were minted in 1976, and they have a drummer on the reverse. They are starting to get pretty special to find in your change. I immediately take any I find out of circulation and encase it in plastic.

Other coins

Going to the post office and using cash in the the stamp machine can yield you some dollar coins. The post office is the only place that regularly uses dollar coins. I don’t have any of the recent ones, only some older Sacajawea coins. The two current dollar coins are the presidential coin, and the Sacajawea coin. I also grab the Susan B. Anthony coins, but I think they have all been removed from circulation. During its last mint year, I got one encased in mylar from the Mint. They may be almost impossible to find nowadays.

Same goes for half-dollars. I have one of particular interest–a bicentennial half-dollar coin. It looks almost new, too. I’ve had it since Junior High. Other than that year, this coin has not changed in recent years, like other coins have. Also be on the lookout for pre-1965 silver half-dollars.

I have hundreds of coins, mostly because I grab anything that’s unusual to me, even current foreign coins. Thanks to a friend of my father, I have lots of European coins from WWII, including a french coin made of tin. I really need to grab a set of Euro coins, but they’re kind of expensive.

So, go empty those pockets and change purses. Find anything cool?

So I guess this has been some kind of unannounced blog hiatus. You just need a break every now and then. What have I been doing? I spent about two weeks wasting my free time with Morrowind. I hung out. I worked on a story until I realized the plot line was marginal to the story at best.

But I do have several books to review and several authors have been in touch about guest reviews, so things should heat up in January. That is a good time for beginnings, I think. Or re-begins.

See ya then!

My post is over at Here Be Magic today, where I detail my struggles to keep alive the Christmas spirit in our household during an unseasonably warm winter.

An Unseasonable Christmas

Plus, the Here Be Magic authors are also giving away a Kindle Fire! You’ll find the link to the giveaway in the above post. So read, comment, and enjoy!

So I finished my Snow White story and it’s off to beta readers. While I was finishing it up, I took notes so I would write a blog post on my MS clean-up process.

First, back in the middle of October, I decided I was finished with the rough story. My first draft actually includes making about 3 passes through the manuscript. I tend to write a very bare-bones first draft, because the story is coming fast and furious, and I just want get it down. My actual first draft was about 15,000 words. When I finished in October, I had added about 10,000 words. It was at that point that I set it aside.

Why set it aside? Back in the spring, I took an online course by Angela James entitled Before You Hit Send (well worth the money). Part of what she stressed was giving your manuscript time to just sit. You cannot effectively edit unless you have a fresh viewpoint. And you get that by giving yourself a break from it, for at least 3 weeks. So I did. I worked on my time travel story, plus I wrote 3500 words of a Beauty and the Beast story. Then, I went back to Snow White, printed it out, wrote all over it, and did another draft or two. I ended up with a draft of about 33000 words, plus a discards file of 5000 words (my smallest ever!)

That was kind of a long preface to the meat of this blog, but over the weekend, I did my manuscript clean-up. Here’s what I do:

1. Remove scene titles. I make heavy use of the Document Map in Word (now called the Navigation Pane), and I name all my scenes so I can just point and click the map to jump to a scene. When I clean my doc, these are deleted.
2. Ensure scene break formatting is consistent. Usually I’ll use a hash (the old-fashioned way), but since I know CP uses *** scene breaks, that’s what I use for stories I intend to submit there first.
3. Ensure chapter break formatting is consistent, and chapter numberings are correct. There is no right way, just pick a way and be consistent.
4. Name chapters. I did this for The Sevenfold Spell, so I needed to do it here. Make sure the chapter names are not spoilery. They should “go with” the beginning of the chapter, not the end.
5. Skim for unnecessary scenes. These are the scenes that don’t drive the plot forward. I found one scene during my final clean-up that had to go, thus swelling my discards file past 5000 words.
6. Skim for pacing. Page through the story by scrolling it with your mouse wheel. If one scene requires notably more srolls than the others, take a closer look. Same goes for short scenes. You might even want to zoom way out on your MS so you can just take in the scene lengths without getting distracted by the words. (Set your zoom to 10% and you’ll see what I mean.)
7. Check chapters endings and beginnings. Do the endings end on a cliffhanger without seeming gimmicky? Do they flow? Do the beginnings progress naturally from the ending, and if not, do you have a good reason for it? I had to change the order of two scenes because I didn’t want to get through the morning, and then go back in time to an earlier point and get through the morning again for my other character.
8. Fuss over the whole thing, backwards and forwards. Review the todo list that is in your mind, and get’em done. Try to think of any last minute tweaks you need. Make sure the tweaks don’t change the story more than you intended.
9. Go into Document Properties and fill out the author, title and any other information you desire, such as the series title.
10. Send to your beta readers. Yes, you have to be prepared to again sit back and wait. Find some good readers–they are hard to find–and send them off, and give them a good long time before you expect anything back. I gave my readers till the middle of January. In the meantime, I get to work on my other stories. Yippie!

Also, while waiting for feedback (an eleventh step!), I read the whole story aloud. This helps more that you would believe. My husband listens to me (and makes suggestions), but even reading by myself clues me in to so many voice problems.

What will I do when I get the feedback back? Another draft, of course! But this one–unless the feedback was “major work is needed”–is the final one before I submit.

I don’t mean “sophomore” in this case as juvenile. I mean as the second book.

I’ve written more than 2 books. I have written three full-length novels, and since the first one was 230,000 words, you could even say I’ve written four. The Sevenfold Spell isn’t even among that number because it’s a novella. I was hoping to be able to produce two or three additional novellas in quick succession.

But dang. I got hit with the Sophomore Slump.

I started the Cinderella novella with high hopes. I had what I thought was a good premise. I started writing and I thought things were going well.

Then, I started second-guessing myself. You see, the Cinderella story is quite different from The Sevenfold Spell. I was hoping to go for some humor, but it didn’t work out that way. It has a virginal protagonist who remains that way throughout the story. I came up with an awesome villain.

But the plot … well, it kept failing my “why should the reader give a s**t?” test. The Cinderella story just doesn’t have all that much inherent conflict. Or rather, it’s conflict that the reader really doesn’t care about (with the stepsisters/stepmother) that is eventually culminated with a comeuppance, which really doesn’t resonate with me. And I think, as the author, I have to find it compelling in order to be able to do anything with it.

The part that gives me heartburn is I knew all this last August. I tried to carry on, to up the stakes, to infuse it with more conflict. I tried writing it in first person. I wrote a prequel that I really like. I set it aside for a while to polish up and submit my two novels (the first is a trunk novel). But every time I came back to it, I had less and less enthusiasm for the project.

But I didn’t want to give up on it. However, before long I realized that I wasted a year.

Finally, in July, I set it aside for good and started work on Snow White. It’s finished now; I’m just giving it a week to sit before I read it again before I send it off. I’ve even had some good plot improvement ideas in the meantime (which is why I let it sit). I also still need to read it aloud.

I didn’t have any of the problems I had with the Cinderella story. The more I wrote it, the more I liked it. Also, I’ve started my Beauty and the Beast story already, and I keep coming up with more ideas that I like for it. It may even be the best story of the three, which would be just fine with me if I can keep improving with each novel.

My difficult lesson? To listen to myself. When I know something isn’t working, I need to set it aside and work on something else. Because to set something aside doesn’t mean you give up on it forever. It only means that now is not its time.

I have a new addiction–Georgette Heyer. Someone put up a post a while back about going back and rereading Cotillion every couple of years, so I finally downloaded it and read it. Yes, it is highly rereadable! I liked it so much that I downloaded The Nonesuch for 1.99 at B&N, and I’m halfway through it as well.

I feel quite certain that I read some Georgette Heyer as a teenager. But I didn’t pay much attention to author names back then, so they all blur into Victoria Holt and Barbara Cartland. So I have dozens of books to read! This is almost as good as when I first discovered Jane Austen!

What is it about the Regency period that is so entrancing? It’s definitely the culture; take a Regency novel out of England and you have quite a different flavor. Of course, the term “Regency” doesn’t apply much if it’s not in England, because that’s the country that had the Prince Regent in question. Curious that he never seems to show up in any Regency novels …

Has anyone ever read a novel–romance or otherwise–that takes place outside of England during the 1810s and 1820s? Like, say, New York? I would think such a novel would be rather grim. I remember reading a novel that took place in India–a rather torrid romance, as I recall.

But Georgette Heyer is quite clean. One kiss at the end, with no particular details.

If you’ve read Georgette Heyer, do you have any particular recommendations for me?