Four Books On Sale, Cheap and Sweet
I am clueless.
I don’t know why this happens all at once.
But four of my books – What I Remember Most, Henry’s Sisters, Julia’s Chocolates and If You Could See What I See, are on sale for $4.99 on Kindle.
Yep. Only $4.99.
I have no idea how long they’ll be on sale for. Probably not long.
Cheap and sweet.
Have a lovely day and happy reading.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Cathy-Lamb/e/B001IGO5L0
Blood, Sweat, Tears and Goal Setting
So let’s talk about the blood and sweat and tears of writing.
There is no easy way to write a book so don’t go searching for it.
UNLESS, you get the chance to “search” on a raft down the Grand Canyon, or on a Kenyan safari, or wandering through Prague. Then, by all means, go and go quickly. Do your “research,” laugh along the way, and drink a few glasses of wine for all of us.
Other than that, get ready for some pain.
The “blood, sweat and tears part” is real. I’ve had some vicious paper cuts handling the pages of my manuscript. I’ve had hot flashes and night sweats over my computer. And I cannot tell you how many times I have cried over my keyboard.
I write scenes that make me cry, what can I say? Sometimes I am writing about something that I’ve been through, sometimes I’m writing about something I haven’t been through, but I’ve experienced the emotion, sometimes I feel bad for what I’m doing to my characters, and sometimes I’m crying because, damn, writing is hard.
But if you are truly and totally determined to write a book, you must not only be prepared for blood, sweat, and tears, you must set goals.
Does goal setting sound like two bad words strung together? Does it sound like something that will mangle your creative process? Too boring, too rigid?
Do you picture yourself only writing when the muse hits or the voices in your head start talking? Do you want only to write when you have time, a clear head, all problems figured out, all disasters handled, all kids in bed, all spouses and partners happy, the house clean?
You do? Let me tell you that that is the PERFECT way to never complete your book.
Utterly perfect.
I have written eleven novels and six short stories. I have set writing and editing goals for every one of them, because if I didn’t, they wouldn’t have been finished.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a book where my life hasn’t turned absolutely upside down and inside out during that time. Hell has come and so has high water. Disaster and problems and issues.
The house has been a mess, I’ve fought with my husband, the kids have been naughty. And I’ve still written.
The only times I stopped writing was during the critical illness/deaths of my mother, father, and mother in law. The grief was too overwhelming.
But I got back into it. I drug myself to my chair. I forced those words out.
You must do that, too. Honestly, you could give me a hundred excuses as to why you couldn’t write that day or this day and for 98 of your excuses I would say that you should have written and that your excuse was not an excuse.
If you want to write a book you must write.
Life is a mess. If you want to be a writer you must write through the chaos.
So, goal set. Meet the goals. Every day, every week, every month.
How do I personally torture my little writing self with goals?
Once my agent and editor and I have worked out the plot for my book, I wait for the first sentence to hit from outer space. I drive in the country, drink coffee, daydream. When that first sentence zips into my brain and I like it, we’re off and running.
Or, off and writing, I should say.
I write 2,000 words a day, 10,000 a week, or I don’t go to bed on Saturday night.
I write the entire book, straight through. When there is research I need to do, a character who is getting tricky that I can’t figure out, a problem with the plot or dialogue or direction or pacing, I write XXX.
When the first draft is done, and that can be at 70,000 or 100,000 words, I take a day or so off, then I start in on my editing goals.
I will tell you that my first draft is utter crap. It is the worst thing you’ve ever seen. It’s an embarrassment. If someone said, “You wrote this, Cathy?” I would deny it.
This is what editing is for, friends. Turning crap into something good.
My first editing goal is to go through five single spaced pages a day, twenty five a week. I edit the whole book. Because the book is so bad, this is a head banging process.
For edit number two, I attack 10 single spaced pages a day, fifty a week. For edit three, fifteen pages a day, seventy-five a week. For edit four, twenty pages, etc.
I edit all of my books eight or nine times before they go to my editor and agent.
YOU MUST SET WRITING AND EDITING GOALS, TOO.
Stick to those goals. You might set a goal to write 250 words a day. Or 500. You might set a goal to edit two pages a day or five pages or ten. Figure it out. Be reasonable, be kind to yourself, be ambitious but be rational.
You may have to give up something, or many somethings, to meet those writing and editing goals. For me, when my kids were young and at home, it was sleep. I wrote from ten at night until two in the morning and was up by 7:30 to get the little sweethearts off to school.
It’s not that I recommend this, as it’s no fun to be wiped out and feeling zombie-like, but it’s what I had to do to get published.
At the same time I was a freelancer for The Oregonian. I was very busy. Now and then I also cleaned the house and schlepped something onto plates for dinner.
You might have to write on your lunch break and during your kids’ nap times. You might have to write early in the morning when the crickets are sleeping. You might have to feign sickness and not go to church or your mother in law’s house or work. You might have to give up nights of dancing or cocktail drinking. You might have to volunteer less.
You might have to pretend you’re going on a business trip and go hole up in a hotel in a town an hour away from you. (Yes. A very famous author did this. No. I will not tell you her name.)
Something in your life will probably have to go to make space for your writing and editing.
But you want to write that book, right? You want to see your name on that cover. You want people to read your story. You want to be a published writer.
Then do it. Set goals. Write. Edit. Repeat.
Write on friends.
(Originally published here, in Ms. Career Girl, where I write a column on how to write books. http://www.mscareergirl.com/2017/03/23/blood-sweat-tears-and-goal-setting/)
Want To Go To Scotland? My Very Best Friend is $2.99
My Very Best Friend is less than a cup of coffee today. $2.99, on kindle.
Two best friends, one is a time travel romance writer who has zero romance in her life and a custom made stroller for her four cats, the other is missing and has too many secrets.
Set in Scotland with a man in a kilt and lingerie bike riding at midnight. Lots ‘o laughs.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Very-Best-Friend-Cathy-Lamb-ebook/dp/B00P53BX3K/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1490641444&sr=8-3-fkmr0
A Terrible Cleaning Ordeal
Do you all have this problem?
I am cleaning my house.
With every room vacuumed, every sink scrubbed, every floor mopped, I feel my brain cells dying and leaking out of my head.
It’s very fortunate that I don’t clean my house much or clearly my brain would dribble into space and then who knows what would happen?
Total chaos.
Must go now and have some chocolate to recover from this terrible ordeal.
For Writers: Know Thy Characters
This article was originally printed in Ms. Career Girl. http://www.mscareergirl.com/2017/02/23/know-thy-characters/
If you want to write a book, you must Know Thy Characters.
It’s an invisible writing rule that must not be broken or the Writing Fairy will come and cast a bad spell on you.
You must know your characters down to the teeniest, tiniest detail. You must be them. You must think for them. If you don’t know your characters, your readers won’t either, and you will have a literary ship wreck on your hands.
So let’s chat about what you need to know about your character, and how to get there without losing your sanity or slugging down too much tequila.
First, the basics. What does your main character look like? Try sketching him or her in your journal if her face doesn’t materialize in front of your eyes. Or, cut out photos from a magazine and put them together. Maybe the main/minor character is you. So, picture yourself – on your best day, or your worst. Take note of her age, weight, how she walks, and how she talks.
Name her. First and last. Should the name mean something personal to you? Eh. Maybe. Use Grandma’s first name. But maybe not. Do not give her the first and last name of someone you love or hate. Don’t. Especially if you hate someone. If you write about that person, with their real name, especially if she is a hideous, scary, axe wielding corporate witch, expect an expensive lawsuit to come rolling down the pike at you.
Figure out what she does for work, if she likes her job, or if she is getting ready to quit. Why does she want to quit? Maybe she knows she’s going to be fired. Why is she going to be fired?
Maybe it’s a stepping stone job. Maybe she’s making a bunch of money at one of those high end, exhausting law firms filled with vultures, and will put all of the money she’s saved into a lavender farm in the country and start a new life.
Knowing what job your character has is important as our jobs say a truckload about us.
Know Thy Character’s Family.
You need to figure out your character’s family and what her childhood was like. Our childhoods effect us well into adulthood in a multitude of ways. Were both her parents around? Did one abandon the family? Did one have an addiction? Too strict, too flighty?
No one really knows you unless they know the nitty gritty about your childhood, right? So don’t leave your character’s childhood out unless you want a gaping hole in your story and in your character’s personality and development.
In my book What I Remember Most, my character, Grenadine Scotch Wild, lives happily with her wandering, hippie parents until she’s six. Then they disappear. She can hardly remember anything about that dark night in the woods except hearing them yell, “Run, Grenadine, run.”
She runs and she’s later found wandering down a highway by a trucker. She goes into the foster care system. That loss, and what she can’t remember, shapes the rest of her life.
What about friends? Does your character have any? Are they healthy relationships or not? Does she have a best friend, or was there a falling out? Is she lonely? A loner? Why? Are their trust issues that started long ago or does she generally love being alone?
What are her internal issues? Low self esteem? A wild streak or impulsiveness? Is she scared, repressed, or angry? Is she reeling from a break up or a death? Is she lost emotionally? Does she suffer from depression or anxiety or agoraphobia or commitment? WHY? Why does she have the problems she does?
I’ve given my main characters all sorts of problems. Isabelle Bommarito in Henry’s Sisters, is on the edge emotionally, which is why she sits naked on her patio in the middle of downtown Portland on a rainy day and then burns her bra and her thong.
Another character, Stevie Barrett in Such A Pretty Face, weighed well over three hundred pounds before bariatric surgery. She ate her grief away. At the end of the book, she is done eating her grief. Your character must have emotional issues to solve or work on.
On the flip side, what’s humorous/original/admirable about her? Is she super smart? Does she finish the NY Times crossword puzzle? Maybe she is constantly volunteering in the Big Sister program. Does she sing like a drunk angel or dance like crazy on tables or create animals out of paper or paint fantastical paintings? Is she a peacemaker or crazy fun and gets arrested now and then? What makes her special?
What problems does she have in her life? The problems she has could be problems that you have had in your life. You can borrow them. Or borrow the problems of someone you know or read about.
Where are the conflicts? Who does she have them with? A man? A mother? A sister? Maybe she’s a rock climber. It’s woman against nature and she has to conquer nature. But why is she a rock climber? What drives her to climb up and risk her life?
Know thy character’s struggles.
Your character must have external struggles, too. In My Very Best Friend, my character, Charlotte Macintosh, is trying to find her best friend, who she hasn’t heard from in months. Charlotte is quirky. A time travel romance writer, she had a stroller made for her four cats and has an obsession with physics. Charlotte flies to Scotland, where she was raised, falls in love, and becomes the person she would have been had she not endured her own tragedy in childhood. She finds her best friend – along with other complications.
Simply put: Your character must have inside and outside problems.
A question I’ve gotten before is this: Should your main character be likable? My answer, to anyone writing her first book, is yes. Readers need someone to hold onto. They need someone to root for and relate to. They need someone to escape with.
Now, many people will disagree with me on this. There are exceptions to what I just said. Lots of people did not like the main characters in Gone Girl or The Girl On The Train. But they loved the gripping, fast moving, unique plot lines. Those books were blockbusters, in print and in movies. I loved both books. Couldn’t put them down. But if you are going to make an unlikable character, you better have a gripping, fast moving, unique plot line. No kidding. So be careful of that.
Write on, friends.
Here is a handy dandy check off list to use when you’re creating your character …
By Cathy Lamb
What does your character do for a living? Why that occupation? No, really. WHY?
Delve deep into her family history. What did you find? Is she close to her family or estranged?
Who are her friends? Does she have friends? Is she doesn’t have friends, does it bother her? Is she a group person or a loner?
Where does she live? What does her home look like? Does she like her home? If not, why?
Describe her childhood. Good? Bad? Both?
How does her childhood still impact her life?
Where is she now in her life? A good place? A lousy place?
Is she married? Divorced? Separated?
What does your character treasure? A family tea pot? Recipes from her mother? Cookbooks from friends and family
Does she like men? Hate men? Distrusting? What prevents her from being in a relationship if she’s not in one now? Does she like being in a relationship?
What does she want to do? What is motivating her? What’s keeping her back?
What are her stronger characteristics?
What does she hope for?
Where is she weak or flawed?
What mistakes has she made? What mistakes does she continue to make?
What does she do well? Poorly?
How does she dress? Does she like clothes?
How much money does she have? Is it important to her?
Does she have hobbies and activities? What are they?
What irritates her? What will make her temper explode?
Is she a leader or a follower?
What are the worst three things that have happened to her?
Does she have pets? Does she talk out loud to the pets? Does she think her pets are part human?
What are the three best things that have happened to her?
Is she aggressive? Shy? Depressed? Easily amused? Practical or a dreamer? Describe her personality.
What do other people think of her? Does she care what they think?
What has she overcome? What is she struggling to overcome?
Do you like her? Why or why not? Is it important to like her?
If you went to lunch, how would it go?
What advice would she give you about your life? What advice would you give her?
Where do you want her to end up? Where do you think she’ll end up?
What is she capable of doing? What is she not capable of doing?
Where will she be in ten years? Twenty?
What will she regret when she’s dying? What will she be proud of?
How is she as a parent, if she is a parent?
What are her quirks or odd habits?
What does she like to eat at two in the morning?
Does she like china? Does she throw plates when she’s mad? What does she think of the color pink? Does she like formal dinners or picnics better?
What makes her laugh? What makes her cry?
Does she have a secret? What is it and how has it affected her life?
Is her inner life in uproar? Why?
If confronted by an obnoxious person, what would she do?
If she was fired, how would she react?
If she was falling in love, how would she feel?
What does she look like?
Bashing My Head Through A Wall
I am on my ninth edit of my next book.
Translation: I want to bash my head through a wall.
One Chocolate Chip Cookie
Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone out there who believes, as I do, in the truth: If you cut chocolate chip cookie bars into one big heart it counts as “one cookie.”
Add a book and a blanket, and you have an excellent Valentine’s Day evening.
