freelance editing

How to Use Sound to Make Your Novel Stand Out In A Sea of Noise

July 12, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: description in fiction, fantasy author, five senses in fiction, freelance editing, Marcy Kennedy, online writing courses, sense of sound • 16 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

If you’re limiting yourself to just naming a sound, you’re missing out on the richness that the sense of sound could bring to your fiction. You’re speaking to your reader in a monotone.

Next to sight, sound is the most commonly used sense in fiction, but three techniques can help you change the sounds you use from plain background noise into something that adds new depth to your stories.

Use Onomatopoeia for an Echo

Onomatopoeia is when a word sounds like its definition—hiss, buzz, creak, swish, clatter.

The blade scraped across his stubble.

If you’ve ever listened to a man shave using a razor rather than an electric trimmer, scrape imitates the sound you’ll hear with each swipe.

Another poetry technique worth judiciously stealing is the repetition of sounds within words to mimic the sound you’re describing. One of the best known examples is from the final lines of Tennyson’s “Come Down, O Maid.”

The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmur of innumerable bees.

A morning dove’s call at a quiet summer’s twilight carries the same long o sound as moan, and the sequence of m’s and n’s followed by the zee sound in bees creates a buzz like a swarm.

Because most of us vocalize in our minds when we read, onomatopoeic words and phrases help us hear the sound you’re describing. (Speed readers are trained to stop this internal vocalization because it slows reading speed, but it’s also one of the things that helps make reading so pleasurable.)

Don’t overuse this technique. Not everyone likes it. Personally, used frugally at moments when you really need to emphasize a sound, I love it. (And so does Janice Hardy, former instructor for Writer’s Digest, so I’m in good company.)

Play With the Emotional Effects of Sound Deprivation or Sounds We Can’t Control

Using the sense of sound effectively in fiction isn’t all about the type of sound. Sometimes it’s about the lack of sound, the volume, the duration, or whether we have any control over the sound.

When the power goes out in your house at night, do you sleep through it or does the sudden loss of the white noise of the appliances wake you up? Do you find the loss peaceful or, after a while, does the silence become almost oppressive and ominous?

Scientists have studied the effects of sensory deprivation on the human body, and discovered a short period of sensory deprivation, like being underwater, can be relaxing. Over extended periods of time, though, it can lead to hallucinations, decreased memory function, and loss of identity, which is why it’s used as “white torture.” If you place your character in a situation where they can’t hear, they’re likely to be disoriented at first, feeling almost like their ears are clogged. If you place them alone for a long period of time somewhere like the wilds of Utah in winter, the silence will begin to play tricks with their mind.

If we have the ability to make a sound stop, we’re more able to tolerate it than if we have to endure it with no knowledge of when it might end. While our body eventually learns to ignore soft noises like the ticking of a clock in the background, louder noises or noises intended to motivate us to action can’t be tuned out in the same way. In my last truck, the parking break broke, but I didn’t realize it until I’d set it for a ferry ride, and the warning ding kept going after I released it. I had to drive over an hour with no way to make it stop. The sound never bothered me before, but by the end of that drive, I was tense and irritable and fighting a headache.

Let Sound Set the Mood

They don’t call it mood music for nothing. Your choice of sounds can alter the whole feel of a scene, so choose carefully to create the mood you want your reader to feel. If you want to lighten a scene, add a funny or embarrassing sound to a somber or romantic moment.

One of my favorite lines from my co-writer in our historical fantasy is when our female lead’s closest friend says to her, “The wind carries the voices of the dead tonight.” It highlighted not only the grief they shared but couldn’t speak of, but also their dread and uncertainty over what they’d face the next day.

What sound annoys you most? And which do you find most soothing?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Grammar for Fiction Writers is now available from Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords. (You might also be interested in checking out Showing and Telling in Fiction or Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

Enter your email below to receive updates next time I post here because you don’t want to miss the final sense! If you missed the previous posts, you can find the three techniques for smell, taste, and touch here.

Photo Credit: Peter Mazurek (Obtained via www.sxc.hu)

How to Use Touch to Pull Your Reader Into Your Novel

July 5, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: fantasy author, five senses in fiction, freelance editing, levels of intimacy, Marcy Kennedy, sense of touch, touch in fiction • 22 Comments

Did you know that leprosy doesn’t actually make your fingers and toes fall off?

I didn’t. What happens is the bacteria attack the nerve endings in the body so the sufferer can’t feel pain. When they injure themselves, they don’t feel it, and this can lead to infection and gangrene before the injured person realizes it and can get treatment. Imagine if they lost their sense of touch entirely.

Touch is the one sense we can’t survive without, so if you’re not using it in your story, you’re dooming your manuscript to an early death.

Over the past months, I’ve looked at three ways to make your novel scratch and sniff and three ways to use taste to make your readers hungry for more. This week, it’s time to look at three ways to use the sense of touch to touch your readers.

Use All Aspects of Touch

Touch is one of the most multi-faceted senses. You can touch and be touched. You can be touched by another living being, by the weather, or by an inanimate object. To convey touch to your readers, think about temperature, texture, pressure, and intent.

Temperature is about more than hot and cold. It’s about hot and cold within context. A cool hand on a feverish forehead soothes. A cool hand in a handshake is often interpreted as a sign of a cold personality. In an old an episode of Columbo, a character’s cold hands tipped him off to their poor circulation, and that in turn helped him solve the case.

Texture also goes beyond the gritty sand between your toes or the sliminess of separating an egg with your fingers. My co-writer Lisa Hall-Wilson recently wrote a post on how The Details Make the Story. For one of her earliest attempts at a novel, she wanted to write about a fireman and so she booked a tour of a fire hall. Near the end of the tour, she asked to feel one of the firemen’s hands because she needed to know if they were rough like a farmer’s or smooth like a mechanic’s.

Pressure can show intimacy, a threat, or add humor. At my best friend’s funeral, a well-meaning older lady took my hand and squeezed it while she talked to me. The pressure she used normally wouldn’t have been a problem except that when she took my hand, the ring I had on twisted, and every time she squeezed, the stone cut into the finger next to it. She interpreted the pain flashing across my face as emotional and squeezed harder. It was funny in hindsight. Not so much at the moment.

Intent adds layers. I once read that women don’t slap men they’re genuinely furious with. They might punch them, knee them in the groin, shove them, or simply walk away, but they won’t slap them because a slap says that part of them isn’t angry. Part of them secretly knows the man was right or is secretly attracted to him because of what he did. A slap is ambiguous.

Observe (or Break) the Continuum of Intimacy

By its very nature, touch is an intimate sense. You can smell a scent carried on the wind, hear a sound from a mile away, look at stars through a telescope. To touch something, you need to be within arm’s reach.

Jenny Hansen had a helpful post on Using the 12 Stages of Physical Intimacy to Build Tension in Your Fiction where she points out that skipping over any of the stages of intimacy causes conflict. Drawing out these stages amps up the tension as your readers hold their breath to see when your characters will reach the next milestone. You can observe or break the order of the touch levels on this scale depending on what emotional effect you want to have on your reader.

Jenny also notes that the stages of physical intimacy speak to boundaries. Personal space boundaries vary by individual, by gender, and by age, but they also vary by culture. In North America, you don’t kiss an almost perfect stranger on the cheeks in either greeting or farewell. In other cultures, straight men kiss on the lips in greeting. You can add richness to your story by having touch interact with personal boundaries and cultural norms.

Consider How Your Character Will Interpret It

The most important thing for touch, though, is to know how your character will interpret it. A woman whose love language is physical affection will interpret a hug differently than will a woman who was sexually abused as a child. How will a germaphobe handle touch? What about an aging musician whose fingers are going numb?

Do you have a funny story about touch? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever touched? What did it feel like? (I held a baby crocodile once. He wasn’t slimy at all, and his belly was actually very soft.)

All three books are available in print and ebook forms.

Be sure to sign up to receive free email updates so that you don’t miss the last two senses.

Photo Credit: Britta Kuhnen (obtained via www.sxc.hu)

Five Benefits You’re Missing If You’re Not On Twitter

June 22, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: fantasy author, freelance editing, Marcy Kennedy, platform building for fiction authors, social media for writers, Twitter for writers, WANA International • 20 Comments

If you’re not on Twitter already (or have an account you barely use), you probably have good reasons. You’re afraid it’s a black hole time suck. You don’t see the value it adds over Facebook. You’re worried about privacy. You’re not sure how to make the best use of it, it moves too fast, or it’s confusing.

While I agree those are valid concerns, they can all be fixed with a little time and training. And if you’re not on Twitter, there are five amazing benefits you’re missing out on.

(1) Twitter Has Over 100 Million Active Accounts

Whether you’re seeking traditional publication or plan to self-publish, whether you’re a non-fiction author, a novelist, a poet, or a short story writer, you need a platform to sell your work. Your audience is on Twitter. You just need to know how to tap in to them. This is true even if you write children’s books or YA. Your readers might not be on Twitter, but their parents and aunts and uncles and even grandparents are, and your books might just be the perfect gift they’re looking for.

Because of the ability to participate in conversations through hashtags, Twitter also allows you to build a following faster than any other social networking site. People who find you on Facebook usually already know you. People who find you on Twitter are more likely to be complete strangers, and that’s a good thing because you’re expanding your friendships and your reach. I met some of my favorite writer friends on Twitter.

(2) Twitter Makes You a Better Writer

Twitter gives you 140 characters to work with. Not 140 letters or 140 words, but 140 characters. Spaces count, and so does punctuation. Links count as well.

Working within those constraints forces you to write tighter. No purple prose allowed. You need to figure out exactly what you’re trying to say. Twitter’s character limit also helps you value strong verbs and specific nouns over adverbs and adjectives. Both of those skills translate directly into better writing elsewhere.

(3) Twitter Brings You the News Faster than Any News Site Can

Twitter is real time, which means that while reporters are putting together their stories and getting approval from their editors, normal people on site are tweeting. Last August, Twitter lit up like a firefly on crack about the 5.8 earthquake in Virginia before the news stations could catch their balance. In the plague of tornadoes that rolled through Texas this spring, Twitter might have even saved lives.

(4) Twitter Allows You to Keep Your Finger on the Pulse of the Publishing Industry

Twitter is like a writer’s mecca because you can quickly find out about interesting and informative new blog posts (already vetted by others), get tips on writing and publishing from agents, editors, and bestselling authors, and keep up on industry trends and new releases. No searching involved. It comes to you in a bite-sized 140 character nugget. If you decide you want more, you click the link.

(5) Twitter Helps You Research

In her bestselling book We Are Not Alone: A Writer’s Guide to Social Media, Kristen Lamb tells the story of how she needed information on bounty hunters for her novel. Rather than wasting hours trying to sort through results on Google and still not coming up with what she needed, she tweeted about it and received replies from actual bounty hunters willing to answer her questions.

But it’s not only facts you can research on Twitter. If you’re not sure your main character’s name is a good fit for his personality and job, ask. If you want to know what writing software other writers actually trust, ask. In my co-written novel with Lisa Hall-Wilson, I mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah, and we debated whether enough people would know what we meant. So I asked, and we ended up leaving it in the book.

In August, I’ll be teaching a course to help people who aren’t on Twitter get started or people who are on Twitter but are struggling to improve. For eight months, I let Twitter intimidate me. I barely used it and only had five followers (two of which were my brother and sister-in-law). Then, in less than a year, I learned to love Twitter and went from five followers to over 3,600. This course will save you the wasted time, headaches, embarrassment, and learning curve I had starting out on Twitter, and show you how fun and helpful it can really be.

Learn more or sign up for this 4-week Twitter course here.

Twitter is where I hang out most days, so if you’re already on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you. My username is @MarcyKennedy (straightforward right – it’s very important on Twitter to use your name). And please help me spread this post not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ (where the folks who aren’t yet on Twitter are likely to be).

If you’re already on Twitter, what do you love best about it? If you’re not, what’s the biggest thing holding you back?

Sidenote: Since I know this is the busiest time of year for everyone, I’m going down to two posts a week for the rest of the summer. Starting in July, I’ll be doing my science fiction/fantasy themed posts on Mondays and the regular post for writers will move to Thursdays. I’ll be back to the three-day schedule come fall 🙂

Do You Worry You Won’t Succeed As A Writer?

April 25, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Writing • Tags: ebooks, freelance editing, Jeff Goins, Marcy Kennedy, platform building for fiction authors, succeed as a writer, You Are A Writer • 52 Comments

Do you worry you won’t ever succeed as a writer?

I do. Despite how far I’ve come, despite the goals I’ve reached, some days I wonder if those people who want me to quit are right. Some days all I can see is how far I still have to go. And lately, I’ve been struggling with a lot of fear.

This week, I had the privilege of reviewing an advance copy of Jeff Goins’ You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) for a 100-page metaphorical kick in the rear. (We all need those once in a while.)

If you follow Jeff’s blog, you know that he melds practical tips with inspiration. Even though I normally prefer practical tactics I can immediately put to use when it comes to writing advice, in this case, I think the real value of this book lies in his insights into what it takes to succeed as a writer.

I can’t sum up the whole book for you (you’ll have to get your own copy), but here are the top four tips I walked away with for what it will take for writers like you and me to reach our dreams.

(1) “The only person you need to worry about writing for is you” (pg. 27).

This isn’t new advice. We’ve heard numerous times not to write for a trend and to write what we enjoy reading. But it goes deeper than that, and I think the take-away in what Jeff has to say comes from his reasons for writing for ourselves first.

Writing for ourselves first is the only way to be authentic. We all want people to like us, but if we focus on trying to do whatever it takes to make them like us rather than just being ourselves, it’s going to show. We’ll come across as fake, and that will drive people away.

Thousands of other people are struggling with what you’re struggling with. This means that if you write about what appeals to you, it will appeal to other people as well. Always ask yourself, “If I hadn’t written this, would I want to read it.”

You’ll find your voice quicker. If you’re only worried about writing for you, the pressure of impressing everyone else goes away and all pretenses drop. Your voice has a lot to do with being comfortable in public and allowing your personality to come through.

(2) “A brand is who you are. But it’s more than that. It’s your truest self. The part people remember” (pg. 46).

We don’t brand ourselves the same way that businesses or products do because our brand includes our name, our personality, our unique quirks, and our voice, as well as our genre. Your brand is you. No lies. No games. No tricks.

Through your brand you make a promise to people about what they’ll get when they interact with you in person or in writing. I want people to know exactly what they’ll get when they come to my blog and website. In fact, I worry that I’ve split my brand too far by including both writing posts and fantasy/science fiction posts. (I’d love to have you weigh in on that in the comments.)

Brand goes beyond that though to my personality. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a bit quirky and that I love to pick things apart to see how they work and what truth is hiding behind them. I’m all about hope. And I like to help. That’s me in a nutshell. That’s also my brand.

(3) “Content is not king. Relationship is” (pg. 78).

I have a feeling some bubbles just popped. What do you mean content isn’t king?

You have to have good content. It’s foundational. But you can have good content, and work yourself to exhaustion, and if you don’t have relationships with people who will spread the word about your great content, no one will come to read it.

(4) “You never fully arrive” (pg. 93).

There’s always room for improvement even for writers who are on the New York Times bestseller list. Rather than getting cocky once you’ve achieved your definition of success, keep striving to get better.

Be sure you check out Jeff’s website and pick up a copy of his new book You Are A Writer.

You are a writer if you write. But do you wonder if you’ll ever feel like a success?

I hope you’ll check out the newly released mini-books in my Busy Writer’s Guides series–Strong Female Characters and How to Write Faster–both currently available for 99 cents.

Why I’m Changing Up My Blog

March 31, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: author brand, blogging, fantasy author, freelance editing, Girls With Pens, Lisa Hall-Wilson, Marcy Kennedy • 19 Comments

I’ll be making some changes to my blogging schedule starting April 1, 2012.

As many of you already know, I think Kristen Lamb and her WANA (We Are Not Alone) methods are the smart road for writers to take when it comes to balancing the load of writing and platform building while still making time to live your life.

In her post Sacred Cow Tipping – More Common Blogging Misconceptions, Kristen points out two pitfalls we often fall into as new writer-bloggers. We feel we need to have separate blogs for separate topics and we give all our energy to a group blog at the expense of our own. I did both these things, and I was burning myself out, leaving little time for my novel or my life away from my computer.

Lisa Hall-Wilson and I have absolutely loved the year and a half we gave to Girls With Pens, and we don’t regret a moment of it. But it’s time for us to take the next step. We will no longer be blogging at Girls With Pens. (We’re also not getting rid of it entirely—read on.)

So with Girls With Pens shutting down, instead of posting here Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (which I have been), I’ll be posting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Instead of having separate blogs for separate topics, I’ll be loosely grouping my topics into days. If you’re only interested in one of the topics, I won’t be offended if you ignore the others 🙂

Mondays will be where fantasy, science fiction, and real life collide in posts like Who’s Your Unicorn and The Lie of Helen of Troy.

Wednesdays will be devoted to posts on writing, editing, platform building, and blogging like 6 Grammar Mistakes that Will Cost You Readers and What Do We Mean By “Strong Female Characters?” If you’ve also been following Girls With Pens, you already know what to expect on these days. I’m simply moving locations.

Friday will be the new day for interviews with fantasy and science fiction authors to help you pick your next weekend read, behind the scenes looks at the worlds within the books (like my Bertie Botts posts), v-logs, and mash-ups.

I’ll still be bringing you excellent guest posters, but they won’t have a set day.

What about Girls With Pens? Even though we’re shutting down the blog, you can sign up for our monthly Girls With Pens newsletter where we’ll be bringing you interviews with industry professionals.

I hope that you’ll sign up for my blog here, and if you’d like to hangout online, you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I’m also on Pinterest, and would love to have you follow my boards and get a chance to see your boards in return.

The Missing Hunger Games Line

March 29, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Behind the Scenes, Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: dystopian science fiction, fantasy author, freelance editing, Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss Everdeen, Life at Warp 10, Marcy Kennedy, Peeta, science fiction, The Hunger Games • 36 Comments

Even though I loved The Hunger Games movie that released Friday, I couldn’t help but notice that the screenwriters left out one of the most important lines in the book.

The night before the Games begin, Katniss finds Peeta on the roof of their hotel, watching the Capitol celebrate.

Peeta tells her, “I keep wishing I could think of a way to…to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games.”

This makes no sense to Katniss. In the book, she replies by telling him to care about staying alive, and in the movie, she explains that she can’t afford to think that way. Although that particular line wasn’t in the book, it was a perfect addition because that’s the way things are in District 12, where Katniss lives. Thinking of what might be only leads to disappointment. You have no chance of bettering your situation, nothing you do changes anything significant, and the best you can hope for is to survive.

And that’s the best she hopes for from the Arena as well. Only one of the twenty-four who compete comes out alive. To Katniss, any expectation that something might change this year would be futile.

Yet it’s Katniss who, by the end of the book, thumbs her nose at the Capitol and forces them into allowing two winners of the Hunger Games for the first time ever. And over the next two books, it’s Katniss who, without even meaning to, ignites a revolution and changes her world.

She learns one person can make a difference.

I’m not sure whether the scriptwriters missed this theme running underneath all the books or whether they didn’t catch the line that brings out the deepest facet of it, but in Chapter 7 of The Hunger Games, Peeta and Katniss are arguing about which of them has the better chance of survival and of getting sponsors. Each believes it’s the other.

Peeta turns to Haymitch (their mentor) in exasperation and says, “She has no idea. The effect she can have.”

They left this line out of the movie, and without this line, part of the message is missing.

Not only can one person make a difference, but sometimes we make a difference in others’ lives without even knowing it.

Katniss didn’t set out to change the world. She just did what was right and change followed. She had no idea of the chain of events her seemingly small actions would cause.

It works the same way in real life.

When I was twelve, the boy who sat behind me in class would ask me to explain all our school work to him. I dreaded feeling that pesky tap-tap on my shoulder. When I finally lost my temper, he confessed—he couldn’t read. Somehow he’d slipped through the cracks, dismissed as either stupid or lazy, when he wasn’t either.

So I taught him (and felt guilty about snapping at him). At the time, I didn’t think it was anything important, but a couple years later, I overheard him telling a teacher how much I’d helped him and how much it meant to him.

I treasure that memory. So often I struggle with feeling insignificant and like nothing I do really matters, and that memory helps remind me that I won’t always know how something small I did positively affected someone else. If I hadn’t overheard, I would never have known I made a difference.

We’re not all destined to be famous leaders or world-changers, but that doesn’t mean we’re not making a difference in the individual lives we touch, sometimes when we least realize it, often just by doing the right thing. And that too is important.

Do you ever struggle with feeling like what you do doesn’t matter? Has someone made a difference in your life, probably without realizing it?

(If you’re looking for a movie review of The Hunger Games, Karen Rought at The Midnight Novelist has a mostly spoiler-free version, and Jessica O’Neal–the sexy little nerd–does a great job of analyzing the actors and the flow of the movie.)

Does Thank You Mean We Forget? – Dealings with Fairies

March 22, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Mythical Creatures • Tags: Disney fairies, fairies, fairy, fantasy author, freelance editing, Life at Warp 10, Marcy Kennedy, praise publicly, saying thank you, writing thank you notes • 39 Comments

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.” —The Little White Bird (1902) by J. M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan)

Disney has fairies all wrong.

Disney and other modern renderings make fairies young, tiny, beautiful, winged. They’re playful and sweet. In the game my best friend’s daughter plays, they care for plants and animals. Every little girl wants to meet a fairy.

But it wasn’t always that way. In ancient Ireland and Scotland, fairies were feared. They stole babies, misled travelers, and kidnapped people, only to return them years later, after all their loved ones were dead. Fairies belonging to the Unseelie Court enjoyed causing misfortune to humans, including paralysis and mysterious illness, simply for the fun of it. Even the more-benevolent fairies of the Seelie Court were still dangerous if angered or offended.

Folklore focuses more on protection from fairies than it does their appearance. The most common means of warding off their malice were decorating with cold iron like a horseshoe, planting rowan bushes (small mountain ash trees) by your doorway, and keeping charms made of gorse, rosemary, dill, and St. John’s Wort under your pillow or around your neck. You didn’t seek fairies out. Instead, you avoided places where they might congregate and all chances of giving offense.

And if a fairy did you a good turn, you were never, ever, under any circumstances, to thank them. Fairies believed that, if you thanked them, it meant you’d forget the good deed they’d done for you.

I wonder if they weren’t at least partly right.

I’ve done it—said thank you, moved on, and never thought about the help I received again. But if I so easily forget, I have to wonder if I was ever truly grateful at all. So even though I think thanking people is still important and polite, I’ve been trying to come up with ways to put the meaning back into it.

Revive the Art of Thank-You Notes

I’ve heard this advice over and over again, but I’ve often dismissed it as old-fashioned—until I thought about why thank-you notes are perfect…and why they’ve largely fallen by the wayside.

Writing a thank-you note costs you time, money, and effort. It takes longer to select a card, write out a message by hand, address the envelope, and take it to the post office than it does to send off an email, Facebook message, or tweet. True gratitude should cost us something.

Writing thank-you notes properly is also an art form unto itself. My mom was mortified when I hadn’t sent out all the thank-you notes for my wedding gifts within the month after my wedding, but I wanted to take the time to do them right. For each gift, I wanted to choose a specific reason I appreciated the gift and what I liked about it rather than sending out a generic “Thanks for the glasses. I’m sure we’ll use them.” In writing a good thank-you note, we’re forced to think deeply about what the other person has done for us.

Praise Publicly

Public praise gives something back. I don’t believe in doing favors just so someone will do a favor for me in return (that’s selfish). I do believe that, if someone has done something lovely for me, I should try to help them out as well, even if it’s just through putting a smile on their face by letting others know what a great person they are.

Pay It Forward by Doing a Favor for Someone Else

Hold open a door. Bring your co-worker a coffee. Call up a friend and offer to run an errand for them. Each time we do something for a new person, it reminds us of the times others have done something nice for us too. In a way, it makes their good deed immortal.

Do you think we sometimes say thank you by rote and too easily forget what’s been done for us? What other creative ways can you think of to express true gratitude?

Behind the Scenes: Randy Ingermanson and Mars

March 5, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Behind the Scenes, Marcy's Blog • Tags: fantasy author, freelance editing, John Olson, Marcy Kennedy, Mars, Oxygen, Randall Ingermanson, Randy Ingermanson, science fiction • 13 Comments

Today I have the privilege of interviewing award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, author of “Genius in Jeopardy” books and creator of the Snowflake method. He’s taking us behind the scenes on his fast-paced science fiction novel Oxygen (co-written with John Olson).

An explosion on the first mission to Mars leaves four astronauts with only enough oxygen for one to live. The evidence points to one of the four being a saboteur. One’s unconscious. One’s unstable. And the other two are falling in love.

(If you buy the ebook edition of Oxygen, you also get two helpful appendices. The first takes apart the motivation-reaction units—à la Dwight Swain—in the first two chapters. The second explains how they sold Oxygen to a respected publisher in less than seven weeks without an agent.)

Welcome, Randy 🙂

In your Authors’ Notes of the Kindle edition, you write that neither technology nor money are actually an issue and that “humans could walk on Mars within a dozen years.” Why do you think we should send a mission to Mars? What would make it worth the money and manpower investment?

If you believe that space exploration is a good thing, then it needs a goal. Nobody achieves diddley unless they have a goal. Putting humans on Mars is a powerful goal that anybody can visualize and understand. It’s the one goal that would move us forward fastest.

The space race in the 1960s created numerous technological advances that nobody expected. These have paid off massively over the last fifty years. The computer I’m typing on right now and the internet I’m sending you this document over are partly due to the space race. Partly.

A Mars mission would very likely have the same unpredictable side effects. I can’t tell you what they would be, because “unpredictable” means that you can’t know in advance what they are.

The usual scientific reasons given for a Mars mission are that it’ll contribute to our understanding of the history of the solar system (unfortunately, most people don’t give a fig about our understanding of the history of the solar system) and that it could possibly provide evidence of past life on Mars which would shed light on the evolution of life on earth (unfortunately, many of the people in positions to vote for a Mars mission believe that “evolution” is a four-letter word).

So let’s just leave it with this—a Mars mission will astound us with an amazing array of technological advances that we can’t predict, for a total price tag much less than the cost of running a foreign war for one month. A Mars mission would give us a vision of greatness and adventure. If that sounds like something our country desperately needs, then a Mars mission would be a good thing.

What’s the one thing you think is key to making a manned mission to Mars possible? How did you work this into Oxygen?

Political willpower. Going to Mars is not that hard, technically or financially. If you fund the project at a few billion dollars per year (this is well within NASA’s current Spartan budget) and you commit to a ten or twelve year program, you can get there. It’s harder than going to the moon, but not much harder, and we have better technology than we did fifty years ago when John Kennedy committed to putting Americans on the moon.

The key thing missing is a political champion (like Kennedy) who can look beyond the next two years. Several presidents over the last couple of decades have given lip service to Mars, but they typically backed off when something more urgent came up.

A Mars mission needs steady commitment for longer than that.

In Oxygen, we simply postulated that NASA formed a small independent unit, a “NASA within NASA” that had one guy who had absolute control and a reasonable budget. This was the only way we could see to get the continuity needed. No international collaborations. No sprawling bureaucracy. Just a small team of dedicated people.

The problem came when the budget cutters came around with their axes, looking to save a few bucks. This is very plausible, but it’s also the best way to wreck the mission. You cannot run a Mars mission that doesn’t have dependable funding. You can’t.

A lot of people see science and faith as incompatible, yet your two main characters (Valkerie and Bob) are both people of faith. How would you answer the people who say you can’t be both a scientist and a person of faith?

Roughly 40% of all working scientists are people of faith. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are conservative Christians or orthodox Jews (although some are). But it means that the death of faith among scientists has been greatly exaggerated. Likewise, a surprising number of philosophers are people of faith.

There is an odd philosophy known as “scientism” which has sprung up in the last few decades which says, roughly, that the only valid knowledge is scientific knowledge. The reason I say this is “odd” is because there is obviously no way to demonstrate this using scientific method. So scientism is self-refuting, and therefore false.

Of course I believe that science is one way to reach valid knowledge. But if it really is the only way, there’s no way for us to know that.

Given North America’s ongoing love affair with reality TV, one element I enjoyed was that you had a news station wanting to turn the Ares 10 mission into the “biggest, baddest reality show you ever saw, with a boatload of danger and packed to the gills with romance.” What aspects of a mission to Mars do you think would make for great reality TV?

In our novel, two good looking single men and two good looking single women, isolated for almost three years in a ship the size of typical Tokyo apartment was all the reality show the networks could dream of. Whenever you have that, there’s the immediate question of who’s going to hook up with whom, and when?

Throw in some jealousy and the ever-possible threat of instant death, and you really do have the best reality show ever. TV money might very well be the only way to fund a Mars mission.

Because this was a co-written novel, did you run into any “bloopers” where John wrote a character in a way that made you ask “what was he thinking?!”

Hmmmm, maybe the other way around, but we’re not going to go there. At one point, I wrote a scene that John just said no on. But neither he nor I will ever tell anyone what it was.

Early in the coauthoring, we discovered a much more insidious problem was maintaining the emotional continuity between scenes. It was just impossible for either of us to write a scene until we had read the preceding scene, because we had to pick up the emotive atmosphere in the same place.

Once we learned that, we put ourselves on a rigorous schedule where we mapped out who would write each scene and on what day at what time. As soon as a scene got written, whoever wrote it would email it to the other one, who was waiting for it.

This made writing the novel hard, but once we learned that we had to do it this way, it worked pretty well.

You’ve written a sequel to Oxygen. Will The Fifth Man also be released in a Kindle edition soon?

We’re working on final edits now. We’re shooting for a release in early April, but I can’t make any guarantees until the book is done, because life happens.

Thanks, Randy, for taking us behind the scenes on Oxygen.

If you want to learn more about the craft and marketing of fiction, sign up for Randy’s Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine (with more than 29,000 readers). You can buy Oxygen in paperback from Marcher Lord Press, for Kindle at Amazon, or for your Nook at Barnes and Noble.

Icarus and My Fear of the Sun

February 24, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Mythical Creatures • Tags: fantasy, freelance editing, Greek mythology, guest post, Jessica O'Neal, Marcy Kennedy • 0 Comment

I have an unusual fear, one I don’t normally talk about. I’m terrified of ending up like Icarus.

Join me today at Jessica O’Neal’s Sexy Little Nerd blog for my guest post about Icarus and my fear of the sun. And while you’re there, be sure to read some of Jessica’s other posts. Her blog is nerd paradise and one of my favorites 🙂

Something Like This, But Not This

January 28, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Vlogs, Writing • Tags: advice for writers, fantasy author, freelance editing, Life at Warp 10, Marcy Kennedy • 14 Comments

Writing can be one of the most confusing professions around. We’re told that agents and editors are looking for something fresh and unique–but not too fresh and unique. We go to our critique group or send out our manuscript to beta readers and what one person loves, another hates. And everyone wants to tell us how they think our book should end.

And we end up feeling exactly like this . . .

Have you ever been in a situation where none of the advice you’re being given makes sense and you start to suspect that the person giving it doesn’t have any more of a clue than you do? 😉

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