Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Book Two
Book One is complete and off to the publisher, and you are looking at the notes for Books Two and Three. Well, the ideas you wrote off to the side as Book One metastasized into a full manuscript over the last year. If the publisher who asked to see the first three chapters really, really likes the book and requests a sequel, you want to be ready (thank goodness you attended that convention and got her business card).
But how?
Jenny Bravo ran into the sequel question after completing her first book, These are the Moments. Unlike you, she was even more behind the eight ball because she never even considered doing a second book until the fans of the first book asked for more. She shares “Ten Crazy Realities About Writing a Sequel” from her experience.
As an editor I highly recommend following the advice under #3.
“3. You have to remember things that you don’t.
Details, my friend, Details are the clincher.”
After taking a break, reread your original book. Look for the hooks and hints of what to expect in future books you gave yourself without knowing you had done so. That gift the werewolf ex-boyfriend had sent which bounced out of the trash can never did get picked up. The bartender who carefully listened to the main character’s sob story wasn’t what she seemed; the question is friend or foe? A throw-away line in backstory becomes the plotline for Book Two.
Other advice about how your options are both amazingly broad and equally restrictive, needing to respect the readers, and enjoying working in an already created world can be found here: http://jennybravobooks.com/blog/writing-a-sequel.
WRITING EXERCISE: Look over one of your completed works (flash, short, or novel) and find a throw-away line or action which can create a primary or secondary plot line in another story. Would the same main character be used or is a different point-of-view (POV) character needed? Write five sentences fleshing out the basics of the plot line.
READING EXERCISE: Pull from your completed reading pile (you know, the shorter pile beside the to-be-read pile) a Book One and Book Two. Review Book One to see how it fed into Book Two. What are the hints and hooks placed in the first book? Think about each one: did the writer set the hook deliberately or was it organic?
Esther Freisner has been the go-to humor fantasy writer if you wanted to see traditional gender expectations turned on their heads. Her Chicks in Chainmail series feature women rescuing men, including the recent seventh book of this anthology series “Chicks and Balances.” The second anthology series she heads is suburban fantasy, things like what happens when the soccer mom is also a witch? Again the focus is on quirky humor as the title of the second book of the series indicates: Strip Mauled.
She recently has started a Young Adult (YA) series on princesses of myth – girl power stories set in history. If you think your teen might like some inspiration on how to be a princess AND a warrior, you might like to look into Spirit’s Princess and other princesses of myth.
Third of four postings from the 50-word Flash Friday, where 12 prompts were given to writers for mini-flashes. The prompts were words or photos, and the flashes were limited to fifty words.
Today’s flashes are the stand-alone flashes based on word prompts. I think “Arms” was my favorite prompt; so many different meanings to the word. I tried to go with a non-traditional definition of the word for a romance writer. I wanted to attempt twisting the word away from standard after seeing what other people did with the prompt “Thong(s)”.
PROMPT SEVEN: Arms
“That is a lot of guns.” Bambi whispered, staring at the armory. Why on earth had Mason assembled all this? Shaking off the fear-factor, Bambi reached for an automated assault weapon. The zombies were about to get some hurt on. (words 40)
PROMPT EIGHT: Casablanca
The next clue was “White House.” George spent hours searching the local video stores political tape selections with no luck. The last store had the great presidential speeches next to classical black and white. Duh! He pulled the Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman movie out and found a new post-it-note. (words 50)
PROMPT TEN: Fig Roll
“Fig rolls follow a tradition starting in ancient Egypt with fig-paste stuffed pastries” The professor droned on. Abdul groaned. He needed to update his persona, which meant college in the twenty-first century. He had hoped a culinary degree would avoid the history he had already lived through. (words 47)
PROMPT ELEVEN: Myriad
The future. Must be so easy for those who couldn’t see it. Melusine froze. Myriad uncomfortable paths lay ahead. Choosing quickly, she moved on the one denying her love for a year. Staying still would have killed too many people, although it meant meeting Douglas tomorrow. (words 46)
(first published 2/8/2013; republished new blog format 3/19/2017)
Image courtesy of namakuki at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Have you ever considered the power of water? It’s enough to make one hydrophobic.
H2O, with its free ions, can act as an acid or a base. We live on a planet where the molecule can exist as gas, liquid, and solid – sometimes all within inches of each other. Plus it has a weird property of getting larger when changing from liquid to solid instead of condensing. Liquid water molecules glom onto neighbors with both “hands” if no one else is near creating a surface tension few substances can beat. All the while being anywhere from transparent to translucent – meaning light can pass through it in both liquid and solid forms, as well as gas. More about its properties can be found at the USGS Water Science School.
Water is amazing.
Taking all these amazing abilities and combining them is what sends a shiver down my spine.
“Water finds a way.” Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Water vapor is everywhere. Getting a little cold it become water liquid and slips deep into cracks. The water freezes as the temperature drops even more, say a desert at night, and the crack expands. Water beats rock, every single time, fragmenting those hearty souls which traveled from the center of the earth to the surface. Eventually water will take the rock out like a ninja warrior, quiet and deadly. By crack, or acid, or base. Steel rusts. Clothing rots. Stone crumbles. Water allows us to create but also erases everything we make.
Water is scary.
In humanity’s constant search to improve, we are developing techniques of hydrophobic – making our creations throw off water. You may be familiar with some early examples of this field – polytetrafluoroethylene (telfon), stainless steel, and waxed coats. Telfon’s makes a corrosive resistant surface through its molecular bonds; basically water’s friendly ions can’t break into the carbon-fluorine party and start bonding to the surface – hence the non-stick surface. Similarly the process of making stainless steel alloy keeps water ions at bay and make the steel unrustable – but the nickel and chromium costs a lot more than carbon steel so large amounts aren’t practical. And waxed coats are made from cotton dipped in wax making them practical for working near seashores and on boats.
I remember once being in a car with no floor. Seeing the road rush by under your feet at 50 miles per hour is an experience. Younger readers may not remember cars with holes rusting at the doors and around the wheel beds from the combination of salt and water during the winter. Switching to plastic-based materials not only made the cars lighter, so saving gas in trying to move mass, and safer, steel sheets no longer bend into the human compartment during a crash, but the plastic also makes the car body stay together better in northern climates.
But that is then, what am I geeking about now?
Laser technology, chemical technology, nano technology. Scientists are developing other means to keep water from bullying other materials into rust. Why are we going through all this trouble? What possible results are worth this effort?
The field of hydropobics makes incredible practical items – as we previously seen with cutlery which won’t rust, kitchen pans no longer needing to be scrubbed after every use, car staying intact through winter slush, and clothing not getting soaked when working around water. Can we change the substance property? Should it be an alloy, a coating, or maybe just modifying the shape can make something hydropobic?
You may have already seen one of the recent applications, hydrophobic paint. Some cities have started painting the outside of the first floor of buildings near the bar district. Now let the peeing person beware – draining the drink can bounce back at ya. Cool, right?
Anyone who travels by plane during the winter – when water really shows off its ability to go from liquid to solid and back again – is well familiar with the wait for the deicing preparation of wings. Nasty chemicals are sprayed on the wings.
A new technology of laser technology changes the surface of the metal wings so water surface tension is shrugged off. No liquid water on wings means no ice forming from the liquid as the temperature drops. No deicing steps are needed, ever again – saving time, chemicals, and my holiday schedule. Totally geeking about this application.
Initially they were trying the paint, but that didn’t work. (MIT 2010) Instead a complicated pattern surface was recommended, something like what the University of Rochester has been working on.
The deicing technology is important for food shipment, electrical wires, the car windshield in winter, sidewalks, as well as the previous mentioned planes.
And who wouldn’t want clothes which won’t stain. Liquid repel right off. Okay, taking water out of the equation will make washing them more difficult, but how often will you need to wash them, really? No sweat, mud, no food stains, no drinks down your back when someone bumps into you by “accident”. Sounds like Science Fiction – but it’s real. Available right now – not truly practical as clothing in price or application as yet unless you are one of those who can live in multi-million dollar homes.
I predict in a decade we will go crazy about this fabric just like we did with wrinkle free polyester in the sixties. It will last for about a year, just like the chainmetal cloth of the eighties. Why? Because one of the most important properties of clothing is wicking moisture (sweat) away from the body in a cooling action. The quote of “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” (Jurassic Park screenwriter) applies to hydrophobic clothing.
On the other hand, gloves able to shrug off concrete and tar and boots able to walk through mud are already an industrial application in use today.
Applications will continue to grow for hydrophobic technology, whether the long-imagined un-iceable plane or the unexpected application against nocturnal urination.
“Water finds a way.”
But humanity is going to make it really, really tough for water to win.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Words cannot describe how badly CPR is presented – in books or TV shows.
I’ve taught myself to ignore the CPR done on beds and with bent elbows on television. These things are part of the medical TV trope. But books. Books!
For the love of goodness, does no one know how CPR works? The main character of this book is finishing off her Chemistry bachelors to support her eventual medical degree. The following is first person narrative.
“When I first saw them , I thought they were all dead, but they had pulses. Some quick CPR helped keep them alive until …”
1) How the (blank) did one person do CPR on three people? 2) PULSE! equals no CPR – pulse means heart is working!
If you have CPR being done in a book, take a CPR course – a recent CPR course (in the past decade rescue breaths have been dropped). If you don’t have time, ask your friends who have – or just go to your local Red Cross and see if one of their instructors can review the scene. I’ve yet to read a book where CPR is done at an appropriate time in an appropriate manner.
By the way, this applies to any medical procedure. Get a recent fact-check; as my Geeking Science posts indicate, the field is always changing. In fact, checking with subject matter experts applies to any, ANY, .A.N.Y. topic.
