Blogging on Fox last night!
Did you see they ran a story on the growing number of blogs out there? It was interesting to see how many people they interviewed who didn't know what a blog was (if you don't know what a blog is, you're reading one right now: ) )

So, I, in my ever growing and shameless plan to promote The Silver Spoon sent them an email this morning, telling them about the growing trend of new authors setting up blogs to help people get to know them and their work. It's free, provides a sample of the author's writing to those who would be skeptical about buying an unknown, and most importantly, gets around the whole SPAM issue. If you want to know more about someone's book, you can read their blog, rather than suffering a million emails from yours truly. I, of course, generously offered to be their contact for further information : ) So, we'll see how that works out.

Speaking of book news, I'm still struggling with my issue I mentioned in Tuesday's blog. The biggest thing for me is that the characters always need to make sense. What they're doing has to make sense for them and what they want out of life. Otherwise, it doesn't ring true. We've all seen/read where, for example, a villain is just evil for evil-sake. Not that some people/characters aren't just plain evil, but generally there has to be some sort of factor behind it all, at least why they've chosen who they're being evil to.

So, the problem is sometimes the characters come and talk to me and do what they're going to do, but they don't always tell me why, right up front (right now, FoxNews is probably reading this, thinking I'm nuts, but truly I'm not). Then, I'm left with trying to figure out why they did what they did, so I can understand it, so everyone who's reading along can understand it. Right now, I'm trying to figure that out in my evening project, why did they do this? Does it make sense or is it one of those things where I forced it and it was just close enough that they let it go, unchallenged?

I've gone through this process before and forgotten how frustrating, but well worth it in the end, it can be.

And finally, in closing, I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from our speaker yesterday. We had a big corporate shindig yesterday *shudder*, but one of the speakers was great. He was a futurist, meaning essentially that he looks at the trends of today and tries to envision what the future will be like. This field was actually mentioned in the sci-fi romance newsletter I subscribe to as a good resource for those of us writing sci-fi to help us keep it "real." Or as real as a fictional depiction of a potential future can get. Anyway, he was a good speaker, so here are a couple things he said that I enjoyed:

"A good storyteller tells a good story. A great storyteller helps you find yourself in the story." This may not be original to him, but I liked the quote.

And on the fact that there are more women than men in medical, law, and divinity school: "I've gone on record as saying, men are perilously close to becoming pets." This cracked me up, especially as this has been the plot for how many episodes of how many sci-fi shows?

That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow!