Author: Allie P.

The Working Title

by Allie P., posted in Book Stuff and Publishing News

I am asking people to weigh in on what type of title most appeals to them on my facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/alliepottswrites) because frankly I need all the help I can get coming up with a title for my current project. I’ve run through at least five working titles and still haven’t found the one. I ran into a similar issue when selecting the title for my first. By comparison, I found naming my characters significantly easier.

Cover imageIn my first novel, my protagonist’s name was Charlotte, selected because it quite simply means feminine and I wanted her to represent an average woman. There is a mystery element to the story, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t title her story Charlotte’s Web. I am rather proud of the ending and did not want to give anything away, so that further limited what imagery I could include. By the same token, I don’t expect the reader to particularly like her during the first act in the book, so I definitely didn’t want to pull imagery from that section either. I ultimately decided to create a title that summarized the underlying premise of the book, but it was a difficult decision to make. I had just spent the last several months of writing to develop a premise, and here I was trying to refine it down to a catchy 1 – 3 words.

Thankfully I worked with a professional cover artist so that I was able to avoid a similar situation when selecting the front.

So now I’d like to open the topic up for comments from the public. Authors, what inspired you to create your own titles? Did you create the title first and then write the story or vice versa? Were you lucky (or not so lucky) to have your title selected by a publisher’s working group? Readers, what kinds of titles draw you in?

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The romanticized villian

by Allie P., posted in Life as I know it

My husband and I were both recently made victims of cyber crime. I was one of those misfortunate enough to have their credit card information put at risk during Target’s security breach ahead of Christmas while one of my husband’s employees made the mistake of opening an attachment from an unknown source on one of the company computers.In my case, my bank was made aware of the breach before I was and responded by sending me a new card. Additionally I was have been notified that I will receive free credit monitoring. In my husband’s case, files were instantly encrypted and he was advised that he would have to pay a ransom in Bitcoins in order to get his own data back. Even then there is no guarantee that the guilty parties will reverse the damage. There isn’t exactly a better business bureau to report them to.

Luckily he and his personal computer were off site when the attack happened, and he had the foresight to maintain critical files on another server, but the damage to the business is not something to shrug off. I will admit that my first reaction to this news was worry about the virus spreading to our home machines. I couldn’t help thinking of all of our family photos as well as my work in progress.  It doesn’t matter that we’ve made a point to have back-up redundancy, it still made me shudder.  I don’t know what I would have done if those files were suddenly inaccessible.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (film)After the initial panic subsided and he assured me that the situation was contained, I started thinking about how villainy has been romanticized in pop culture and literature. For example, Robin Hood – yes he was a thief, but one that helped people. The end justified the means. Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven sets out to commit murder, but by doing so can earn money to help his children while righting a attack against a woman. We can ignore the crimes when crimes are against bad people.

I will admit then that both of these recent crimes have confused me. The typical Target consumer isn’t exactly splurging on things like caviar and truffles. They aren’t getting offers for unlimited black credit cards. My husband isn’t struggling to keep his business afloat out of our garage, but isn’t exactly a fortune 500 company (yet). To me, it seemed as if the risk of getting caught outweighed the potential gain. The breach at Neiman Marcus made more sense.

That is until I remembered that the perpetrators from either crime are most likely not from the US. Stealing those last $12 dollars from a person’s bank account could mean life or death. As ads for various charities like to remind me, a quarter per month could save the life of a child.

Still those last $12 dollars could also make the difference in keeping the victim’s power on or off in the midst of a polar vortex when the bill comes due.

I will admit that I do enjoy the recent trend of stories and shows about the antihero, and/or evolution of the villain. I am in no way shape or form advocating that they go away. They are actually some of my personal favorites as I believe that they provide us with characters that have depth and stories that can go in multiple directions.

Some believe that these stories are promoting the criminal lifestyle and in turn creating more crime. Others, that these stories are merely a reflection of our existing society. I’m not sure where I fall within the spectrum after the last month. I just require that they don’t gloss over the fact that there are always consequences, no matter the intention.

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Performance and Character Reviews

by Allie P., posted in Life as I know it

English: Popped balloons resemble jellyfish. P...

As I’ve mentioned previously writing is only one of the many hats I get to wear on a daily basis. Unfortunately as I was changing out my desk calendar I was reminded today that the party is over. I need to put on my boss hat and get started working on the dreaded performance reviews.

Yes, I do have direct reports (no I didn’t force them to buy my book), and yes I do dread the performance review as much as they do or more. Why is that? Because my work requires us to complete reviews in a one-size-fits all format which can put people on the defensive. Additionally my office is not very large and so I am very familiar with why an individual did or did not complete their annual goals for the year without the need for another meeting.

fax
fax (Photo credit: anomalous4)

The part I dislike though most about the process is where the manager is expected to provide constructive criticism. The trick is presenting it in such a way as to motivate the person towards changing the behavior in the long-term rather than instigating a finger-pointing war. There was a Dilbert carton recently which showed the pointy haired manager reminding himself to criticize the behavior, not the person. In typical Dilbert fashion, he failed miserably. Hopefully though I’ve offered suggestions to my staff throughout the year, making this requirement on the form redundant.

You have to be able to first identify what motivates the individual and then how to best leverage that trigger into their work. However it is just as (or even more) important that the person being reviewed respect the reviewer, otherwise there will be no change. As an aside, I would expect that the majority of my protagonist’s from An Uncertain Faith reviews haven’t gone so well as of late.

Authors should be able to relate to this concept as much of the same work goes into effective character development. When I was developing my character notes, I had to describe to myself what was this person’s core needs? How did they respond when under stress? Some of these notes made it into the story verbatim, some were probably less obvious to the reader, but helped when it came to dialogue. I didn’t take the time to properly sit down and review my characters on previous writing attempts definitely contributed to my writer’s block and ultimate failure on those attempts.

It is much easier to write what should be done when preparing and conducting performance reviews than it is to actually do it. In my case there is a generational gap between myself and some of my staff. It didn’t take me more than a week on the job to recognize that what motivates me professionally is vastly different from what motivates a person closer to retirement or one just entering the work force. I would recommend that anyone attempting to write about a character vastly different from themselves study up on how to motivate those not like you or managing different generations.

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Standing out in the crowd

by Allie P., posted in Indie book promotion, Life as I know it

I am what some may call vertically challenged. For this reason standing out in a crowd has always been somewhat difficult for me.

My husband towers over a foot above me, which has proven helpful time and time again. He might have difficulty finding me, but at least I can see him. During the past few times we ventured out for New Years citywide celebrations, I’ve chosen to wear distinctive hats to help him better identify me in the masses. It is a strategy that may have helped us reduce the number of times we have to text our locations, if separated, like a grown up version of the Marco Polo, but I am still working on finding my ‘distinctive hat’ for the book crowd.

Helvetica cattle
Helvetica cattle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a fairly well known book on marketing called The Purple Cow which deals with the importance of finding some way to separate your product from the dozens others like it in a way that is unexpected or otherwise remarkable. By its logic, I might be able to bring attention to my book in the brick and mortar store if I had the pages printed in orange or had the book printed and bound in the shape of a triangle. Better yet, I could replace the cover altogether with an OLED and animate the thing! Can you even imagine how awful the bookstore experience would be if the shelves were turned into a tiny climate controlled version of Times Square? It is going to happen. Start shopping for sunglasses now.

English: Broadway show billboards at the corne...

Unfortunately the same tactics won’t work for the e-book – unless retail websites and eReaders start allowing animated gifs as cover art. But until then, what can be done to better distinguish an e-book from the thousands of others when they all will be displayed on nearly the same medium? Yes, I could manipulate the price as an attention – for example drop it from $3.99 to something oddly specific like $3.76, but that might impact long term brand value.

One I saw is to bundle your e-book. As I only have a single published novel to my name, that would be some feat to pull off. I guess I could do that by forming some partnership with another equally new author in a symbiotic alliance. Debut Authors Assemble!

Until then, I’ll keep working on trying to find the neglected market and growing my reviews.

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Oh the best laid plans…

by Allie P., posted in Life as I know it

Scrunched up paper in a wastebin

The pages and pages of discarded stories I’ve started and never finished over the years taught me that I am one of those writers who has to have the majority of the story including chapters, scenes, and major plot points before I write page one. It was a practice that worked wonders on my last attempt. I was able to set myself a daily goal and then click clack clack slowly, but surely I was there.

This time though I am encountering something I hadn’t planned for, an unruly protagonist. I am now 14,000 words in (a feat I’m fairly proud of considering I have to squeeze in writing between day job and diaper changes) and she is determined to steal scenes destined for other characters. She’s made me want to growl at her, “I’m your creator, you need to hang back and let these other characters develop.” Does she listen? No. She continues to do whatever it is she wants.

She’s made me rearrange entire sequences already, and I’m not even out of the first act! I’ve wanted to tell her, “oh just you wait until the beta readers get here.” Then she nearly argues back at me, “I’m making your story better!” Unfortunately I secretly suspect she may prove to be right. At times such as these I think it is probably a good thing that I don’t have daughters in real life.

I’m a huge fan of the epic fantasy genre and used to frequently shake my fist and the various authors of series spanning 5+ books who seemed to loose control of their own storylines after book 3. I now am feeling like quite the hypocrite and do hereby promise to be more patient in the future.

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