Lucienne Diver Talks Revision Hell

Some of you already know my friend Lucienne Diver, who is both an author and one of the agents at The Knight Agency. Needless to say, she's a very busy woman, but she was kind enough to come share her experiences with revisions, and give you a sneak peek at her new book, THE COUNTDOWN CLUB. (Hint: It sounds amazing.) Be sure to let us know what you think (either about revision, or the book, or both) in the comments! Lucienne will be giving away a copy of the book to TWO lucky commenters.

Take it away, Lucienne!

My Prolonged Process

So, the demented little DJ in my head wants to rewrite songs from musicals today rather than be productive. For example, “How Do you Solve a Problem Like Maria?” from The Sound of Music:

“How do you solve a problem in revisions?

How do you catch a flaw and pin it down?”

It’s a curse. If only I could rewrite books with the ease of lyrics. Unfortunately, I have a horrible love/hate relationship with revisions. I adore first drafts – writing practically stream of consciousness, having a plan, but not knowing exactly how I’m going to execute it. You see, I was an inveterate pantser (a writer who flies by the seat of her pants, winging it) until I started writing mystery/suspense…and then my wings needed a lot more bolstering to get me off the ground. With my first YA suspense, FAULTLINES, I created a murder board, just like you see in all of those television shows—The Closer, Major Crimes, Without a Trace, Castle, and I’m sure a million more. It had the suspects, clues as to motive, means and opportunity, timelines, connections and all that jazz. It still didn’t quite tell me how I was going to weave these into the storyline. For that I drafted. And redrafted. And drafted again. I wish I could say that I learned from the experience and that my novels are now tightly plotted and then swiftly and seamlessly executed, but that would be a lie.

I maybe can get away with calling myself a plotser now (half plotter, half pantser), but that might be overselling things. What I am is willing to make mistakes and go over and over and over and over my work ad infinitum until it’s really there. Or at least, so I think. When I turn my novel over to my critique partner or readers, it’s absolutely as good as I can get it at that moment. I’m proud of the bright, shiny work I’ve done. Otherwise, I’d never let anyone see it.

And then they burst my bubble. 

All for the best. They make me work. Spot flaws I secretly suspected were there but was hoping no one would notice. Suggest fixes or improvements I never even considered. Or in some cases, cheer me on and give me the confidence to keep going. They make me better.

I make all the improvements, embarrassed that anyone ever saw the manuscript in the condition it was in, but I soldier on. I whip it into shape, and send it off to my agent, cross my fingers and toes and hope she’ll get back to me before I lose all circulation in them.

And receive another set of notes. 

Then, after those are handled and the manuscript is absolutely amazing, it goes out on submission…and perhaps there will be further suggestions, like a revise and resubmit from an editor. Or perhaps someone loves it and buys it and gives it a good home. But, of course, there will be more edits—content edits, line edits, copyedits.

So what am I saying here? That I’m a slow learner? That it takes a village? Well, no, and yes. This is just my process, and I’m willing to put in the work, as aggravating as it sometimes is, making every draft better and better until I hit best. (Always with the realization that I could tinker until I die and still never reach perfection.)

I guess this has been on my mind a lot lately, because, as some of you may know, I’m an agent as well as a writer, and I represent over forty authors, which means I’m always offering critiques, making suggestions, driving my authors—hopefully to greater heights rather than to madness, but I understand that it can be a fine line! But I understand their pain first hand. And shared pain is supposed to be lessened, right?

Right?

______________________________________

The latest product of Lucienne’s blood, sweat, and tears, THE COUNTDOWN CLUB, is available now! (Barnes & Noble, Amazon)

About the Book:

“Mysterious and cleverly plotted, The Countdown Club is a must read for fans of One of us is Lying.” ⸻Amy Christine Parker, Author of Gated, Astray, and Smash and Grab

Making her way through high school in her art geek bubble, Rayna Butler is used to being largely ignored by her classmates. Sure, she marches to her own beat—her Kool-Aid dyed hair and her edgy paintings make that perfectly clear. So when she arrives at school one normal Monday morning and finds a handwritten note in her backpack that reads “Six days to die,” she’s sure that it’s just a friend playing a prank on her.

Jack Harkness is one of the toughest guys in school, a loner hiding his painful home life. When he also receives one of the threatening notes, he doesn’t take it for anything he can’t handle.

Rayna and Jack soon discover that even more students have received threatening notes, although each has a different expiration date. “Six days to die”. . . “Two days to die”. . . “Twelve days to die”. . . there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. And none of the kids appear to have anything in common.

The students take the threats with varying degrees of seriousness . . . until the first murder. Class salutatorian Liam is the first to go, when his house mysteriously burns down around him and his mother as well. Certain that their days are numbered, Rayna and Jack convince the others to join together to track down the killer before their time is up.

About the Author:

Lucienne Diver spends her days agenting and plotting murder. Luckily, she limits the actual execution to fictional characters…so far as you know. She’s the author of the popular Vamped series of young adult novels (think Clueless meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the Latter-Day Olympians contemporary fantasy series of myth, magic and mayhem, and young adult suspense, including FAULTLINES, also from Bella Rosa Books.  Her short stories have been included in the STRIP-MAULED and FANGS FOR THE MAMMARIES anthologies edited by Esther Friesner for Baen Books, KICKING IT edited by Faith Hunter and Kalayna Price for Ace, and TRIBULATIONS, a Rogue Mage anthology, edited by Faith Hunter for Lore Seekers Press.

She lives in Florida with her husband and daughter, the two sweetest pups in the world, and an overflowing library under the mistaken impression that death is not allowed to take her until she has read ALL THE BOOKS.

More information is available on her website, www.luciennediver.com.

Lucienne and friend

Guest Starring Alethea Kontis

I'm heading back to the Coastal Magic Convention next week. It takes place every year in Daytona Beach (on the beach! with books and authors!) and it is far and away my favorite of all the conventions I go to. For one thing, I get to hang out with the coolest people. One of them is the lovely Alethea Kontis, author, princess, actress, and all-around fun lady. We both write revisioned fairy tales, although in different ways (I love, love, love her books) and she has a fun new book out set in Kristin Painter's shared Nocturne Falls paranormal universe (which is I also love), so I asked Alethea if she would come here today and talk to you about the book, writing in general, and (coff) maybe me.

 

ALETHEA:

There are more ways to retell fairy tales than there are stars in the sky. Or people on the planet.

Our dearest Deborah, as you know, has her own unique take on the infamous Baba Yaga. In my world of Arilland, BY is the proprietor and headmistress of Baba Yaga’s Traveling Home for Unfortunate Young Women with Magical Maladies. Her sister, Anastazia Yaga Vasili, was forced to send her granddaughter there after a wolf attack led to an unhealthy obsession with the Woodcutter who saved her (see: “Hero Worship” from Tales of Arilland).

Granted, in my Nocturne Falls Universe, I also have a “Professor Blake” (ahem) who is Head Witch of Harmswood Academy and a kind of fairy godmother to the entire cast.

But I digress…

Fairy tale retellings are a unique sort of collaboration. We, the living storytellers, take the framework of tales handed down to us by storytellers from distant (or not-so-distant) lands long ago. To these we add a boatload of personal experiences, a pinch of modern sensibility, and a dash of our own voice. Stir, simmer, and voila! A new take on an old classic is born.

I am a writer, yes, but I was raised a storyteller. Some readers can tell the difference between “writers” and “storytellers” subconsciously. The best way to tell is by listening to audiobooks. The storyteller’s novel will come across almost as if it were made for radio. There is a cadence of the words and sentences like poetry. It is inherently pleasing to the ear. Not that books by “writers” aren’t pleasing…the text may be both beautiful and intelligent, but the prose just doesn’t naturally lend itself to performance.

Most of the fairy tales you know and love today (and many you never knew or have forgotten) arose from oral tradition, passed down from parent to child at bedtime, or around the fire or dinner table. In many cultures, this oral tradition is born out of necessity. Poverty, diaspora…life can take everything from us, but our stories we keep.

My French grandmother was a single mother who raised five kids all by herself in the wild mountains of Vermont on a government salary. My Greek grandmother’s family came over on boats from Greece…and not always under their own names. My Ottoman grandfather was a refugee twice: burned out of his home as a baby in 1922 during the Great Catastrophe of Smyrna, and then forced to become a privateer during the Nazi occupation of Greece. He had to leave two countries and find a new home with little more than the clothes on his back, all before the age of twenty three.

Papou died before I was born, but I know his stories because my family told them. My family never stops telling them. It is who we are. It is what we have. The one legacy we were given.

My French grandmother remarried later in life—Pepere also died when I was very small, but he left my grandmother with a house and enough money to live comfortably on her own. The Greeks…well, they had the diner, didn’t they? They all worked in the diner. Or at the bar. Or the burger joint.

Dad made me promise to never get a job in the restaurant industry. I didn’t realize then that what he really wanted was for me to take my genius brain and break out of the Greek stereotype. I may not have ended up on the same career path as all the other USC Chemistry majors, but I always stayed true to my word.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t write about Greeks in diners…

In all my books of Arilland, the fairy tales I retold were from Grimm and Andersen, Mother Goose and Lang. In the Nocturne Falls books, the fairy tales I got to retell were my own.

Kai Xanthopoulos’s parent work at Mummy’s Diner. Heather Hayden’s happy place is somewhere on a mountain in Vermont. Owen Liddell was cursed in Egypt as a teenager in the 1920’s…setting him far enough east in the Mediterranean to have crossed paths with Greek and Armenian refugees from the Ottoman Empire.

But that’s all worldbuilding—that’s not the story.

The story of Besphinxed is one of a young woman who is amazing and powerful at heart, but she’s been raised by some truly terrible people, and so believes some pretty horrible things about herself. It’s the story of a young man who was cursed into the form of a cat a hundred years ago, and he hasn’t grown a lot in that century. He’s still a coward, willing to just let life happen around him for better or worse. But they are thrown together by Fate…and it turns out, each was exactly the medicine the other needed.

In so many ways, the three books I’ve written in the Nocturne Falls Universe so far have turned out to be exactly the medicine *I* needed.

 

Alethea's Bio:
New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a voice actress, a force of nature, and a mess. She is responsible for creating the epic fairytale fantasy realm of Arilland, and dabbling in a myriad of other worlds beyond. Her award-winning writing has been published for multiple age groups across all genres. Host of “Princess Alethea’s Fairy Tale Rants” and Princess Alethea’s Traveling Sideshow every year at Dragon Con, Alethea also narrates for ACX, IGMS, Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. Born in Vermont, Alethea currently resides on the Space Coast of Florida with her teddy bear, Charlie. Find out more about Princess Alethea and the magic, wonderful world in which she lives here: https://www.patreon.com/princessalethea

 

 

Lucienne Diver, Alethea, and me last year at Coastal Magic

As you can see, we never had any fun

 You can find Alethea at her website http://aletheakontis.com/

Find the book here: paperback: Amazon | B&N
e-book: Amazon |  iBooks | Nook | Kobo

And if you're going to be in Daytona Beach on Saturday the 24th, we'll both be taking part in a book signing that is open to the public, so you can come see us there!https://coastalmagicconvention.com/schedule/public-charity-signing/

 

Guest Author & Giveaway: Toni McGee Causey

I have a confession to make right off the bat: I never intended to read Toni McGee Causey's (aka T. M. Causey) book, THE SAINTS OF THE LOST AND FOUND. Not because I didn't expect it to be good--I'd read a number of Toni's earlier humorous cozy mysteries and liked them a lot, and the book has been getting amazing buzz. But because it was the kind of book I don't read. Way darker than I am normally comfortable with, and with a lot of topics I avoid like the plague, including serial killers, abused women, and dead children. But I wanted to host Toni here on the blog, so I thought I'd at least read the first few pages, so I could talk about it with some knowledge.

But then I ran into an unexpected problem. The book isn't just good--it's GREAT. So great that I couldn't stop reading it, even when it pushed me well past my comfort zones. Toni's earlier books were lovely; light, frothy, amusing entertainment. This? This is a damned masterpiece. (And no, she didn't pay me to say so.) The writing was stellar, the characters enthralling, the story so intense that I had to keep reading to find out what happened. And while I'm going to warn y'all that there are definitely some trigger warnings for this book, it is also well worth reading. I am giving it my highest possible recommendation. She calls this book "Southern Gothic Suspense." I call it one of the best books I have ever read in my life.

I love this cover too--and Toni did that as well!

I asked Toni to come post a guest blog, and here it is. She'll be giving away a signed copy of the book (or an e-copy, if the winner prefers) plus a $25 gift card to the bookstore of the winner's choice (she'll do international as long as the card can be purchased there electronically) to one lucky commenter this Friday, the first of April. Take it away, Toni, and thanks for stopping by!

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

One of the most dreaded questions a writer can field is the 'Where do you get your ideas' question, especially with regard to longer fiction. It's the kind of query that has a million answers, and often the author has no real clue how they put this idea with that one, stowing them somewhere in the crannies of their minds where the random ideas may bump and roll around until they become so entangled, they form a completely new idea. Or mess. It can work both ways. What makes this one better than that one? What makes this one the thing you knew you would use for a book, when there were a thousand other notions that seemed just as viable shunted off to the side, where hoarders even feared to tread.

This is the one time I feel like the kid at the back of the class who finally has an answer, who raises her hand with an "oh oh oh PICK ME PICK ME, I KNOW!" squeal. 

THE SAINTS OF THE LOST AND FOUND is the story of a woman, Avery Broussard, who sees lost things. Glimpses, like photo snapshots, of anything (or anyone) someone has lost bombard her as she moves through life and interacts with anyone. Lost keys, a phone, cameras, money, love. A child. Imagine having that ability to know the condition that lost thing is in, and see it, but not always be correct. She can see something lost in a wheat field, but may not know which wheat field.

Now imagine... you have that skill and you're trying to find a lost child... before a killer can finish his task... and you fail. One of your rare failures. 

Avery fails... and runs... and the story starts with just what happens when you cannot outrun your own abilities, or the vengeance someone will take for your mistakes.

So, where did that idea come from? Two odd-but-true events that took place probably fifty years apart. The first happened to my dad. The second, to me.

My dad told me his story... and he's not one to believe in anything extra-sensory. He swears it's true. He and my Paw Paw had been hunting. My dad’s family were very poor, and if  they didn’t hunt, they didn’t eat. This was back in the days of the Great Depression, and my Paw Paw’s three hunting dogs were prized because they helped most of the hunts be successful.  

 On one such trip, two of the hunting dogs returned, but the best one did not. My Paw Paw and Dad searched everywhere, and couldn’t find her. Dad was about ten years old at the time, and after they’d been searching futilely for a while, Paw Paw told him to get in the truck. They drove for about an hour (once they were out of the woods), far south of the property they’d been hunting on, and my Paw Paw pulled up to a very old house where an even older black man sat on a rocker on his front porch. His eyes were milky-white, the cataracts were so thick, he could not have seen who it was who'd driven up, and he had no phone. When Paw Paw got out of the truck, Dad was surprised that the old man started talking first—and knew who they were. Without anyone having said a thing yet.

“You lost a dog a ways back,” the old man said by way of intro, and Dad said his hair stood straight up on his head.  

“Yep,” Paw Paw said, but didn’t elaborate as the old man turned his head and sort of stared out into the trees. Trees he couldn't see.

He hummed to himself for a few minutes, kinda nodded as if figuring something out, and then said to my Paw Paw, “You know that river where you were hunting?” 

“Yep.”

“Well, about two miles west of where you were, the river forks. You know it?”

“Yep.”

“Take the right fork, and go on down a ways, ‘bout a mile or so, and your dog’s hung up there in the barbwire fence.”

Paw Paw thanked him, promised him some food from the hunt, and he and Dad climbed back in the truck, heading the almost hour drive back to where they’d been hunting.

My dad’s not the kind of person who believes in woo-woo stuff, especially something like this, so he indicated he thought it was all a waste of time, but they found the fork in the river, veered to the right, and about a mile from the fork, the dog was hung up in the barbwire fence. 

I probably would have dismissed the entire thing as completely far-fetched, except that it was my dad telling the story, he was sincere in his disbelief-until-he-saw-the-proof aspect, and I’d had enough oddball experiences finding things that other people had lost that I knew there could potentially be more at work than someone simply telling a tall tale. 

For many years, I’d get flashes of where something was that I was looking for... I’d “see” it, and then sure enough, that’s where it was. I’d never thought much about it other than assuming I had simply probably memorized its location as I walked through a room—maybe something akin to a photographic memory—but I never assumed it was anything extraordinary beyond just memory, until one day, a friend was telling me about her mother’s lost high-heeled red stiletto shoe (her telling me was for a story reason), and as she talked about it, I “saw” the shoe underneath a very specific kind of porch.

I asked, "Does she live in a house that's raised off the ground?"

My friend was a little surprised, and said yes.

I asked, "Is it a little higher off the ground than maybe normal... it has steps in the center of the front porch that lead up to the front door, and no railings?"

My friend was getting a little weirded out, because her mother lived in Nova Scotia, and I'd just completely described her home... Even though we both knew we'd never talked about where her mother lived, and I'd never been to Nova Scotia or to her mother's.

Then I said, "Well, I have this weird image of that red shoe. If she faces the stairs and goes to the left, behind the third pylon, there's a depression in the dirt. The shoe is lying there. But it's been chewed on by a dog.

My friend laughed, because her mother didn't have a dog, but she said she'd ask her to look anyway.

She called me right back. The shoe was where I described it, exactly. In the condition I described it.

How does that even happen? I have not a single clue.

That freaked me out. Plenty.  

Not long after, a different friend, Julie, who lived in Arizona (and I lived in Baton Rouge at the time), was desperately looking for another friend, K, who’d left a suicide note. Many mutual friends had gone out searching, but K couldn't be found. When Julie called me and told me what was happening, as she talked, I could see K... she was sitting by a large tree, eyes closed, having already died. Her white car (I didn’t know she had a white car) was parked nearby. I could sense water, but not see it, which was odd and I could also see a woman with a backpack leaning over K, not yet realizing that K had died.

I told Julie all of this. She was noticeably disappointed when she sighed and said, “Unfortunately, where we live, it's a desert. There are no trees like that, and no water.” 

And I completely understood--she was hoping for that magical solution, and I honestly couldn't give it to her. It bothered me terribly to be so wrong, but it was a long shot anyway. I told Julie, “Ignore it then, it’s just an odd image.”

She called back four hours later, devastated. They’d found our K... two hundred miles north of where she lived, sitting on the bank of a dried river bed, leaning against a giant cottonwood tree. Her white car was parked nearby. A woman with a backpack who’d been hiking with friends had found her.

She'd only died about an hour earlier (Julie believed), based on a ticket she'd paid to enter the park. Witnesses would later confirm sightings of her when she'd parked and then gone and sat by the tree.

Aside from the shock and grief for the mutual friend, the entire conversation and ensuing discovery stunned me and if it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for not believing it. What was worse, I didn't know what to do about it. Help people? How?

Not long after, I told a couple of people, and the first thing they did was ask me about something they’d lost. It was a near-instant reaction on their part, and sometimes it was something important, but sometimes it was something that had just eluded them and they were tired of being thwarted. Every time, I 'got' an 'image' that popped in my head. And I was almost always wrong about my guesses. I think my ratio of correct “images” to questions was so low, it probably needed multiple zeroes after a decimal point. 

I didn’t mind being constantly wrong. It was a relief, actually, because the hope that people have when they are asking about something lost is palpable, and dashing those hopes, or seeing their disappointment, was equally brutal.  

Which lead me to wondering... What if? What if you could do this for real... But you're human, you're not perfect, and you make mistakes? Would you go to the police? Would you volunteer? Where do you draw the line?

What if everyone wants your help? How do you have a life? Do you hide your ability?

What if a child's life depends on it?

What if your own life does? Or someone you love?

Years after losing K, Avery was born, and I think she’d probably been there all along, from the first time I found something... or maybe even as far back as when my dad told me that story about the hunting dog.

And those what ifs kept piling up, pressing forward, begging to be answered until I could ignore the questions no longer.

THE SAINTS OF THE LOST AND FOUND is not for the faint of heart. It's a dark book, and it may break your heart, but it may also give you hope.

For me, it's finally given me peace.

Tell us if you have ever had any sort of experience with finding lost things, or other weird paranormal oddities. And be sure to go find Toni here:

http://www.tonimcgeecausey.com/

Read an excerpt here

http://www.facebook.com/ToniMcGeeCauseyAuthor (for giveaways and contests)

http://www.facebook.com/ToniMcGeeCausey (more of the sillier stuff in life)

http://www.twitter.com/ToniMcGeeCausey

And get the book here:

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