A feast for the eyes - and a good story, too

Oscar night. Not much point in watching since we hadn't seen very many of the films. And so often, it seems as if lots of nominated films are just not to our taste, no matter how well made or well acted. I mean, "No Country for Old Men" was a fabulous piece of film-making, but I didn't like anyone in the story. That's a necessity for me, whether in films or books (and something I strive to provide my own readers - characters...people...to care about.)

So instead of watching the Oscar show - or more episodes of Burn Notice to which we are currently addicted (yes, some very complicated characters to care about) - we went to the second run cinema and saw "Hugo."

First, yes, characters to care about - a whole cast of them in the first minute of the film as the camera leads you on a chase through a train station in 1930s' Paris. The station guard with his leg brace, the woman with the dog and her portly suitor, the man in the toy shop, the cheery flower seller, the musicians, and many more, each sketched as distinctly as a master writer like Dick Francis can do in a few words. And then the eyes peering through the 4 in the great clock. The story question right there in front of you. Whose eyes and why from inside the clock?

Well done. It was a nice story. Well performed for the most part. About loss and memory. About the magic of...story! But what made the film step into magic for me was
not the story but the language of its composition.


The visual experience. The deep moody colors of the era. The deep stairways and the clicking gears and mechanics of the great clockworks. The shining eyes of the two young friends. The snow. The magical, glowing view of the city at night. The lovely precision of the small mechanical man - the automaton left by a loving father to a lonely son, which brings a mystery (and you know how I love mystery) to the tale. And I have to say that for the first time in my experience 3D really added something special.

Faults? Yes. It gets a bit wordy in ways it doesn't need to. (Don't hammer me over the head by saying things that are transmitted so beautifully by action - another word to the wise author!) A few too many shots of the young Hugo's glistening eyes. (Yes repetition is good, but a wise author will take out one too many.) I wonder if children (and there were many in the theater) love the film as much as adults seem to.

Summing up, a most enjoyable two hours.
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Writing Evil

Blogging on my agent's livejournal today. The topic is Writing Evil.

I talk about how I try to avoid the Snidely Whiplash or anonymous Dark Lord kind of villains and aim to introduce ambiguity, choice, and realism into my work. Read more of this post!

Spirit Lens Copyedits: The Nitty Gritty

As my long ago post noted, I've been fortunate with copyeditors through the years, having only one bad experience - an overzealous copyeditor who worked on Revelation. I had to spend a lot of time undoing what she had done. I've never had any problem getting my copyedit changes accepted, whether I've rejected or altered the CE's suggestions.

One glance at the Spirit Lens manuscript, and I knew this was going to be more complicated than usual.



As you might be able to tell from other postings, I am meticulous about words. I tweak and change, ever searching for the right words to evoke mood, time period, character information, action. The difference between shout and scream is important. Burned and the archaic form, burnt, have a different sound and feel to them, and egads evokes a very different time locale than godamighty or by Grapthar's Hammer. Words are an intricate part of world building. I feel that my job isn't done until I have all the right ones.

I was also well trained in grammar and spelling, and a lot of my craft learning was how to adapt the formal writing rules I learned in school for fiction writing. My manuscripts are long, somewhere between 150, 000 and 180,000 words. By the time I turn it in after revision, most of the words are the ones I want, and almost all spelled right, and put together with every regard for proper grammar. Where the grammar is informal or incorrect, I've chosen it to be that way. Though, to be honest, I am terrible at compound words: sylph-like or sylphlike, mid-afternoon or midafternoon, and so forth.

Words are also a critical component of narrative voice. Is my narrator educated or ignorant? Thirty years old or ten? Is he verbose or terse? Is he a storyteller or is he a librarian converted into a royal investigator? All these things should be revealed not only in the character's dialogue, but also in the narration of the story if it is told in an intimate point-of-view. Sometimes, a character speaks in a rural or uneducated dialect. Sometimes a character speaks in fragments. Sometimes particular archaic or peculiar words show up in a character's voice to evoke a time that is not 21st century USA.

These were the sources of most of the corrections caused the problem with this copyediting experience.

One of the CE's tasks is to make "suggestions" for clarity. I deliberately chose to use the metric system in these books, rather than make up a system of measurement. Because Sabria is in the throes of a scientific explosion akin to the first half of our 17th century, I wanted the feel of a very precise measurement scheme. [And yes, I know the metric system came into use somewhat later than that, but this is not historical Europe! It certainly COULD have been in use in the 17th century!] Sabria is also a kingdom that is very much a Mediterranean-style landscape and feel, so I didn't want to use the US spellings of the metric measurements. I preferred centimetre to centimeter, and litre to liter. The CE kindly changed all the spellings to the US spellings and queried every single measurement as to whether I wouldn't rather use yards, miles, and gallons for measurement. Aarrgh. Lots of "no"s and lots of stets ensued.

Another of the CE's tasks is to correct grammar, and to make sure that a manuscript adheres to the publisher's styleguide with respect to spelling [honor vs honour, backward vs backwards, and so forth]. So I found some words in the narrative, which is Portier's voice, had been corrected. The aforementioned burnt as the past participle of burn. He speaks of ten days previous, rather than ten days ago. I had to stet all those well-intended corrections as well.

Portier also is a librarian, an intensely scholarly and logical man. He thinks in lists. He often speaks and thinks in bullet points. I express this in fragments. Every CE knows that sentence fragments are OK in fiction. Certainly in dialogue. Mostly they leave them alone, resisting the call of their formal English training that says sentence fragments are a no, no. This particular CE was really bothered by Portier's fragmentary thinking and attempted to create complete sentences out of many of them. In a few cases, her point was well taken, as the fragments did not follow logically from the prior sentence (which is what makes them work.) But for the most part, these efforts to neaten up the prose didn't work. That was a LOT of retyping and correction. I was really irritated as I did it.

But once I was done, I mellowed. The CE had been meticulous about the things she caught. Though I wished she had focused on more useful aspects of her tasks, the book was better for our mutual efforts. And that's what counts.
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Spirit Lens Copyedits: Readthrough

No sooner had I come off a month of family visits and working on a short story last week, than the copyedited manuscript of The Spirit Lens arrived.

First task? Do a complete read-through without looking at the copyedits. Well, OK, I could have done this the week before the copyedits came, but...did I mention family fun? Short story? A little bout of summer surgery? Updating website? Actually, I wanted to wait until the last possible moment to maximize my distance from the words.

The purpose of a readthrough is not just to "get a feel for the story" again in preparation for final edits. This is the last chance to make any substantial revision. So I want to read carefully, looking for places where the logic doesn't work, getting a feel for the pacing and ferreting out plot holes. I watch for bits that got left out (or duplicated) in the revision process. Yes, I needed to make sure the dark incident in Portier's past was made clear, but maybe I overdid it, put in too much too soon, or some such. I hunted unresolved issues, eg. did I ever mention what became of the haunted guard captain? And I wanted to make sure that the resolution of The Spirit Lens was rock solid, ready to lead in to The Soul Mirror.

So what did I find?


It is amazing how your perspective changes after not looking at the mss. for two months. I found myself pleased with what I was reading. All the warts that I saw when up to my eyes in the details of revision had faded out because of the enforced breathing space. I found that my doubts about whether I had really laid out the chain of events clearly and whether I had belabored certain bits of history overmuch were laid to rest. And indeed, I did not miss those 10,000 words I cut out of it in the least. Nor had I left five thousand ragged edges where I'd pulled them out. It all seemed to work.

One of the best parts was reading those pieces I really labored over during revision. Mostly these were the pivotal scenes, the big changes in direction and emotional upheavals that MUST make sense, and yet only come clear once you've gotten to the end of the story. All of these pieces were much more improved than I remembered. I think the grand mystery - for, as I've said, The Spirit Lens is at heart a murder mystery - unwinds clearly and logically. And I think my three investigators' relationships - which form the primary emotional arc of the story - do the same. Whew! I really expected to need some continued revision, but all I found that needed doing were some word and phrase improvements and some very minor paragraph reordering. I even cut out a sentence here and there - bits I'd clung to, but suddenly stood out as wholly unneeded.

So now it was time to take a look at the copyedits.
[To review what the copyediting cycle is all about, take a look at From Sale to Shelf: Part 3.]

First thing I had to do was get set up. For the first time, I was going to be dealing with electronic copyediting and not a paper manuscript marked with varicolored pencil. OK, technology doesn't bother me. And even though I was given only a week to get the manuscript turned around, I didn't expect any problems, especially given my feeling that the book was pretty clean. That was before I looked.

Stay tuned...
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Revision 4: Cutting Words

In these times, editors are having to push back on writers more and more to keep their stories lean. This is not necessarily a factor of the reading market, but rather a factor of the bookselling market. Readers may love their Big Fat Fantasies. But paper is expensive. And booksellers are jealous of their shelf space. And, of course, more words does not make one a better writer! You CAN make a grand, complex story with luscious prose in less than 900 pages. (Keep telling me that.) So what do you do when your editor says, "Pare it down by 10-15K?"

First remember that the story, characters, and setting are the most important. Get them out there in the most wonderful fashion you can. That being said, we all have fat in our prose. I know I write lots of extra words. I think it's a product of my "start from the beginning and go" plot development. I think I'm writing tighter these days, but at revision time, here are some techniques I use - very fresh in my mind from these past three weeks.



1. The Easy. Start with a goal of removing one line per page. That's pretty painless unless you are a truly "spare" writer. (In that case you probably don't run into the cutting words problem!)

2. Nibbling. Look at any paragraph with just a word or two dangling on the last line. Challenge yourself to move those danglers onto the previous line by shortening the paragraph. Somehow this tactic makes you read the paragraph more carefully and find lurking phrases you don't need.

You can do also do this with sentences at the end of the chapter. If your chapter runs onto a new page by three sentences, challenge yourself to push those sentences onto the previous page. You can always find a way. Don't ask me why this works even after you've reread the chapter and worked until you feel as if it is drumhead tight. There is always a little more slack.

3. Fat Patterns. Look, for example, at dialog where you've put a short response and then an explanatory response:

"No, I won't," said George. "I never take a girl to the prom."

Why not just answer:

"I never take a girl to the prom," said George.

You still get the negative and the explanation. Much more concise. Now consider the dialog tag. Is it needed?

4. Two to One. I am an inveterate "say it two different ways" person. Read carefully to see if you're saying the same thing twice.

This sequence: Time was short. I needed to get down to the harbor. Midnight approached.

Could be rewritten as:
Midnight approached. I needed to get down to the harbor.

(Note that these are much briefer sentences than I embroil myself in, but you get the idea.)

This also applies to multiple comparisons or multiple metaphors. Your prose is often stronger with just the one really good one. "He was strong as an ox, tough as nails, and he wore a crust on his skin like barnacles." Drop the tough as nails and you can recast the sentence without the second "he". [Of course strong as an ox is cliche,too, but this is an example, OK?]

5. Excess Baggage. Target long descriptive paragraphs. If you have five sentences of description when Portier first sees the estate of Montclaire, which one can you leave out? Target the least vivid, the most cliched, the one that doesn't reflect anything unusual. Put in the four best ones and the reader will fill in the rest. If you're in a smelly alley, you probably don't have to mention the refuse. If you've got a lurking cat in the refuse heap, you probably don't need to mention the rat. Things like that. Vow to reduce all descriptive paragraphs by one sentence. Often when you start pulling out the least vivid, you realize you can actually do with only three little goodies. Or can combine two so-so pieces into one.

6. Micro-management. Look for places you're boring the reader with extraneous movements. "He walked across the room." First off, "He crossed the room" is stronger and shorter. But why not skip the walking and use the preceding and following text to indicate the change of position? Is the walking itself so important?

Or, "She lifted her purse, rummaged through it, and pulled out her wallet." Unless the lifting is particularly meaningful (ie. she's a paraplegic or you are focusing on micro-movements for a literary purpose) lose the lifting. "She rummaged through her purse and produced her wallet." Micro-movements get tedious.

7. Macro Removal. Deleting whole threads or scenes hurts. But sometimes, something that seemed a good idea at the time you wrote it, doesn't pay off. Yes, you like the words, and it's interesting, but will the reader miss it if it's gone? I found a couple of those. Maybe worth 500 words each. And what was left was cleaner. The cool thing in these times is that you can save those deleted scenes for your website or blog. If you read your work aloud, you'll hear when the pacing bogs down because of a digression. Lose the digression.

8. Sinkholes. These are little places that chew up wordcount. Things like dialog tags. We often put in far more than we need. Empty dialog exchanges. ["Did you really?" "Uh-huh." "Really?" ] Repetition. Extra adjectives that can be obsoleted by using a better noun. Extra adverbs that can be made unnecessary by picking a better verb. If you use two adjectives to describe a newcomer onto the scene, try to eliminate one. Summarizing statements that do nothing but reiterate what your character just said, offering no new insight. "Those were the reasons I hated him." All of these things clutter your prose. The story will be stronger, cleaner, and clearer without.


Good luck and happy revising!
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Learning from Critiquing

One of the best ways to hone one's writing skills is to critique other writers' work. Yes, I know I've said this before. But even after writing eleven books, and learning an incredible amount, it never hurts to get reminders.

I just completed critiquing seven manuscript submissions for several workshops. All of these were the opening pages of fantasy or science fiction works. These ranged from utterly beginner level to one that made me sorry the submission was only 20 pages. And I want to state right here up front a Bravo! for all seven submitters. It takes a lot of moxie to put your work out there for someone else to scrutinize. Some aspiring writers never get there...and they'll never get anywhere. Because as much as we must write for our own pleasure, publishing means communicating our ideas to someone else.

This exercise reminded me of several important lessons about openings.

1. Open with something important - the story!
2. Be specific
3. Go deeper - step back and view the big picture
4. Strip TV and movie cliches from your writer's vocabulary

1. Open with something important - the story!
   Even the most die-hard seat-of-the-pants writer [me!] knows a lot before beginning to write. Backstories of characters. World history. The nature of magic. You need to know those things. The reader may need to know them, too, but not necessarily everything, and certainly not in the first two chapters. Be ruthless. Get to story developments - events – in the first two pages. It is story that draws in the reader, not history. If it is page 16 before we know the gender of your main character or page 18 before the first “event” occurs, you will have lost most of your readers.
   



2. Be specific
   Specificity is what separates generic prose from vivid prose. Think about moving from place to place. Walk is a generic movement. It almost always requires an adverb to tell the reader what kind of movement we’re talking about, eg. walked slowly or walked briskly or decisively. English is rich with verbs, especially for something so basic as movement. Pull out that thesaurus - not to find hifalutin words your characters would never use, but to find the right word: stroll, meander, stride, trot. For nouns, don’t just say flower or cup or animal. Find a word that will evoke the world you’re describing or reveal something about the character who is describing it. Tankard and teacup give us more vivid scenes without excess verbiage. Think replacement, not addition. When your characters hear a prophecy, don’t leave us with generic, “Beware of the evil one. Shadows will drown the light,” come up with something interesting and specific to your story.
   



3. Go deeper - step back and view the big picture


What makes your fifteen-year-old hero different from every other fifteen-year-old hero in literature? Think of the heroic deeds he needs to perform…and then think of what seeds of personality or emotion exist inside your character that can emerge to support those deeds – or what the character lacks that he must develop to be able to do what you require of him. Sometimes you don’t know these things right away, but eventually you must. You’ll not only enrich your character, but you’ll get ideas for meaningful story events that will develop or expose these characreristics. And then look at the reverse to find interesting quirks and flaws. Maybe your female love interest doesn’t need to be highly literate, but she needs to be assertive, so let her lack of literacy be something that distinguishes her from other female characters or something that bothers her.


4. Strip TV and movie cliches from your writer's vocabulary
   
   How many people in the world can actually survive their boat going over a waterfall? A blow on the head severe enough to cause unconsciousness will generally cause a concussion. Look up the recovery time and symptoms of a concussion. Repeated concussions cause brain damage. [See the NFL statistics on players who are held out of games or retire because of repeated concussions.] Is it really possible to do the Jason Bourne thing and pick out the evil perpetrators from a mobbed train station? Visit a mobbed train station and try picking out one person! Labor almost never begins with one violent contraction. See what I mean? Don’t rely on film or TV for any medical advice, historical fact, or mechanical reality, ie. guns, bombs, car flipping etc. [Watch TV with a doctor, historian, or mechanical engineer and you’ll hear about it!] Besides being inaccurate, they are cliché. Boring. Unoriginal. And editors, agents spot them right away.
   
   

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Demons and Shapeshifters

I am a guest blogger today on Authorial, agently, and personal ramblings, which is my agent, Lucienne Diver's blog. The topic? Gargoyles, and Demons, and Shifters, Oh My!

In my offering, I list my four rules for story development, especially when incorporating some fantasy trope like shapeshifting or the fae or demons. And these four are...

1. Make things really bad for heroes (could you have guessed this?)
2. Make things different than in other stories
3. No black and white
4. Reverse it all

I illustrate these points with the rai-kirah books.

Over the past week, Lucienne has hosted guest blogs from a number of her writers who do shapeshifters and demons and other beasties - including Lynn Flewelling, Faith Hunter, and Susan Krinard.


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Treasure Hunts

I think I last wrote about research back when I was just beginning to work on Unholy Alliance. But I wouldn't want you to think that was the last time I went hunting the wonderful details that can make a fictional world real. Here are a few places I've visited in the past couple of weeks (not counting Chicago where I was visiting family over Thanksgiving!) I'll leave you to guess what mayhem I've conjured from them...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppice (A lot is written about the flaws of Wikipedia - not entirely correct info, amateurish, incomplete, unreliable - but it is a great jumping off point and often leads to other links.)

http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/#letterI

http://www.cidpusa.org/blood_letting.htm

http://www.medicalantiques.com/medical/Scarifications_and_Bleeder_Medical_Antiques.htm

http://www.naturesongs.com/birds.html

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookdown.pl

http://paulcarlisle.net/mooncalendar/

Complete Mediterranean Wildlife Photoguide (Sterry)
English Through the Ages (Brohaugh)

And, as always, my treasured Roget - not an imitation thesaurus or word finder or synonym finder, but the real Roget's Thesaurus, where you can look up words by their semantics and find that word that's on the tip of your tongue but just won't come.

Enjoy!

And here are two more I just had to add

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art7783.asp

and

http://smallfarms.typepad.com/small_farms/2006/04/freerange_pigs_.html Who can resist an article called Free Range Pigs?

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Attacking a Scene

This scene, the start of a new chapter, is driving me crazy. Two of my investigators are supposed to be leaving Castelle Escalon on an urgent mission. They believe they are closing in on the guilty party. But Something Will Happen before they can leave. The scary Forces of Order arrive and threaten Partner Two. This is a dangerous risk of exposure, and will introduce a Change of Direction in one of the partners that we will see play out through the end of the book.

You can likely see the trouble here - subtlety. I need the scene dramatic enough to be compelling, and yet its truest consequence must be essentially unrecognizable. Ouch. Why do I DO this to myself? Needless to say, this scene has bugged me for days now. I can't seem to get it right.


So, to begin. They are supposed to be leaving the palace, so Partner One is waiting in the stableyard. Partner Two does not show. The crochety stableman (a very minor character who will appear on occasion throughout the books) is griping at Partner One that he needs to get gone because he is upsetting the horses. Part of the stableman's irritation is that there are "guests'" horses that have been there since before dawn. (Hint, these belong to the above-mentioned Forces of Order who are causing the delayed arrival of Partner Two.) I like this crochety guy. I like the fact that the Forces of Order got here very early. Partner One suspected they were coming, but assumed it would be after he was long gone.

First time through: Partner One is annoyed at the delay and marches inside to roust Partner Two. He finds the Forces of Order already ensconced with Partner Two.

Problem: Logic and inference. The Forces of Order would never question people inside the royal residence (certainly not long enough to cause the dramatic change of direction I plan). They would retrieve offenders or witnesses and take them to their own bailiwick. This is part of the essential balance of power in Sabria. [Same reason police really want to take suspects down to the station and not question them at Mafia headquarters.]

Also I'm totally not sure of how Partner Two is going to react to this, which is a question I'm going to have to resolve sometime, but I don't have enough evidence as yet. How can I understand his motivations and make the reaction real, when I don't see him before or during the action?

Second attempt: Partner One takes repeated trips to the stableyard gate to "see if he's coming" and gets an eyeful of the Forces of Order removing three witnesses from the palace. The witnesses are cloaked and hooded to hide their identity. I really like this custom (invented on the fly!) and so I want to keep it. But the logical consequence is that Partner One can't be sure whether or not Partner Two is one of these three hooded witnesses. He rushes into the palace, finds someone to ask, and gets the story of the "removal."

Problem: all the real action is off screen. The scene comes off as passive. One of the most important people involved is never seen. And, as Partner One is not going to be able to do anything about this "questioning" I've set up a truly boring scene where everything of consequence has already happened or is hidden. Whatever reaction Partner Two has to the event is hearsay.

Much gnashing of teeth here on my part.

Third attempt: Partner One takes repeated trips to the stableyard gate to "see if he's coming" and gets a glimpse of two sentries (from the Forces of Order). Uh-oh. Anxiety - he didn't see this coming so soon - propels him into the palace. (Already I have better emotional context.) He gets into place just as the first of the witnesses has been "hooded" and the second is being rousted...and Partner Two will be next. More anxiety. Partner Two has been delayed by a cordon of Forces of Order, and is fuming. Partner One sneaks/talks his way through the cordon [already more action] and joins Partner Two - so we will see them together "before" the event...and something subtle in Two's behavior after the event will hint at the change I'm trying to enable... Oh yeah, this is much, much better...

I'm off! Third time's the charm and all that.

So why include the stableyard at all, you might say. That seemed to cause all the difficulties. Why not have Partner One see the arrival of the Forces of Order from inside?

Because he just wouldn't be there. His residence is in another part of the palace entirely. To have him in place "just right" to see these happenings from the beginning would be contrived. The two partners would never agree to meet inside the palace as they are supposed to be antagonists, one forced into subordination to the other. Their meeting for the journey would occur at the last possible moment. Character and situational logic - as I have created it - must prevail. Yes, I as the author can force circumstances to make anything happen, but especially when the stakes are high and difficult - getting this event to happen with all its subtleties - I don't want to plant a neon arrow sign outside the door, saying "Look At This! Look at This!"

Maybe I've got it now. I'll keep you posted.

Update: Option three worked out even better than I imagines. Once I got moving on it, instilling more of a sense of danger, the elements came together. I had valuable, revelatory time between the two partners that will contrast marvelously with their later encounters. I was able to examine and instill motivation of Partner 2's reaction to being "hooded," as well as drop in details about the customs surrounding the Forces of Order. And I left something important in Partner 1's hands that ties the action both to previous plot points and future ones. If only it hadn't taken me a WEEK to get this right. This is why I'm slow, folks...

Cheerio!
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Reader Mail

I love reader mail. Mostly the people who write me are happy with the books and want to tell me what struck them especially, or they want to find out if I’m going to write more in a particular world. [Yes, all right, all right, maybe someday I’ll get around to a Song of the Beast sequel .] To hear from a happy reader helps me through discouragement and reminds me that I’ve “done this before and it turned out ok.”

But some readers go beyond and expose something of their emotional involvement with the stories, and that is most gratifying as well.


Jarod wrote:

What struck me most of all in the book [Breath and Bone] was the way you wrote Valen's addiction. I'll admit that, at first, I didn't like it at all. I found that I disliked the character, the weakness, and my own difficulty in relating to his plight, being free of such addictions myself. I was frustrated that he couldn't just get on with life and be a "normal" protagonist and, well.. make choices that I myself might have made. It took me a while to realize that my reaction was a "good" one, in that it meant that you (as an author) created a believable and very flawed character whose weaknesses were a central part of his being--and wrote those weaknesses so powerfully that I wanted to skip the scenes for the sheer discomfort they caused me (but
I didn't skip them!). I surely can learn a lesson from this, that a flawed protagonist is much more interesting, and that writers must not be afraid to show those flaws and embrace them, lest the story dull.

How beautifully this articulates the storyteller’s art! Thanks, Jarod.
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Epic Fantasy Week

Check out epic fantasy week on my agent, Lucienne Diver's blog. There have already been postings on promotion from Lynn Flewelling, and series and story arcs from David Coe. Next up...

Diana Francis on worldbuilding, me own self on developing fantasy heroes, and then Sarah Hoyt on writing fantasy in a scientific world. Enjoy! Read more of this post!

Me, Myself, and I - Part 2

Yes, I've been absent for a while. A family illness has kept me from the keyboard and I'm just getting back into Unholy Alliance.

First order of blog posting was a follow-up to my Deep Genre post about first person writing. I thought a reader's comment was worth a second part. So, if you're interested in the topic, check out Me, Myself, and I - Part 2. In summary:

the post covers ways to address some of the common writer problems with first person, such as conveying knowledge outside the POV character's grasp, keeping up tension, and so forth. Read more of this post!

Me, Myself, and I

For the first time in forever, I posted on the Deep Genre blog.

The post is an answer to a question about whether one can overuse the words I and myself when writing in first person.

The short answer is: Yes, of course! The post talks about some techniques to minimize the problem. Read more of this post!