Elle Carter Neal

Orb’s Return (Poetry)

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life, Poetry 2 Responses »

Mar 052013

Orbs and Faeries by Cornelia Kopp Beyond the murk
The ire of dragon long impaled on wretched lance
Encircled in a bitter trial.
Sacred heart and evil dance
And hemlock burns in desperate pale
Beyond and through the cries of night
Bewitched and thrice behove of light
Briton’s daughter-earth beyond
Fearless echo of their heart.

Raised to eerie moonless night
Light plays less on psyche’s worth
The Mystery by Alice Popkorn Dance through arrow of the fire
Green and hour’s silent birth
Beneath the lilac of the mire
A figure glides in darkling robe
And crows bark soft in deepened woe
Orb lifted high and light believe
And sorcerer set in rightful place.

For once was Erin light and fair
A lively burning dancing heart
Children playing in the dales
And friend and lover never part
Once Upon a Time... by Alice Popkorn Spring and Summer come and went
And Harvest brought an unknown chill
A thief stole in as wont and will
Sent by those whose blood runs dark
And fear through minds began to cry.

They welcomed him did Erin’s kin
Stranger within despite such cold
His face was worn but smile did break
And seemed he kind return less bold
But bird with him he held with angst
Raven eyes burnt menace deep
Through thought and dream-filled bitter sleep
Looking for Inspiration by Alice Popkorn All felt death at shoulder’s door
Distressed at nothing they could know.

Under mist’s dark blanket tales
be told of dragons, wisps, and trolls,
And sprites of earth beneath the dire
crept still silent into holes.
The dark force slowly gained its ground
Pressure living in defeat
And aching monster hell to mete
They felt the call of evil notion
Hard in mischief deep undone.

Poem by Elle Carter Neal

Photos for this post are by the very talented Cornelia Kopp (aka Alice Popkorn on Flickr):
Orbs and Faeries
The Mystery
Once Upon a Time…
Looking for Inspiration

Taking Steps (Flash Fiction)

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life 2 Responses »

Jan 232013

Dancing Children, photo by Valerie Everett It was a day for dancing, Eloise thought. A week of rain and now weak sunlight trickled through the dissolving clouds and everything sparkled. But she had vowed never to dance again.

She looked down at her purple fairy gumboots as she squelched through the muddy grass. What a wonderful sound they made. Not as nice as the clack, clack sound Trina was making on the pathway. Eloise turned her head and grinned at her sister.

“I wish there was some way to tell them apart,” the lady at the grocer’s had once said to their mother. That was before the accident, of course. Now they were The Normal One and The One in the Wheelchair.

But today Trina had legs. Shiny metal legs that went clack, clack on the pathway. Faster and faster she went until Eloise could feel joy-thrill-wonder-relief coming from her the way she could sometimes feel a tiny bit of the worst of her pain. The clack, clack was the beat of a song, now. Eloise stepped onto the pathway and took her sister’s hands.

And they danced.

Elle Carter Neal is an Australian author.

This story was written for all the paralympic athletes and others who inspire by overcoming the difficulties they face, and was prompted by this gorgeous photo of Cody McCasland and his carbon blades.

Photo credit: Dancing Children by Valerie Everett

Writers: Are You Stuck on Your Book, Your Publishing Options, or Your Marketing?

Advertisement No Responses »

Jan 222013

I’ve written before about Holly Lisle’s writing career development program, How to Think Sideways, and I’ve just learnt that she is launching a new iteration of this extensive course, with great bonuses and an introductory discount. If you’ve been hoping for chance to save some money on this course, make sure you grab your opportunity before the price goes up on Friday.

How to Think Sideways ULTRA is being released from 12 to 15 March. If you’ve ever wanted to write your book well, or if you have a finished or almost-finished novel you just haven’t been able to get an agent interested in, or if you just want to self-publish — this is the course for you. Holly covers everything.

I am an affiliate of How to Think Sideways and get a commission for any sales through my affiliate link. But I’m also a student of the course and I think the information it covers is well worth the cost of the course.

Revisions

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life, Revision 2 Responses »

Jan 112013

Musee Mecanique Fortune Teller Reading Tarot Cards, by Vicki MacLeod

I’m in the revision phase of my middle grade fantasy novel. I love this part. Revision is layering. It’s the search for symbolism and metaphor and meaning. It’s digging into the richness of what I’ve written and discovering that my planning and outlining paid off when I allowed the writing of the first draft to flow organically.

This book stumped me for a while in the search for its theme. Almost unbelievably, it was staring me right in the face. I had to change two characters to find it, but the wealth of additional subtext that opened up was so worth the extra work. It forms part of one of the book’s twists, so I don’t want to reveal too much, but the main theme is “taking responsibility for what you create” – very apt for me right now, on many levels from my writing to raising my children. Last year was a hard one, parenting-wise, and my son and I need to do some revision on our relationship this year, too.

We, as a species, tell and read stories in order to nut out a conundrum that is bothering us. If we stick to writing about the answers we’ve already found, only our reader benefits; if we write into what we’re trying to discover, we benefit too.

Since this book involves a magic wand, naturally I was always going to use the wand symbolically and I also always planned to use symbolism from the Wands suit of tarot cards. I couldn’t believe the coincidence, though, when I realised not only did I have fourteen chapters to my book, and fourteen cards of the minor arcana of the Wands suit, but also that the symbolism and reading of each card fits beautifully into the storyline of each chapter, in order. It made my day when I matched those up and got fourteen for fourteen. I then sat down to draw from the symbols of the suit – mainly fire and things that symbolise fire or are symbolised by fire – and came up with a number of scenes that enrich the plot by drawing on those symbols. It’s such a thrilling process.

I’ve also had a chuckle at the hazards of using Find and Replace to automate edits. I came across a few instances of one of my characters wearing an intriguing item of clothing called a “Jameset”. I scratched my head over that one for a while. The book is fantasy and the characters do don clothing from another world, so I could well have made the word up deliberately; it wasn’t ringing any bells, though. Then I looked through my notes. About a quarter of the way through the first draft I’d decided to change a character’s name from Jack to James and ran a Find and Replace – but I forgot to set the search to “whole words”. Ah, well. Check, check, and recheck. And then hire an editor.

What about you? Do you love or hate the revision process? Do you graft in symbolism retrospectively, or do you plan everything, including the symbolism, up front?

photo by: MRS.HART

Dyad

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life 4 Responses »

Dec 122012

My daughter is nearly a year old, and has been walking for a month, and, thus, our motherbaby dyad is slowly coming to an end. Because of her reflux and the distress that lying horizontally has caused her, we have spent the year quite literally attached. This is how I managed to get all my editing done this year:

Dyad1 Dyad2

How to Hustle Your Readers in Three Easy Steps

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life No Responses »

Oct 172012

Hustle is a British TV show about a group of likeable con artists and the elaborate confidence tricks they pull. In addition to having criminals as the protagonists, the show also breaks other storytelling rules (like “never cheat your reader”) to great effect. Here are some ideas you could borrow to up the ante in your own stories.

Cast of Hustle - Robert Glenister, Kelly Adams, Adrian Lester, Robert Vaughn, Jaime Murray, Matt Di Angelo
Cast of Hustle – Robert Glenister, Kelly Adams, Adrian Lester, Robert Vaughn, Jaime Murray, Matt Di Angelo

1. The Loveable Rogue Protagonist

The first risk Hustle takes is that of the lawbreaking hero. It’s not an uncommon technique, but it does come with some useful guidelines to enable the author to pull it off without alienating readers. Your protagonist can be “bad” as long as he abides by a moral code that usually includes not harming “innocent” people, like children, pensioners, or anyone lower down on the crime food chain than the protagonist. In Hustle, the mark (and thus the episode’s antagonist) is always either truly nasty and immoral or excessively greedy, with no respect for the unofficial code of ethics, and therefore deserves to be taken down.

Sometimes the antagonist is the police, which is writing on thin ice if one’s readership is not a group of anarchists or teenagers. Hustle handles this cleverly – one episode featured a corrupt cop where Mickey Stone’s gang was hired by the Chief Inspector to ferret out the dirty detective; another episode involved one of the team being arrested as part of the greater con, but, since he hadn’t actually stolen what the police thought he’d stolen, he was soon free to go.

2. Sleight of Hand

There is a reason people love watching magicians despite knowing they are being tricked: the catch-me-out-if-you-can bravado. It’s part of the game to see if you can spot the sleight of hand that creates the illusion. The most skilful magicians relish the impossible-seeming tricks, knowing that their audiences expect to be conned convincingly.

Hustle cons the viewer by leaving out a crucial piece of the set up until after the big reveal. Normally this technique would irritate and annoy readers – it’s often called “cheating the reader”, and readers will demand a really good reason for a point of view protagonist forgetting to mention something that would assist them in solving the mystery too early. But Hustle viewers expect to be conned, in the same way that the audience at a magic show do. Once you know the score, the game becomes one of guessing what information has been omitted, rather than one of solving a mystery. This works best over a series, where readers become used to the formula over the first book or two and set out to second-guess the author from then on.

There are two other effective ways to accomplish a sleight of hand in a novel: Smoke and Mirrors and The Unreliable Narrator.

The Smoke and Mirrors trick involves placing your “con” in plain sight, but hiding it behind other elements in your book, such as red herrings, MacGuffins, anachronisms, and sub-plots, or using them as distractions. By the end of the book, the reader should be able to see, in retrospect, that the author had given a number of clues, deftly palmed away, but definitely there. Starting with your story’s climax, or its ending, or even mixing the chronology up a bit (think Pulp Fiction), is one of the simplest ways to obfuscate without having to leave out any clues.

The Unreliable Narrator is ideal for first person narrative and can be used as a subtle way of giving the reader a heads up that not all is as it seems and that the narrative will not be telling the whole story. With this mistrust in place, the savvy reader will be on the look out for clues that are glossed over by the protagonist.

3. Breaking the Fourth Wall

Occasionally, one of the protagonists of Hustle will glance or wink at the camera, or even speak directly to the viewer (known in theatre terms as breaking the fourth wall). This method of writing is common in the classics, often with the narrator addressing a direct comment to the “dear Reader”. It fell out of popularity over the course of the last century, but now seems to be returning. It is a rather risky technique because it can shatter the precious illusion that fiction builds, pulling viewers or readers out of the story by reminding them that they are watching or reading fiction. Or, as in Hustle, used sparingly and with skill, it can do the opposite – make the viewer feel s/he is part of the team, in on the con, and ready to hustle. It can also be used to distract the audience while you slip in one of your vital clues.

So, study your mark(et). Build up your confidence. Position your mirrors. And get ready to give them a twist to remember.

How I Lost My Courage

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life 2 Responses »

Oct 042012

Fearful Fascination, photograph by Jake Phlieger

When I was a young child a little girl called Fiona Harvey was kidnapped from the same town where I lived. Parents of that town – my parents, my friends’ parents – clamped down on our freedom out of concern for our safety and taught us about “stranger danger” – as well they should have. I still walked home from school almost every single day, but things had changed.

My fears grew slowly. I travelled to the UK and felt able to take risks I wouldn’t have dared to in the place where I grew up. I lost more innocence, not because I took those risks, but because others felt entitled to abuse my naivety simply because I had it. I took a lot of supposedly far bigger risks that had no negative consequences for me at all. Travelling by myself overnight on a train to see Dublin, Stratford-upon-Avon, London… some of the highlights of my trip to the UK. I took myself out to dinner in Dublin and then walked maybe a mile by myself, late at night, across the city, to find a particular pub I’d read about, where I then had a drink and a conversation with a lovely Scottish couple and a pleasant young man from Cork. Right place, right time? I certainly hadn’t been as safe at our next-door neighbour’s house, or in my parents’ home with bars on the windows and dead-bolts on the doors.

Each incident of harassment, each creepy feeling, each uncomfortable experience weighed me down, until I reached a point where I would spend most of a day in a state of panic because it was necessary to leave the house to buy a loaf of bread. I was lucky that things changed for me when I became pregnant – Relaxin is an incredible hormone, and, true to its name, it relaxed me enough for me to let go of impending agoraphobia and feel safe enough.

It angers me, though, that we are all only just “safe enough”. Sometimes, without being aware of it, we may be standing only an inch from someone who has no respect for other human beings. Buying a loaf of bread should be easy, something you don’t even have to think about. Until a man follows you from the bakery to your car in broad daylight while you’re handicapped by the toddler you’re carrying on your hip.

I feel overwhelmed when I read news about cases like Daniel Morcombe and Jill Meagher, and more recently Jyoti Singh Pandey. I’m a head-in-sand type of person. My response is usually to dive into reading or writing fiction that makes me feel that it is possible to be invincible, to defend oneself, to outwit the villains. I’ve been told I should write more realistic fiction, that it is dangerous for children to believe in magic and happy endings because they might wish for a faery or sorcerer or magic wand instead of calling for help. I don’t know the right answer to this. I think childhood and innocence vanish so quickly – maybe a little fantasy and happiness is worth the risk.

Many years ago, one of my favourite TV shows was Charmed – three modern-day witches who took on demons without even breaking a nail. Imagine not having to consider crossing the road because someone dodgy is loitering on a corner you need to pass. Imagine being able to cast up a shield or hold up your hand and push away an attacker with a pulse of energy. Imagine what you could do with your life if you were not afraid of anything.

It’s so wonderful to dare. It’s so wonderful to approach life without the negative intentions of other people even crossing one’s mind. I wish that all children could retain that sense of invincibility.

Meanwhile, here’s something you can do to help:

photo by: felsadog

Literary Midwifery

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life 4 Responses »

Sep 252012

eReaders Am I the only one for whom the proverbial lightbulb takes several small clicks of the switch before it glows brightly enough to get my attention? Last year I read and reviewed Noah Lukeman’s free ebook, How to Write a Great Query Letter. In it, Lukeman berates authors who spend years working on their manuscripts only to pound out sub-par query letters in one sitting. His opinion is that writers should spend as much time on the query letter as they do on writing the book. Click one of the light switch: Why does one have to waste so much precious writing time “crafting” a god-damn query letter? Oh, yes, I get that it is supposedly a work of art that showcases the writer’s talent, abilities, and intelligence. But, really? I’m getting a bit jaded in my thirties. I’d rather write another book that could, hopefully, be read by many eager readers, than “showcase” my writing talent in a letter to one person who may not even exist*.

I stall at some part of the editing phase of almost all my novels and I’ve now started wondering if part of it might not be due to a reluctance to deal with the query letter and tracking down of the contact person. I’d rather start a new novel than finish an existing one and have to get it out there. Click two. I get nervous when I start thinking about what agents and publishers might require from me. Television interviews? Yikes. A rewrite turned around in two weeks while I’m dealing with a sick child? Eek. Click three.

A report on publishing non-fiction on Kindle, how Amazon is geared to help authors sell books, and a decision to make some extracts of my Word 4 Writers course available through Amazon, followed by the information I mentioned previously on the success of fiction, and trilogies and series in particular, in ebook format. Clicks four and five.

Then I read the first part of John Locke’s book, where he comes from the position of having owned two highly successful sales businesses, and points out that in any career other than writing and publishing, owning your own business is a legitimate and often impressive road to take. And just look at the independent film industry. There it is downright icy cool to be indie. The publishing industry is the only industry in the world that stigmatises those who choose to own their own businesses.

So I took his analogy and applied it to myself and my own little corner of the universe. My world has been affected by another industry that seeks to stamp out anyone choosing to trust their own natural instincts and manage their own process–obstetrics.

And that was the stadium floodlight at full wattage right in my face. I haven’t spent the last four years on a political battleground fighting for my right, and my daughter’s right, to birth our flesh-and-blood babies at home and to birth naturally without intervention, only to turn around and meekly take my ink-and-paper babies along to the hospital to hand them over to a bookstetrician. “Yes, dear, I am fully committed to natural writing. But if you go longer than forty chapters you will have to attend an induction. It’s a requirement of our insurance policy. Sorry. If you choose to labour on a Friday we will have to cut the book by fifty pages. If you need more time, you’ll have to pay back your advance. With interest. Oh, and, by the way, you won’t have the final say on your child’s name, personality, or what it looks like. Sign here.”

And that was the snap of the final string tethering me to the dream of a traditional publishing contract (preferrably with one of the big six). Although it’s something I’ve wanted since I was 18, I’ve now found the freedom to let it go and try to get my novels to my readers myself. After all, authors with trad pubs have to do a lot of the marketing legwork themselves, anyway. The big houses are bringing fewer and fewer benefits to the deal, and a lot more drawbacks. A wait of a year or more before publication versus publish whenever you are ready? Holding back the publication of the ebook version until the print version has sold “enough” copies, and then pricing the ebook higher than the paperback, versus the option to bring out the ebook first and price it at 99c (or free) so that readers are willing to take a chance on a new author? Seems so obvious now.

The field has never been more level, and I am so ready to play.

* Namely, “Daniel Carlyle”, supposed “Aquisitions Editor” of Pan MacMillan – a pseudonym for a pseudo-person given out to anyone cold-calling their switchboard. I imagine letters addressed to Mr Carlyle got no further than the post room before they were opened and returned in their SASEs, unread. You know what? My time is more valuable than that.

photo by: steffens77

Standing on Three Legs

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life 5 Responses »

Sep 132012

Zhang Huan – Three Legged Buddha, photograph by Ryan D. Cole

A decade ago I would never have believed the publishing industry could change so quickly. I mean, this is the industry where the majority of houses still insist on paper submissions, printed in double-spaced Courier on only one side of the page. It’s a dinosaur, surviving only because of the prestige of a traditional publishing contract and the hunger of authors that feeds it.

Four years ago I started the first book in a trilogy, choosing this format because I had three protagonists and liked the concept of one entire book per viewpoint. After I’d completed the first draft of the first book, I received some advice that made so much sense it changed my mind immediately. I was told that agents and publishers were very unlikely to sign a trilogy by an unknown author because of the risk involved. It would be more strategic to offer a standalone book. Since my book wasn’t all that lengthy, I realised I could incorporate the three viewpoints into one story and solve the problem. But it was a headache. I needed to continue the story as if I’d already been writing from the points of view of the different characters, but I only had the voice of the first character established in my head. It didn’t feel like the others were talking to me yet. Perhaps I needed to start again.

I decided to start a new book instead–one that really was a standalone–and shelve the headache to deal with when I had more time and mental energy to spend on it. But in the meantime something interesting happened. Some other authors began to have success with self-publishing ebooks, in particular via Amazon. One of these was John Locke, who has now sold millions of ebooks. But the crux of the matter is that these are not self-help titles or financial tomes or stock market secrets–the biggest seller on Amazon Kindle is fiction. Just over a year ago I spoke to a so-called “Internet Marketing Coach” who blinked in confusion when I told him I wrote fiction. “Maybe you should try publishing ebooks on Kindle,” he suggested vaguely, before going on to advise me to do the usual keyword research and figure out what information product I could create to sell to people (in other words, exactly what I’d told him I no longer wanted to do). I dismissed his comment about Kindle at the time (after all, I didn’t have a Kindle myself and couldn’t visualise how anyone might read fiction on an e-reader).

How fast things change. Now I’m the one hitting that “Buy with One Click” button, thinking I’ll give that author a chance for 99c. I’m actively searching out the Kindle editions of books I’m interested in (fiction and non) in order to save my poor bookshelves from collapsing. I no longer have to get rid of a few books before I buy more.

But, most importantly for me, I’ve noticed another trend on Kindle: trilogies and series books are back and more popular than ever before. Readers are so much more likely to buy all three books on Kindle seeing as they are (sometimes) much cheaper than the print editions, one can actually find the first book in a long series (it’s no longer likely to be “Out of Print”), and these books don’t clutter up any shelves (or waste too many trees) if they remain unread.

So I’m reviewing my standpoint on my trilogy. I have a draft of the first and a few chapters of the second, and now I think I may as well keep going. I knew there was a reason I had stalled.

photo by: ryan_d_cole

Sparks of Inspiration

Elle Carter Neal, My Fictional Life 2 Responses »

Sep 042012

Photograph by g_kat26

A week or so ago I had one of those sparks of inspiration that usually stop me short as I backtrack in amazement to work out how my brain cobbled together something that seems so, well, inspired. I was tidying up (yes, housework), putting some books back on a shelf, when I noticed that the author of one of the books had the same name as a character from my work-in-progress. I thought nothing of it at the time, but about half an hour later I found myself mulling over what I remembered of a Wikipedia entry I’d read a year ago, that had a connection to a plot strand involving this same character. Suddenly the phrase “everything’s connected” popped into my head, and an element of the Wikipedia entry that I hadn’t considered important before wound up being the thread that tied an entire dangling subplot back into the main plot. I was so blown away I just had to sit there for a moment with my mouth open.

I’ve had others like that. An advertisement for a Hannah Montana concert led to me reminiscing about my own childhood aspirations and the games I’d invented around Alice in Wonderland (we had a wonderful embankment in our garden that made for a perfect tumble-down-the-rabbit-hole sequence). Within a day I had an entire novel outlined involving crossing over to another world.

My not-so-pleasant experience at a hotel in Torquay led to an idea for a comedy a la Fawlty Towers, but set in a family residence. My characters had other ideas when they started killing each other. That book was a mess and I eventually “frogged” it (a knitting term I love, meaning to rip all the stitches out and reclaim the yarn to start again from scratch). But I was drawn to the premise of a dysfunctional family with layers and layers of secrets, and the moment I saw a photograph of a manor house that just had to belong to this family, the pieces clicked together and I started writing.

My most bizarre inspiration was from a dream. I’ve written about this one before. The dream involved a pygmy hippo, but in the book the hippo is simply a dog. Despite it’s psychedelic beginnings, this story is my most “normal”, with no elements of fantasy or magical realism.

I’m being deliberately cryptic, I know. None of these books are published yet because I have editor’s block. And a distinct lack of time these days. I’m working on both those issues.

What about you? What inspires your stories? Do you sit down to deliberately craft ideas, or do you wait for flashes of inspiration and grab for the nearest shopping receipt or sheet of loo paper to write them down?

photo by: g_kat26

Older Entries