Announcing the Alternate Version Blogfest (aka, I turn my YA fantasy into a steamy romance)

First, a quick announcement.  Suzette Saxton and Bethany Wiggins are hosting a contest on their blog.  The main prize is a 40 page agent critique, so do go take a look.  Contest ends March 14, 2010.


I recently submitted a scene to my critique group with some sexual tension between two characters. They all thought it was too abrupt and suggested I sprinkle in some tension in previous scenes to make the development more gradual.

Well, you know how these things go. I went back home and started fooling around with an earlier scene.  One thing led to another ... and before I knew it, a very different version of that scene was born.


For comparison, here's the original scene, from my YA fantasy Midnight Thief. It's an excerpt from the scene I posted for the Fight Scene Blogfest.



“Most times you won't have the luxury of resting after a fight.” At first she thought it was Riley speaking, but then she realized the voice came from off the mat. She sat up to see James watching from the side. This was the first time she had seen him here during her practice. Hastily, she climbed to her feet as Riley also stood.
James stripped off his outer tunic, tossed it on a nearby box. and walked onto the mat. He reached a pale but well muscled arm towards Riley, who tossed him the dagger he had been using. James caught the dagger and in the same motion beckoned Kyra toward him. She stood, frozen in place. He motioned again, more curtly. This time she obeyed, muscles tense as she approached him.“Let's see what you've learned.”




And here's Midnight Thief:  Torrid Romance Version

“Most times you won't have the luxury of resting after a fight.” Kyra looked up to see James on the side, his cold blue eyes boring into her with an intensity that she felt down to her very bones.She watched in fascination as James stripped off his tunic, revealing a well muscled chest made all the more interesting by two scars that ran across his chiseled abs.

His eyes swept over her, taking in first her face, and then lowering to appraise the rest of her body with a calculating eye. She flushed. He was just evaluating her as a fighter, she knew. But still, her breathing became quick and shallow.
James stepped aggressively onto the mat. "Let's see what you've learned so far," he murmured, his voice husky with anticipation.

Hehe...

And once I started, I couldn't stop! I call this next one Midnight Thief: The Thriller


“Most times you won't have the luxury of resting after a fight.” At first she thought it was Riley speaking, but then she looked up and saw how wrong she was.

Chapter 35

It was James. This was the first time she had seen him here during her practice. Hastily, she climbed to her feet...


I learned several things during this exercise. First, that I probably don't have a future in romance. And second, this is really fun! And thus, I'd like to invite you all to participate in the Alternate Version Blogfest.

Here are the details:

1.  The Blogfest will take place on April 1st, 2010.  Yes, the date is intentional.
2.  Sign up on the Mr. Linky Widgit below.
3.  For your entry, post a short passage from your WIP, and then an alternate version of it in a different style.  It can be funny, but doesn't necessarily have to be.
4.  Post your entry on your own blog on April 1st, and go surf around to see what everyone else has come up with.
5.  And of course, I'd appreciate it if you could retweet/blog/share about this blogfest.  It's always more fun with more people :-)

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Tips for Developing Character Voice from Dee Garretson

I recently attended a workshop at a Central Ohio SCBWI meeting with middle grade author Dee Garretson*. She gave some good tips for developing character voice.



Just to clarify, people talk about several types of voice. One type, what Garretson refers to as authorial voice, refers to the author’s writing style. A while back I blogged some tips from Cathy Yardley for developing your own voice. Dee’s presentation focused instead on character voice, which is the style of a specific character in your story.

So on to the tips:

1.What kind of observations does your character make? What would that character notice about someone they just met, or a room they just entered? It would be different for a 12 year old girl than it would be for a middle aged man.

For example, if a character were to say:

“She was a German and made brilliant meatballs,” -  Gideon, the Cutpurse

What impression do you get of the character? What kind of person would mention meatball making ability as a defining characteristic?

2. How does your character react to situations?

“I felt a drop of sweat trickle down my side like a spider and disappear into the waistband of my itchy, brand-new suit pants, which I hoped never to wear again.”  -I,Q

From this reaction, we can tell the character is young and uncomfortable in formal clothes. 

3. Word choices  In the first example, change "brilliant" into “yummy” meatballs and you get a very different voice.  There are also some good word choices in the quote from I,Q -- spider, for example.

Another example:
“The fog hung over Booker Mountain like an old ragged coat.” - The Dragon Heir

If you change “old ragged coat” to “malevolent ghost”, again, you get a  different feel.

How do you invoke character voice in your own writing?

*Garretson’s middle grade adventure book Danger’s Edge: Wildfire at Camp David will be released in September.

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Multiple Posts About Multiple Comparisons

So the Anonymous winner of the Neuropublishing Joke Contest has revealed himself now as Todd, brilliant MIT neuroscience graduate student and my officemate at lab.

He wrote an explanation of multiple comparisons in the comments section of the last post, and I thought I'd repost it here because I know y'all want more statistics on the blog. Actually, I should have just made him write the explanation for me rather than trying to do it myself. It's the least he could do for a free book*, right?



Anyways, here's multiple comparions take two.  If you want to see the joke that started it all, click back to the last post.

* Apparently Todd already owns a version of The Graveyard Book, but requested it as a prize to throw me off his trail.  However, I didn't know he owned it, so that strategy failed.  After everything was sorted out, I ended up giving him Pillars of the Earth instead.

------------------------

Todd's explanation:

I feel compelled to write my own short explanation of multiple comparisons for a lay audience, because I think I'm going to need it again some day...

Imagine you have a quarter and you want to know if it always comes up heads. You flip it 5 times, and it comes up heads every time.

Because you're an expert in stats, you know that that will only happen 1 out of every 32 times with a normal quarter. In other words, the probability of getting that result with a normal quarter is around 3%. In other words, as Livia pointed out very well, we're going to say that we think this is a trick quarter, but we acknowledge there's a 3% chance that we just got a strange set of coin flips.

In scientific terms, the "null hypothesis" is that the quarter is normal. We tentatively "reject the null hypothesis", because there's only a 3% chance of a normal quarter. This is a key point about science -- EVERYTHING is tentative. We're never, ever sure about anything. We can never directly prove our hypotheses are correct, we can *only* disprove other hypotheses. And we always do this while acknowledging there's a certain chance that we're wrong. Hopefully, that chance is vanishingly small, but not always...

Now, on with the story. Say you go to the bank teller and tell them to open up the vault, because you heard a rumor they might have some counterfeit coins in there. You insist that they flip each of their 20,000 coins five times each, and if any of them come up with heads all five times, you're going to call the cops.

See the problem with this? While there's only a 1/32 chance that any one quarter will come up all-heads, when you do this 20,000 times, you expect several hundred quarters to have all-head results, through pure chance alone.

You need to be much more careful with your threshold for a counterfeit coin because you're testing so many, and so you "correct for multiple comparisons". The simplest way of doing this is just to change your mind about when you're sure a coin is counterfeit. If you're satisfied suspecting a single fake coin after 5 throws, you'd require, say, 18 throws to satisfy yourself that the bank really had a bad quarter.

Livia's explanation was great, but if you didn't get it the first time around, maybe that helped?

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The Winning Neuropublishing Jokes and a Statistics Lesson

Okay, I know I'm a day late to announce the winners of the Neuropublishing Jokes Contest.  Unlike other bloggers with convenient excuses for delayed posts, (cough, cough),  I have no excuse except, well, I'll explain later. So sorry about the delay, and without further ado...



*drumroll*

The Grand Prize goes to Anonymous, for the following joke:

A brain scientist, an agent, and an editor walk into a bar...

The brain scientist stubs his toe on the bar and yells, "Ouch! I really felt that in my free nerve endings! My somatosensory cortex is going nuts!" The agent says, "Your screaming has far too much jargon. I can't sell it." And the ScienceDaily editor rewrites it to, "Leading scientists prove toes cause pain; suggest removal."

This one got the most votes from random people I pulled to my blog to help me judge.   In an unexpected twist, though, this joke is actually not eligible for a prize because Anonymous chose his/her other two jokes as the official entry.  But this just received so many compliments that I wanted to award the prize anyways, if just for bragging rights.

The book prize will go to the runners up (yes, there was a tie). 

From Liana Brooks:

Q:How many brain scientists does it make to write a bestseller? 
A: None. They taught the lab rat to do it.

Again from Anonymous:

Q: How many brain scientists does it take to write a best-seller?
A: Thousands! Of course, after you correct for multiple comparisons, only a handful are doing any real work.

Congratulations!  Both runners up requested The Graveyard Book as their prize.  So Liana, I'll be contacting you about your mailing address, and Anonymous, I have a good guess about who you are, but please contact me as well.

Okay, and here's the reason I've been procrastinating on the results.  I guess, *sigh*,  I'm going to have to explain Anonymous's second joke.  I know I'm going to explain it slightly wrong, and some statistician will come out and tell me I'm dumb, and it'll be embarrassing for all involved (where by "all involved" I mean me).  But I'll give it a try...

*rolls up sleeves*

In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to do statistics on experimental data.  If we were doing an experiment on whether morning or evening testing would result in better scores, one ideal data set would be if all morning tests were better than all evening tests:

Morning:  99, 97, 92, 95, 98
Evening:  85, 90, 82, 70, 88

  However, that's never true in the real world.  In reality, our data is noisy because of factors like individual variation, testing conditions, phase of the moon, etc.  Therefore, rather than a clean difference between the datasets, we usually end up with two overlapping datasets:

Morning: 99, 97, 92, 82, 55
Evening: 85, 92, 70, 95, 88

So see how Morning tests are mostly better, but there's alot of overlap?  With datasets like this then, there's two possible interpretations.

1.    Morning testing is better on average than Evening testing (ie, the experimental conditions are Actually different)
or
2.  The two testing conditions are the same, and the difference you get is just a fluke of the specific samples you took.  (ie, the experimental conditions are Actually the same, aka the Null hypothesis)

To get an answer, we perform a statistical test that calculates the probability of getting our data set if the conditions are Actually the Same.  This is called the p value.   In other words, if the p value is less than 5%, there is a less than 5% chance that the conditions are Actually the Same.

It's standard in the sciences now that if the p value is less than 5%, we conclude that our experimental conditions are probably different. 

With me so far? 

Okay, so the whole p value and statistics thing works fine if you just do one experiment with one statistical test at a time.  However, when you're analyzing brain imaging data, you're interested in a whole bunch of different areas.  Usually, we divide the brain into tiny cubes  a few millimeters wide, and perform a statistical test on every single one.  Now we have a problem, because even if every single one the cubes are Actually the same for the two experimental conditions,  5% of them are going to pass our test, just because of random chance.  Say we're testing 100,000 voxels -- that's 5000 voxels that will light up in our brain image due to random chance! 

Therefore, for neuroimaging, we have to do a more stringent statistical test, and this is called Correcting for Multiple Comparisons (cuz, we're testing multiple cubes, see?).  So if you're doing an expeirment, you might get activations in a whole bunch of voxels, but once you correct for multiple comparions, only a handful are actually activated.

Get it?  Funny huh?

Um, get it?

Eh, well, it's really funny to neuroscientists.  Just take my word for it.

Thanks to all the good folks who entered the contest.  Do go over to the contest and check out all the entries.  It was fun  :-)

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Transition Between Storylines Without Losing Your Reader (Sky Village and Lost Mission)

Note:  Thanks for all who entered the neuropublishing jokes contest.  Winners will be announced on Saturday.

Presenting multiple storylines with different point of view (POV) characters is tricky. It’s hard to ask the reader, who’s already invested in one narrative, to start again with a new one. I find that if I’m looking for a reason to stop reading, I often do so at a storyline break.

Many novels use a clean break (new chapter or section) between storylines. While that works, I’ve seen some books attempt smoother transitions. These transitions tend to be plot specific, so they won’t work with any book, but I’ll describe a few here as brainstorming fodder. I find that a good transition keeps me interested for the following reasons:



1) Keeps the momentum: There’s less of a psychological break between sections.  Sometimes a good transition will also introduce a hook that motivates me to read the new storyline.
2) Plot refresher: If we’re returning to a previous storyline, the transition makes it easier to reorient myself. I don’t have do the work of remembering what happened and where the plot is.
3)Emotional refresher: A good transition will remind me why I’m interested in going back to that other storyline -- why I care.

The first example is from Sky Village by Monk and Nigel Ashland, which Peta Andersen lent me to help with POV changes in my own manuscript.

Sky Village begins with the story of Mei, also called Dragonfly, who goes to live with relatives when her mother is captured. She has a book, called the Tree Book, that her mother used to read from. When Mei opens the book, she finds that the stories her mother read to her, about a boy Breaker and his sister Riley, were real. What’s more, she realizes she can speak with Breaker through the book and learns that Riley has been captured by demons.

“I can’t believe this,” she said, her finger still tingling. Somehow, all this time, the Tree Book had been sharing stories about real kids. But why? And would she be able to talk to the others?

You’re really her, Breaker said. You’re dragonfly.

Mei was speechless. Finally, she asked, “Where’s Riley? Is Riley okay?”

After a moment of silence, Breaker responded. She will be soon.

The next chapter launches from Breaker’s point of view, starting from a point in time before Riley’s capture. Because of this transition, I'm invested in Breaker before his section even begins.

The storylines switch back and forth in a similar way throughout the book. At the end of a character’s section, Mei and Breaker talk, and we transition into the other character's story. As a reader, I found it helpful because it reminded me where we were in the other narrative.

For example, here’s another transition.

[Mei speaking] “Morning Man says my mother was able to communicate with the birds. But why is this happening to us? What if we can’t control it, Breaker?”

[Breaker speaking] In a few hours, I have to conjure a demon for the first time. So I guess I’ll find out.

[Start of Breaker's chapter]

As a reader, I remember, “Oh yeah, last time, Breaker was trying to conjure demons.” It’s much easier to rejoin his story that way.

What if characters from two storylines don't communicate? Athol Dickson uses a different approach in Lost Mission. He has several related narratives, some of which take place in different centuries. He transitions between them by means of an omniscient narrator. Here is one such transition between the story of an 18th century Franciscan friar to a present day woman in Mexico.

But let us be more patient than the friar, for this is just the first of many journeys we shall follow as our story leads us back and forth through space and time. Indeed, the events Fray Alejandro has set in motion have their culmination far into the future. Therefore, leaving the Franciscan and his solitary ship, we cross many miles to reach a village known as Ricon de Dolores, high among the Sierra Madres mountains of Jalisco, Mexico. And we fly further still, centuries ahead of Alejandro, to find ourselves in these, our modern times.

I have mixed feelings about this approach. It was fine for a few switches, but after 345 pages of this , I got a little annoyed. However, these transitions did manage to keep the momentum going better. It’s almost like, since there wasn’t any white space between two sections, the eye just keeps going.

Would anyone like to share good ways of transitioning between storylines?

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A 100% Absolutely and Completely Realisitic Neuroscience Love Scene (Love At First Sight Blogfest)

Brain scientists wonder about many things.  Besides obvious mysteries like  whether or not we'll ever solve the problem of consciousness, there's also the perennial question of why we're so underrepresented in the romance genre.

Think about it.  When was the last time you went through a checkout aisle and saw a  Nora Roberts with a dreamy fMRI technician on the cover?  The sad truth is, our research generally has more sex appeal than we do.

So when I heard about the Love at First Sight Blogfest, I knew it was my responsibility to up the percentage of steamy brain scientist love stories available.  So without further ado, I present:

A 100% Absolutely and Completely Realisitic Neuroscience Love Scene



He rushed in five minutes before scantime, hauling a laptop bag over one shoulder and flashing an apologetic grin.

“Sorry I’m late. I went to the wrong scanner.”

She forced a polite smile but didn't try too hard to hide her annoyance. “The patient’s name is Alicia. I've explained the procedure, and she’s in the bathroom changing. Can you help me set up?”

“Sure.” He strode past her only to stop outside the control room door. “I don't think I know the combination.”

“Four eight three.” The panel flashed green, and the lock clicked.

“Four eight three,” he muttered as he followed her in.

“You’ve scanned before?”

“Yes, but we used a GE system at Stanford, not the Siemens.” He reached into his pockets, fishing out cell phone, keys, and wallet and dumping them onto the back table. She glanced at his shirt pocket and scanned his waist for a belt before demetaling herself as well. Both of them paused at next doorway, automatically patting their hip and back pockets before entering the air conditioned scanner room.

“And this is the magnet,” she said over the soft thrum of the helium pump. The scanner took up a good portion of the room, a giant horizontal cylinder with a man-sized bore.

She pointed at the bottom cabinet as she walked by. “The linens are in
there.” He opened it, bending his lanky frame in half to peer inside. By the time she finished plugging in the headcoil, he had covered the scanner bed with new sheets, readied a pillow, and placed a packet of earplugs for the patient on top. She felt slightly guilty about her rudeness earlier. The imaging center was notoriously hard to navigate.

A knock sounded from the control room. “That's probably the patient.”

He stayed out of the way as she performed the final safety checks, gave instructions to Alicia and rolled her into the scanner. “Squeeze the emergency ball if you need us,” she told her as they returned to the control room.

She settled in front of the scanner controls and dove straight into the preliminary scans. A low mechanical buzz came through the intercom, and a grainy brain image loaded onto the screen. Halfway through setting up the next scan, she paused.

“Sorry I'm not explaining more, but we're running late and this is a long paradigm. I'll try to walk you through next time.”

“No problem. I'll just look over your shoulder.”

“Thanks.” For a few minutes, there was no sound except for keyboard, mouse, and the low pitched scanner noise.

“How many subjects have you run on this paradigm?” he asked when her typing slowed.

“Seven.” She scanned the screen, double checking the parameters. “The pilots were promising, but now the group analysis doesn't show any activation. I'll try a few more before I give up.”

“Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed then.”

The scanner made a high pitched, repetitive trill as it began its functional runs. She monitored the display for a few more moments before speaking again. “To be honest, I think I'm shooting myself in the foot by using SPM's volume based normalization. The VWFA is variable enough as it is. I really should look at it again with--”

“Surface based normalization.”

She cocked her head and glanced in his direction. He looked down at his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “I feel the same. Exactly the same, in fact, about volume based normalization. It doesn't make sense why we still stick with it--”

“When surface based normalization is so obviously superior.” Impulsively, she swiveled her chair to face him. Their eyes met.

In the next room, the scanner continued to sing.

* * * * *

Whew (*fanning self*).  That's about all I can handle for now.  And now you have some insight into the love lives of neuroscientists.

Thanks to Simon Larter for alerting me to the blogfest, Courtney Reese for hosting,  Lady Glamis, whose recent bit of flash fiction inspired the ending line, and Good Omens for inspiring the second to last paragraph.

Be sure to check out the other entries in the Blogfest for some less nerdy fun.

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How the Brain Responds to a Loved One's Pain

Note:  Remember to submit your entries to the Neuropublishing joke contest by the end of Saturday!

In Tender Morsels, Liga's daughter Urdda grew up not knowing the circumstances of her birth. When Urdda was fifteen, her mother finally told her of the brutal gang rape that led to her conception. Urdda ran out of the house weeping, unable to deal with the new knowledge. The following passage describes her feelings.

Why couldn’t there have been … some small tale of betrayal or bad luck for which Urdda could have consoled Mam. This was too great a pain, too monstrous a series of injuries. It lumped in the past like…. Like a bear on a hearthrug, impossible to ignore.

When we hear about a loved one suffering, we often suffer along with them. Like Urdda, we feel their pain as if it were our own. Today, I'll talk about the neural basis of this phenomenon.



Tania Singer and colleagues from University College London conducted an experiment on pain and empathy. They recruited couples and put the female partner in the scanner. The significant other remained outside the scanner. During the course of the experiment, they either gave the woman electric shocks, or showed her signals indicating that her significant other was receiving a shock. (Don't worry, volunteers get to set the maximum level of shock themselves, and they get paid a lot of money.)

When the woman received the shock, many pain processing regions became active in her brain, including those that processed the physical sensation as well as the emotional aspect of receiving pain. When the woman saw that her partner was getting shocked, she showed activation in a network that only included the areas that processed the emotional aspects of pain. What’s more, the amount of activation correlated with self reported empathy scores.

In summary, when you hear about a loved one’s pain, you don't activate the regions that process physical sensation, but you suffer the emotional consequences of the pain.

Can I extrapolate some writing advice from this? Not in a scientifically rigorous way, but it's probably a good reminder to make your readers care about your characters. The closer they feel to them, the more they will suffer along with them. But don't worry, even if your readers are groaning in sympathy, you can rest assured that they're not actually feeling physical pain. :-)

What do you think of these results.  Do they mesh with your personal experience?

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