Starting the Second Novel: What I'm Doing Differently

It's crunch time in dissertation land. I’m aiming to graduate this June, so blog posts won't be as frequent this semester. Hopefully I'll come out the other side without too many dead brain cells. :-)

With the new year, it’s a good time to talk about new beginnings. Now that I’ve finished revisions on Midnight Thief for agent Jim, I'm starting a new novel.

It's a very different experience this time around. Three years ago, I was blissfully ignorant about the whole  process. Seven revisions, two years of critique group meetings, and 178 blog posts later, I’ve learned a few lessons.

These some things I've learned and/or am doing differently the second time around.

How to Incorporate Backstory That Hooks The Reader

Spoiler warning: Spoilers for the John Rain series by Barry Eisler. Also, The Detachment reached #1 on the Kindle store this week. Congrats, Barry!

I don't often read series out of order, but Barry Eisler was kind enough to send me a review copy of The Detachment when he visited the blog. The Detachment can be read as a standalone, although there are references to events from previous books.

 While I often find “here’s what you’ve missed” sections boring, I enjoyed the backstory passages in The Detachment. They actually made me eager to go back and read the previous volumes. Now why would that be? Time to dig out the old magnifying glass.

Spoilers: Good or Bad?

One of my favorite Threadless T shirts

I hate spoilers. Once I turned on the TV and accidentally watched last 10 min. of The Usual Suspects (I hadn't seen it before). Whoops. I also figured out the ending of The Sixth Sense halfway through and was grumpy the rest of the movie because I'd missed out on the surprise.

But do spoilers actually decrease enjoyment?

Spoiler alert:  A recent study says no.

Top Five Book Picks of 2011

I usually don't do book reviews, but once in a while, it's fun to blog as a reader rather than a writer. Here are my favorite books that I read this past year.  I read many other fantastic books as well, but if I have to limit myself to five...

(Listed in the order in which I read them.)


1. Plain Kate by Erin Bow

I have already gushed about Plain Kate -- the poetic language, the heartbreak. I loved this book so much that I bought two copies – one to keep and one to underline and analyze. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fairytales and bittersweet stories.

Tips On Responding to Public Criticism (Inspired by Steve Jobs)

The Internet is an interesting place. When people interact through computer screens, it increases anonymity and decreases inhibitions while dehumanizing the person on the other end. This is why online interactions tend to be so polite and respectful.

Um, right.

The truth is, if you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll eventually take your turn as a punching bag.  As a blogger and future author, I'm very interested in how people react to public criticism. A while back, I ran across this video of Steve Jobs during a question-and-answer session. A man asks an insulting question, and Jobs’ response was quite impressive. It's worth taking a look.

Let's break down this response see if we can come up with some generalizable tips for dealing with public criticism.

Do Re-readers Tend to Be Revisers?

So today on twitter, agent Holly Root proposed a theory:  Editors tend to have been re-readers as kids; agents were rarely re-readers. (via Molly O'Neill)

I don't know about agents and editors, but that made me wonder how re-reading and re-writing are related for writers.  I proposed my own hypothesis:  Writers who like revising were re-readers as kids. Writers who like first drafts, not so much.

People on twitter started weighing in, some who fit this pattern, and some who didn't.  Which made me curious enough to put up a little unscientific poll. 

What are your rereading and revising preferences?  (Email subscribers and people reading in feed readers will need to click through to the web page to take the poll.)

poll by twiigs.com

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The Psychology of Attraction: The Intertwining of Sex and Aggression

"His gaze flickered to my lips. I got that. He was once again furious with me and once again perfectly ready to have sex with me. The conundrum that was Barrons. Apparently it was impossible for him to feel anything as far as I was concerned without getting angry about it. Did anger make them want to have sex with me? Or was it that he always wanted to have sex with me that made him so angry?"

--Shadowfever, by Karen Marie Moning


So I’m looking back over the "Psychology of Attraction" series, and so far we have fear, uncertainty, and now aggression. Which makes me think I should clarify some things before y'all stage an intervention. This series is not meant to be a picture of how healthy relationships work, or even how the majority of relationships work. They’re interesting tidbits that might be useful for a novelist. As often is the case, the healthy cases don’t always make interesting stories.

Actually, that's an interesting thought -- that the pathological makes for more gripping stories. Is it true? Is it desirable? Which dovetails nicely into today's post.

When I was researching the article on fear, I ran across some old studies exploring the relationship between aggression and sexuality. The basic idea was that the experimenters made test participants angry and then tested them for sexual arousal.