Announcement: My editor sent a round of emails last night concerning the back cover materials. That included the book teaser and the author bio. They looked good. They also sent the covers for the individual novels. I'll put up the covers when I can. The proposed 3 in1 cover and info can be found at www.ancientlight.com. I'll keep you updated. I should have three new books out soon.
Introduction: I wrote the novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon. This was my 21st novel and through this blog, I gave you the entire novel in installments that included commentary on the writing. In the commentary, in addition to other general information on writing, I explained, how the novel was constructed, the metaphors and symbols in it, the writing techniques and tricks I used, and the way I built the scenes. You can look back through this blog and read the entire novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.
I'm using this novel as an example of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel published. I'll keep you informed along the way.
The four plus one basic rules I employ when writing:
1. Don't confuse your readers.
2. Entertain your readers.
3. Ground your readers in the writing.
4. Don't show (or tell) everything.
5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.
All novels have five discrete parts:
1. The initial scene (the beginning)
2. The rising action
3. The climax
4. The falling action
5. The dénouement
The theme statement of my newest novel, Valeska, is this: An agent of the organization becomes involved with a vampire girl during a mission, she becomes dependent on the agent, and she is redeemed.
Here is my proposed cover for Valeska:
The purpose of a novel is to reveal the protagonist and usually the protagonist's helper, the author needs to place them in circumstance that allows them to reveal themselves. The means can be conversation, exploration, discovery, other's conversation, confession, accidental discovery.
There are three ways to know truth: the scientific method, the historical-witness method, and logic. Did you notice that though I started with the most direct evidence: photos, videos, and recordings, it became very clear very quickly that without context, they weren't worth much. The context for all of this evidence is written. You can guess then that the most important evidence is written documentation. In general, the evidence is just called documents. Documents give context and record details. Documents are relatively difficult to fake--although they can be faked. Documents can be used to demonstrate the evidentiary tests that are used for all evidence. I'll get to that tomorrow.
Remember, we look at evidence in terms of primacy of witness. A document can be a primary, a secondary, a tertiary, and I add in the quatriary source. If you have an eyewitness account of anything in history, that is primary. If it is from an eyewitness, but by another source, it is secondary (the report of an eyewitness). If it is anything else in history, it is tertiary--a history book is a tertiary witness and worthless for historical evidence. Quatriary means fiction or opinion--about the same thing in terms of history. As an historical fiction author, I'd like to point out, that although a tertiary witness is not good for historical research, a well researched historical fiction or history book can provide excellent information in a palatable format. That's one of the reasons I write historical fiction--to make history entertaining to my readers. I just don't want anyone to get the wrong idea about the value of a tertiary witness.
More tomorrow.
For more information, you can visit my author site http://www.ldalford.com/, and my individual novel websites:
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com
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