Tag: Renee Scattergood

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Winter is Here…Beware Winter!

Most of you are probably saying, “Wait a minute! It’s not winter!” But it definitely is here in the downunder, and with it comes the winter illnesses. I’m usually smart enough to get my flu shot since I have a weakened immune system. It doesn’t keep me completely healthy, but I don’t get as sick for as long. This year I was silly and forgot, and so far I’ve had the flu three times, bronchitis twice and a head cold. I’m just now starting to get over my worst case of bronchitis I can ever remember having.

So what’s the point of me telling you all this?

Don’t be silly like me, and certainly don’t mess with your health! When it really comes down to it, it’s the most important thing in your life. Without good health, how can you possibly live a productive and happy life?

So now I have good news and bad news. I’ll give you the bad news first, so it won’t seem so bad once I give you the good news. :-D…

Read more from this week’s Fantasy Fix and find out Renee’s news for the week.
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If you’ve missed previous editions, it’s not too late to read them. Here are links to the last few:

Top 10 Signs You’ve Lost Your Mind!
Including my top 10 signs that you’re either losing your mind, or maybe you’re just WAY too close to your fantasy WIP!

Enough is Enough
Featuring Joshua Robertson’s article about the editing process, and when to realize it’s time to stop.

Help us Improve our Newsletter!
Has a poll to help us discover what readers want from an author newsletter. The poll is still open–don’t lose out on this opportunity to make your voice heard.

 

 

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 Top 10 Signs You’ve Lost Your Mind!

Last week Joshua’s featured article was about the editing process, and when to realize Enough is Enough. Timely advice for me, as I’m going through that final clean-up stage for my own book right now. I’m not ready to let it go just yet, but I’ll own up to my blurry-eyed, obsessive state, which tells me that I at least need a temporary break.

So it’s time to fess up, all you writers out there, because I know I’m not alone. Here are my top 10 signs that you’re either losing your mind, or maybe you’re just WAY too close to your fantasy WIP! Rearrange these as you like, depending on your personal level of insanity. All in good fun…of course. 🙂

#10 – You do a double take as you’re driving down the road—you swear you’ve just seen something from your story world flash by in real life.

#9 – You’re describing to a friend all that your main character is going through, and they mistakenly think you’re talking about an actual person.

#8 – You have an inexplicable craving for fire roasted meat and ale (even though you don’t drink alcohol).

#7 – Your browser history is full of gruesome searches on things like medieval battle wounds, death rates, and treatments, or how ancient poisons were made and used. You’re sure by now you’re on a watch list somewhere.

#6 – Your family is ready to stage an intervention, and even the cats are walking back and forth across your keyboard in an attempt to get you away from it. And by the way, that robe you’ve been wearing all week is ready to walk itself to the wash…or sacrifice itself on the way for the greater good. Yes, I went there.

#5 – You can’t fall asleep at night because your characters might go on doing things without you, and you’ll miss it.

#4 – When you do fall asleep, you’re being chased all night long by that 20-foot troll your character was fighting just before you went to bed.

#3 – You’re alternately excited and terrified to find out what your beta readers think. While you’re waiting to find out, you react to every email notification sound like one of Pavlov’s dogs, and get super annoyed when it’s only spam.

#2 – You’re feeling so much guilt and grief over killing off one of your characters, that you’re ready to turn yourself in to the authorities and make a confession.

#1 – You wonder if you get rich enough from selling your books, you could buy an island somewhere, re-create part of your book world there (kind of like they did in New Zealand for the LOTR movies), and just live there already. A writer can dream anyway!


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Enough is ENOUGH!       

Editing your draft is hard enough, but deciding when you are done tweaking the manuscript may be even more difficult. We have all been at that place where we have read and reread our story 5 or 6 times, and asked the question, am I done yet? For unpublished writers without an agent or editor, it can be even more difficult to decide when a WIP has reached the final draft. With no one to force them to stop editing, it’s not uncommon for writers to edit with no end in sight. Truly, writing the perfect manuscript can really never be achieved, but when do you decide that enough is enough.

You may notice you are done editing when the story is no longer moving forward, but sideways; or you recognize you are changing a sentence one week only to switch it back the next. Though, the two reasons you may quit editing are 1) you are happy with your manuscript, and 2) your beta readers/critique partners no longer recognize any plot holes or glaring issues.

Other reasons you may decide it”s time to stop editing:

  • When you can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad anymore (if you have gone mad, and cannot even see words, send it to someone else)
  • When you give up (if you are ready to throw in the towel, send it off and take a break so your mind can rest)
  • When you don’t know what you’re editing for anymore (if your story starts to take shape that is irregular with any known form of writing, send it away to betas)

How close to done is your manuscript?

– Joshua Robertson

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Sneak Peek Friday: Author Renee Scattergood

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Smashwords is once again holding their annual July Summer/Winter Promotion. So this year Renee Scattergood is listing Demon Hunt, the prequel novella to her Shadow Stalker serial, free for the entire month!

Demon Hunt

Demon Hunt smallAuren longs for adventure and a break from her tedious life on Appolia. It’s the start of summer, and she is looking forward to her yearly camping trip with her foster father, Kado. She believes these trips are for fun, but when they arrive on Luten Isle, Kado informs her that she is a shadow stalker, and she is in training.

One morning, Auren decides to take her training into her own hands. She only means to practice seeing the veil to the shadow world, the world of the shadow people and the source of their power. Instead, she opens the veil releasing a demon, a guardian of the shadow world, into the physical world.

With the deadly beast loose, she and Kado don’t have long to hunt it down and return it to where it belongs, or many innocent people could die.

Download it on Smashwords Free in July!

Now for a Sneak Peek!

“We’re getting closer.” Kado sped up, trusting that Auren would keep up with him. They needed to reach it before it got to the mountains or they might lose it. Though there was an advantage to it heading that way. It wasn’t going toward any of the villages.

The rock face they had run into rose well over two hundred meters, but about fifty meters up, there was a cave.

Kado pointed. “That’s where it’s heading.”

“How do you know?”

First he pointed out the obvious. Recent gouges in the hard rock. “It will seek darkness as well. Being from the shadow world, they are not accustomed to the daylight. It confuses and agitates them.”

“Maybe it will start just traveling at night then?”

“They don’t sleep, Auren. It will keep moving. We’re just lucky they move so slowly. It’s our only advantage.”

“How are we going to get up there? We didn’t bring rope.”

“I had intended on teaching you to free climb during this trip. I also planned to have time to do it properly. We don’t have that luxury now. I will go first. Watch me and go where I go.”

 

Renee Scattergood's Bio PicRenee Scattergood lives in Australia with her husband, Nathan, and daughter, Taiya. She has always been a fan of fantasy and was inspired to become a story-teller by George Lucas, but didn’t start considering writing down her stories until she reached her late twenties. Now she enjoys writing dark fantasy.

She is currently publishing her monthly Shadow Stalker serial, and she has published a prequel novella to the series called, Demon Hunt. She is also working on a new series of novels, A God’s Deception.

Aside from writing, she loves reading (fantasy, of course), watching movies with her family, and doing crafts and science experiments with her homeschooled daughter. Visit her site for more information and a free copy of Shadow Stalker Part 1 (Episodes 1 – 6): http://reneescattergood.com

Author Pages

Website/Blog: http://reneescattergood.com/

Renee’s Author Spotlight: http://reneesauthorspotlight.blogspot.com.au/ – a blog where I feature indie and small press authors.

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00NTJY1W2

Smashwords Author Page: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rscatts

Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/user/RScatts

BookBub Author Page: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/renee-scattergood

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8507658.Renee_Scattergood

Renee’s Shadow Stalkers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16rTPYCAwDq5cpyxHfphx0-x6ka9C7DWoJsdgYa2CyAw/viewform

Social Media

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/reneescatts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReneeScatts

Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/100671337443224225702/posts

LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/pub/renee-scattergood/56/963/3

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/rscatts/

 

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Help Us Improve Our Newsletter!

Running a newsletter can be difficult. You don’t always know what others want to read. Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to get it right. I ran a poll before to find out what our readers would like to see, but it didn’t get much of a response, so this time I’ve made one that is more generalized.

We really want to make this the best possible newsletter for our readers, so we’d really appreciate it if you would take a few minutes to take our poll, then pass it on to your friends, family and social media followers. Feel free to copy and paste the following into your social media:

What to do like to read in an author’s newsletter? Share your thoughts! http://bit.ly/AuthorNewsletterPoll Please RT!

Thanks so much in advance. Hopefully we’ll get plenty of responses this time and we can tailor our newsletter accordingly. Oh, and if you’re an author and would like to know the results of the poll, email me at reneescatts@gmail.com with “Poll Results” in the subject, and I’ll email you the results once I have them.

Thanks and happy reading!

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Sneak Peek Friday

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OWS Summer Reading List

The Official Our Write Side (OWS) Summer Reading List is out, and I was so surprised to see that Journey to Aviad is on it! Fellow author Renee Scattergood also made the list with her Shadow Stalker series. Congratulations Renee!

51J6aQb160L__SX331_BO1,204,203,200_So in celebration, this week I’m featuring an excerpt from Journey to Aviad, which is permafree as an ebook. If you haven’t read it yet, you can easily add it to your summer reading list.

This particular excerpt came to mind, as the horrific event it mentions also plays out in Into the Shadow Wood, but from a different perspective. Watch for my upcoming cover reveal and release date!

Amazon     Barnes and Noble     Smashwords

 

The caravan was slow and cumbersome, and strangely silent. The only voices to be heard were those of the younger children playing together in the carts. There was no singing, or storytelling, or idle conversation to pass the time as one might expect on a journey of that sort. All wore a haggard look—eyes red-rimmed, and expressions numb. Elowyn thought these people looked very much like animals stunned by a predator’s venom, stumbling about in shock and confusion, slowly and unwittingly marching on towards their inevitable demise. Elowyn realized that she probably wore the same expression, exhausted from lack of sleep, and unable to forget the image of the troll and the watchman being eaten alive. That moment in time kept replaying itself over and over in her mind, until the images became so surreal and strange that she wondered if they had really happened at all. She could almost convince herself that it had been a nightmare, except there she still was, marching along with a group of complete strangers, on a road she had never traversed before. If it was only a nightmare, she was still in it, praying desperately to be wakened.

When after a long day of walking the group finally camped for the night, Elowyn lit her own fire a short distance away. She was weary of the crowd and of feeling the weighty burden of everyone’s sorrows crushing down upon her soul. But she found that Morganne’s company was equally mournful. The fire had been fed and stoked many times before she would say anything at all, and even then she spoke with a broken voice.

“I never knew such things existed before today. Even had I known … I don’t think that I would have really understood without seeing. And as horrific as the trolls were, from what Gareth told us, the Hounds are far, far worse. I know in my mind that his word is true, but I fear that without seeing, I do not truly understand their danger either, and that frightens me even more than what I have just witnessed.”

Morganne grew quiet again for a few moments, and then with great brokenness said, “I am sorry. I should never have brought us. Nothing our mother could do would ever come close to the terror I saw unleashed by a single troll, let alone a Hound. It was wrong of me to think that I could make this journey, that you and Adelin were safer away from Tyroc. What I do not understand is why you came. You have seen a Hound—you were nearly slain by one. You knew the danger in a way that I could not, and yet you came.”

Elowyn gathered her thoughts carefully for a few moments, answering truthfully, “Tyroc was not so safe as you imagined it to be. Our cottage was no stronghold, and our mother no sure protector from danger. It is around Tyroc that the Hounds gather their strength. When they have overrun the woodlands, and Braeden has darkened the skies, who there would be strong enough to protect us?”

MEET JOURNEY TO AVIAD’S CHARACTERS

What’s on your #summer #reading list? Here’s our top 25! #ourwriteside #amreading

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This is the End!

Why are endings so darn hard to write? Ever read a great book with an ending that just infuriated you so much you wish you’d never read the book at all? Some endings can leave readers bewildered, or have too many questions unresolved. Others are just plain unsatisfying. All that build up, for THIS? Or always a favorite, the cop out ending. Even an average reader can tell when an author has written him or herself into a corner with no way out, and fixed it with a magic solution that has no believable explanation. Nobody wants to be THAT author–the one who leaves readers hanging, annoyed, rolling their eyes, or even completely pissed off. By contrast, a great ending will have your readers raving about your book to their friends, and make them hungry for your next book. So yeah, there’s a lot of pressure to come up with that perfect end to the story you’ve already poured your heart into.

I’m feeling that pressure right now as I finish up the last couple pages of my WIP. What makes a good ending anyway? Read this week’s edition for a few key points to consider as you approach the end of your story, and for other great information.

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