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Messages - Marie August

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 17, 2012, 11:11:15 PM »

I could very well be getting my covers mixed up. But with what the book covers said I was still under the impression that Mercy's shifters were not wolves. I'll try to find the first one and see if I can remember why.

There was one somewhere that has a lion on the cover. Might be Kitty. The head lion in the pride is a romantically interest of the MC.

There is no Lion in the Mercy series. But there are shifters of different sorts. Mercy herself shifts into a coyote, and in the most recent Mercy Book "River Marked" she does meet some shifters who can turn into other things. Like a bird.

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 13, 2012, 04:47:58 AM »
I like them both. They feed into each other a bit. Though you really don't need to read one to enjoy the other.

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 13, 2012, 04:37:41 AM »
If you don't like any sort of heavy romance in your UF, I would, however, avoid Patricia Briggs' Alpha Omega series. Those books definitely have a prominent romantic subplot.

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 13, 2012, 04:35:22 AM »
Of course I'm picky of the ones I buy so I might be avoiding the bad writers. But I also reject good writers because their type of UF isn't quite what I want. Patricis Briggs is one-I'm not sure if I put her on my list. I love her writing and story telling abilities but the Mercy books are to romantic sounding for me. Well, they might be more paranormal than UF. Sometimes they are very close to each other.

I'd say Patricia Briggs is UF. She has a decently sophisticated world with many different types of supernatural races. If you decided not to try her out because you thought the Mercy books were romance, I'd highly recommend giving them another look. I've always seen the romance plot for Mercy as being very much in the background. It's definitely overshadowed by the mystery and action/adventure plots.

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 12, 2012, 09:52:35 AM »
I have found, however, that when you start talking specific books, the ones that I was referring to as being lousy may be the very ones that you think make the cut while you may believe that some of my favorites are horribly written. That's part of the fun.

There are books that I dislike because they aren't my thing, and there are books that I don't like because they're done poorly. Sometimes I'll like something despite the fact that it's done poorly, because it's a genre I enjoy. Like I might actually enjoy a poor knockoff of an UF series, because I liked what was being knocked off.

Whenever I dislike something because it's just not my thing (like horror, or super techy sci-fi), I try not to hold it against the creator. Doesn't mean that it's flawed.

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DF Reference Collection / Re: The importance of Names.
« on: June 11, 2012, 10:47:04 PM »
I assumed that Harry Carpenter sounds too much like hairy carpenter.

Harry anything can always sound like "hairy". But there are worse last names to go next to it than Carpenter.

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 11, 2012, 10:34:40 PM »
I think that the "new" thing that's been becoming popular over the last decade is throwing all of the "old" things into a mixing bowl. You're more hip if your book is a Mystery-Fantasy-Dystopian-Zombie Thriller-Romance. Luckily most of these are also YA (because authors need to ride off the popularity of Twilight and Harry Potter), so the libraries don't have as miserable of a time figuring out where to shelve these books.

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Author Craft / Re: First Person vs. Third Person
« on: June 11, 2012, 10:31:18 PM »
To my mind the real joy of writing in first is when the POV character is totally and utterly wrong and does not know it but you want it to come across to the reader anyway, which is an extremely fun challenge to work with; an awful lot of people seem to take first-person narrators as both inherently sympathetic and inherently reliable, and like any other reader assumption that gives you something to work in contrast to.  The Thing I Want to Work On is in one first-person POV, and I am enjoying it immensely.  (The Thing I Should Be Working On is in two third-person POVs and I am finding that a bit more of a grind as a format.)

Whenever you're reading or writing something in the POV of a character (third or first), they should be an unreliable narrator. It can be a very good tactic in causing the readers to make a flawed assumption, which can then cause the readers to be surprised when a plot twist comes later on. You can foreshadow the plot twist, but have the readers miss it because the POV character did.

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Author Craft / Re: Do you blog?
« on: June 11, 2012, 06:15:26 AM »
@ Darkshore:  Going kinda off topic here, but do you find WordPress to be a user-friendly site?  I'm looking into building my own website and WP is one of the tools I'm considering.  Any input will be helpful, here or in my "website building for idiots" thread in the Advice column.  thanks!

Blogger is more user friendly.

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Author Craft / Re: Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
« on: June 11, 2012, 06:14:02 AM »
I think readers are tired of poorly written, derivative novels that imitate best sellers. Readers are always happy to read something original and well done, and never happy to read all the other authors that try to profit off of the original success.

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Author Craft / Re: First Person vs. Third Person
« on: June 11, 2012, 06:07:19 AM »
I like Third Person and First Person about the same. As long as it isn't in present tense! That gets on my nerves. It's very distracting.

I write in Close-Third Person. Which basically means that from scene to scene, it is in a single character's point of view. And nothing can be written into the scene that the POV character does not know.

First Person can be deceptively easy. But a lot of writers who write in first person just know how to write in one character's voice (which is really their own voice). If the voice is interesting, and there's only one POV that the author ever writes, they can get away with it. But if they write multiple books with new protagonists that always sound the same, it can get repetitive.

I'm not clear on what third person omniscient is.  How is it different from plain ole third person?

A lot of people who don't know anything about writing fall into a sloppy sort of Third Person Omnicient. There are no limitations in Omnicient. The author can be inserting observations in one paragraph that only they would know, and in the next paragraph be inserting thoughts of character A, and then in the same paragraph thoughts of character B. The fact that you have no limitations can make it challenging to write Omnicient in a good way. When done right, Omnicient POV can have have interesting comedic moments with the author narrating their ironic take on their characters (Like with JK Rowling and Georgette Heyer). A lot of fantasy authors, in my opinion, do Omnicient poorly. They use that writing style so that they can ocasionally dedicate a couple pages to information dumping about their fantasy world without worrying if this info actually would be something one of their characters would know, care, or think about.

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