Joseph Nassise

A press conference was held yesterday at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany to announce my latest project, HELLstalkers.  This new series is being written in conjunction with my friend and fellow writer, Jon Merz, and what makes it so new and interesting to us is the fact that it is being written for the mobile phone market.

Yes, that’s right, I said the mobile phone market.

Reading novels on a mobile phone has been exceedingly popular in Asia for several years now and they are slowly making their way into the European and American markets.  Jon and I have teamed up with Blackbetty GlobalMedia GmbH, a Vienna based multimedia small screen publisher and Vodafone, a telecommunications giant, to bring this new series to life.

HELLstalkers revolves around an accident at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, a mysterious organization known as Project Cerberus, and a group of military operatives formed into a team known as HELLstalker One.  The team is led by Captain Memphis Stone, US Army, who soon finds out that there are some things that military training just doesn’t prepare you for…

Sample chapters will soon by available for download directly to your smartphone both at the official HELLstalker website and at the company website (Mobilebooks.com).  We’re also going to be making use of QR Codes, mobile tagging, and social networking to provide behind-the-scenes information, sneak peeks, and other multi-media activities to make it an experience unlike reading your average print novel.

In fact, here’s the first piece of the puzzle for those of you who have been following along:

(If you don’t know what the symbol above actually is or what to do with it, you might want to drop by this post.  There will be more of them in the future, each one with a little something different for the story.)

Jon and I are very excited about the series and hope that you’ll spend some time with us as it unfolds over the next few months.  If you like, you can join our Facebook page or get on the mailing list so you don’t miss out on any exciting announcements!

While at Comic-Con a few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Sean O’Reilly, the CEO and founder of Arcana Comics. Arcana is not only the largest comics publisher in Canada, but also works in other mediums, including video games, short-form animation and live action shorts, toys, merchandise and the like. At the time I was shopping the rights to turn my Templar Chronicles trilogy into a comic series and while that project just didn’t seem right for Arcana, it gave Sean and I the chance to get a feel for each other’s work and to form a basis for doing some work together in the future. Several months later, when he needed a writer for a new comic series he was envisioning, he gave me a call.

Candice Crow, a five issue comic mini-series about a young woman who discovers she has some rather unusual powers (and limitations) was born.

Sean already had a basic idea, as well as an artist attached to the project. He needed someone to flesh it out and write the scripts for the five issues. After talking it over a bit, I signed on and worked on the series as time permitted in between novel projects. It took a while, but eventually all five scripts were written and were passed on to the artist. At that point, there was nothing more for me to do but sit back and wait.

Recently, I was able to see the fruits of my labors. Completed copies of each issue – drawn, inked, colored, and lettered – were sent to me for review before they went off to the printer. The series won’t be officially released until the Fall, but I was excited with what the team as a whole had come up with. For the first time I’d been involved in a project that I couldn’t just sit down and handle all on my own and I found the experience artistically satisfying, to say the least.

So with this year’s Comic-con just around the corner, I thought I’d share the first few pages of Candice Crow Issue One with you all. (Concept by Sean O’Reilly, Script by Joe Nassise, Artwork by Angel Angelov)

A few months ago, I ran into some difficulty while neck deep in a particular writing project. My deadline was looming and I was going nowhere fast. Day after day I would sit down at the computer and beat my head against the wall, trying but repeatedly failing to drag forth the requisite pages that needed to be written that day.

It wasn’t due to a lack of organization. I had a detailed outline in front of me. The action and emotional impact in each chapter was scripted out and I even knew from which character’s viewpoint the scene would be written. I was excited about what was to come; the scenes were well constructed and drove the story forward at a decent pace, the characters were interesting and unusual. I was perhaps better prepared to write that book than any other I had written previously.

And I had long since passed the point where I could write only when “inspired” to do so. My muse had long ago been hunted down, captured, and chained to the demands of a professional writer’s schedule – you write when you need to write, not when you “feel” like writing. Writing when inspired was for sissies. I was a professional, damn it!

But it was not to be. Day after day I struggled, producing, on a GOOD day, about one fifth of my usual output and that only after hours of painful effort. The bad days weren’t even worth talking about.

As the time passed and the lines through the days on the calendar made it increasingly obvious to me that I either needed to do something drastic or shoot myself, I made a decision.

It was time for a change.

For years I have written in the quiet confines of my office, my trusty desktop with its 20 inch monitor my only companion. Music was a big no-no; too often I would find myself typing the lyrics to the songs I was listening to rather than the words of my tale and even purely instrumental numbers were a problem as I could get lost in the notes as easily as the lyrics.

To shake things up, I purposely changed everything I could think to change. Rather than work at my desktop, I would use the laptop. Rather than sit in my comfortable leather chair, I would use one made of hardwood without a seat cushion. Rather than work in the privacy of my office, I would go to the library or the deli or the local Starbucks. immerse myself in noise and people. Rather than create in silence, I would graft headphones to my ears and submerge myself in pulse-pounding and bass-cranking music if necessary.

Imagine my surprise when it worked.

The words that I had struggled so hard to find poured effortlessly from my fingertips in the midst of that Starbucks, an iced vente mocha frappuccino at my side. The action sequences that had seemed so scripted and flat previously now jumped to life while the words and music of Nickelback pounded in my ears. My output shot up to my usual levels and then kept going, until I discovered that I could write faster and with better results than I ever had before – all because I took a chance and changed the usual way I did things.

Is something in your life stuck? Are you getting frustrated by your inability to make a change?

Then step outside the problem. Come at it from a totally different direction. Take your usual process and turn it 180 degrees in the other direction.

Change your perspective – you might be surprised at the results.

I know I was.

The first time it happened, Memphis Stone was standing over the rapidly cooling body of a young girl.

It was just after 9:00 pm, mid-summer, the streets of Boston still reflecting the heat they had soaked up during the day under the combination of the 90 degree temperature and the even higher percentage humidity. It had been a long, grueling month with heat-frayed tempers and the corresponding hike in violent crime that always accompanied such a stretch.

Stone had been fostering a mild headache for most of the afternoon. The pain made him tense, irritable, and the fact that he was still standing there two hours after he was supposed to have gone off shift did nothing to assuage that. Just the opposite, in fact, as it sent his headache rocketing up several levels higher on the pain scale.

He stared down at the body, wondering. Who was she? Why did she have to come along right when she did? Couldn’t she have taken a different way home?

She was the fourth victim this month. All of them young, all of them seemingly innocent, at least to this world-weary detective. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so, for the press had taken to calling it the work of the Saintkiller.

He rubbed at his forehead, his hand over his eyes as he tried to ease the rapidly tightening band of tension churning there. When he took his hand away, the scene before him wavered and then changed…
Read more…

In this month’s installment to my continuing series, A Writer’s Toolbox, I want to talk about what I use to backup, sync, and share my files across multiple computers. (Post #1 in the series – A Writer’s Toolbox: Evernote – can be found here.)

When I am working on a project, I tend to write on multiple machines. If I’m working in my office at home, I write on my desktop. If I’m working at the library or local coffee shop, I use my personal laptop. If I’m on the road in my role as consultant for my day job, I’m usually carrying my company laptop. Not wanting to keep personal files on a company computer, I usually store everything on a flash drive and then mix and match files when I get home.

As you can imagine, trying to keep all of my files organized and up-to-date can be a real pain in the neck as a result. Enter Dropbox – a free online service that lets me handle all of this and more. I’ve been using Dropbox for several month as part of their invite-only beta launch and just this past week they opened up to the public, so the time is write to share with you what I’ve learned.

Dropbox

Dropbox is an online service that lets you store, synch and share information from one computer to another. It will also serve as an automatic backup service for your files, should something go wrong on your end. Once you install it, Dropbox creates a folder on your hard drive. Any file you put inside that folder will automatically be synched and monitored for changes. Each time the file is saved anew, it backs up and syncs the file again. Even better, it keeps a running list of revisions, so you can always go back to an earlier version should you need to do so. You can even undelete any file that you might accidentally have trashed.

Any file you sync with Dropbox is available on any computer you sync it to or through the Dropbox web interface. Each time you sync, Dropbox only syncs the parts of the file that have changed, which saves bandwidth and storage space. The service comes with 2 gigs of storage, which is more than enough for any of the several projects I’m working on at any one time, but additional storage is also available for a small fee. And by the way, your data is safe too, for it is sent using SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before storage.

Dropb - online sync, storage and backup of files

One aspect of Dropbox I haven’t used yet is its ability to share files with other people, be they fellow Dropbox users or not. I can see this being extremely useful for group projects, collaborations, and the like.

And before you ask – yes, the product is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so no matter what major operating system you are using, you should be able to give it a try for yourself.

So there you have it – one solution out of many that are available for synching and backing up your data across multiple computers. I’d love to hear other unique ways people are using Dropbox or what other applications you might use instead, so feel free to leave a comment and let’s talk!

Photo by Hryckowian

I’m in the midst of teaching an online workshop called Jump Start Your Novel, which focuses on the methods I use to organize a project so that I can write the most powerful novel possible in a reasonable time frame. In the workshop we’ve been talking a bit about characters, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on that subject today.

Characters are the heart of any story. A reader wants to be transported out of their daily existence to another place entirely, to be someone else, even if only for a little while. Think about the books you’ve enjoyed and ask yourself why you liked them. You’ll quickly see that it is the way that you identified with the main character and how you reacted to the ups and downs that character experienced that had an impact on you. As a writer, you need to be able to produce the same effect and give the reader the emotional experience they desire.

So how do we do that?

Read more…

Like many writers I know, I’m a pack rat when it comes to information. Anything I see or read or hear that I think might be useful for a story at some point or another gets clipped or bookmarked or jotted down for safekeeping.

The trouble with this is that until recently I didn’t have a useful way of storing this information for future use. My magazine or newspaper clippings went into one big file folder, making it near impossible to find anything quickly. My internet bookmarks were more organized, but there were so many of them that even that system became clunky after only a short time. And I won’t even mention what happened to all those notes jotted down on napkins or the nearest scrap of paper.

Clearly I needed a better system.

And I found one in Evernote.

Evernote bills itself as allowing you to “easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.”

So far it has lived up to its hype.

Evernote is now my way of capturing information that I might want to use at some point in one of my books. Maybe it is a web full page or a snippet of text from one. Maybe it is a photo, be it from my digital camera, my cell phone, or someplace like Flickr. Maybe it is an email or a portion of a chat log. Scanned information. To do lists. You name it and Evernote can capture it.

Evernote has a desktop application (for both Windows and Mac) and a web application. Anything you add to it can be synchronized across all your devices, from your desktop to your laptop to your mobile phone. I have it set up so it provides links from both my email application (Outlook) and my web browser (Firefox) so all I have to do is highlight and click on the link to capture the information I want to save.

Once the information is in Evernote, you can file it using a variety of methods and this is where the true versatility of the app comes into play for me. Multiple notebooks allow me to file information for different books projects together in one place regardless of the type of data I’m saving. Or I can choose to file similar data together – all my photos in one notebook, all my web clippings in another, etc. Either way, a robust tagging system lets me search for similar clippings across multiple notebooks.

The Search feature is particularly cool, as it searches not only the text in your notes, but also the text in any pictures you might have saved. I use Bloglines as my news reader and tend to save a lot of articles in their built in Clippings service, but the additional ability to search through images for text provided by Evernote has caused me to begin saving my latest clippings direct to Evernote instead. As time goes on I’ll probably move my older clippings there as well, since I can find things easier that way. There is nothing more annoying that knowing you’ve saved something and not being able to find it!

Evernote is in beta right now and you need an invitation to try it out. You can go to their website and sign up (it didn’t take me long to get an invite this way) or, you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll pick five random winners to receive an invitation direct from me.

(All images taken from the Evernote homepage and Copyright 2008 Evernote.)

Face it. The first five pages (sometimes the first five sentences) are going to make or break your book. They will be the first pages that a prospective agent or editor will read. Later, once the book gets picked up, they will be the first pages that a prospective book buyer will read.

So how do you make those five pages, and the rest of the beginning of the book, so good that the editor, agent, or prospective reader wants to keep reading?

A good beginning must do six things:

1) Hook the reader

2) Establish a bond with the Lead and the reader

3) Present the story world

4) Establish the general tone of the novel

5) Introduce the opposition

6) Get the reader to keep reading

Let’s take them one at a time.

Read more…

I was involved in a message board discussion the other day about how I set up a series bible. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a series bible is a summary of all the information you need to write multiple books (or television shows or films or what-have-you) in the same setting/story world. Since I do the same thing for my stand alone novels as I do for series work, I thought I’d share that process with you all.

The first thing I do is assemble all of my organizational materials into a three ring binder. I use tabbed dividers so that I can find things easily once the project has begun. I usually use the same set of tags on every project – Characters, Setting, Plot, Timeline, Research, Unanswered Questions, and Reminders.

– The Characters section contains all of my character summaries, my back-story notes, and a physical description sheet that allows me to easily reference things like eye color, height, weight, etc. I also make a habit of cutting pictures out of magazines or off the web to remind me of what certain characters might look like and I keep these with my notes for visual cues when it comes time to develop descriptive passages.

– The Setting section contains all of my setting sketches (one page summaries of everything I know about a particular place or setting) as well as any miscellaneous notes I might have lying around discussing how those setting relate to each other. As with my characters, if I have any images that I’ve saved, I put these in the binder as well.

– The Plot section contains my one paragraph, my four paragraph, and my four page plot summaries, as well as my individual scene breakdowns. I think I’ll talk more about these in my next essay.

– The Timeline section contains my spreadsheet mapping out exactly when things happen in the storyline. If I need to keep track of more detailed events (such as the exact timing of some of the events during the murders in my forthcoming novel THE WITCHES’ HAMMER,) I’ll also draw up one page sheets that outline these as well.

– The Research section contains not only my original list of research topics, but also the research itself. When writing my Templar Chronicles trilogy, I wanted my modern extrapolation of the Templar order to be as close to the original as possible, so this section actually grew so large as to necessitate its own binder. Do whatever feels right to you but remember, you shouldn’t be spending so much time researching that you never get around to actually writing!

– The Unanswered Questions is, appropriately enough, full of unanswered questions. These can be specific research issues (also filed in the Research section) or they can be character and/or plot issues that I haven’t yet worked out. Putting them in their own section and making a point to review it every few days keeps me from forgetting to answer them in the manuscript.

– The Reminders section is particularly important. The last thing I want to do is stifle my creativity and forward momentum by constantly going back and fixing things in my first draft. Instead, I keep notes of anything I need to fix, add, delete or otherwise adjust on a legal pad while I write each day and then transfer those pages into my binder when I’m finished each session. That way I know I won’t forget to come back and do them, which in turn allows my creative side to just get on with finishing the rough draft.

Once I’ve got my binder in order, I’m ready to get to work.

Since I write my chapters entirely out of order, this level of detail ahead of time is necessary for me to achieve my goals. I map out each and every book this way, taking one or two months to get it all squared away. The benefit, however, is that the actual writing time is greatly reduced as I’m not trying to figure out where I’m going while in the process of getting there.

So, how do you organize your books?

Earlier this month I received my editorial letter on the third book in the Templar Chronicles series, DIE SCHATTEN (The Shadows).

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an editorial letter is just that – a letter from your editor. In it, the editor will point out and explain any changes and revisions they would like to see made to a manuscript before it goes into final production. The intent is clear – to use the editor’s input and the author’s skill to make the best volume possible.

How the editorial letter is used varies from editor to editor. Some editors will make vague suggestions about what they want done. Others will provide detailed commentary. From talking to some of my writing friends, it has also become apparent that a fair percentage of editors don’t seem to have the time to bother with an editorial letter at all.

I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career when it comes to this phase of the writing process. My first editor, Amy Pierpont, not only would send back detailed editorial letters pointing out conflicting character issues, unresolved plot threads, and areas that just weren’t as clear as she might want them to be, but she would also redline the entire manuscript. Sentence by sentence. Page by page. Her detailed input helped shape my early writing and helped me improve at a faster rate than I could have done on my own. I’m indebted to her for that, particularly when I think about how rare that type of input is getting to be in today’s publishing environment.

My current editor, Tim Sonderhusken, was apparently cut from the same editorial mold as Amy. His editorial letter for DIE SCHATTEN contained fifty specific points/comments that he wanted me to address in the final version of the manuscript. These varied from a simple comment that the first chapter was “the perfect way to start the novel” to a detailed analysis of one of the secondary characters motivations and how this needed to be adjusted slightly so that it would not overshadow one of the primary characters goals. And he’s done this for each of the three novels I’ve turned in to him to date. While Tim doesn’t redline the manuscript itself, it is quite evident from his editorial letters that he has gone through it line by line and taken the time to do a very careful analysis of the work. He usually gives me a few days to work through his commentary and then we get together to discuss things in more detail. What makes this more amazing to me is the fact that English isn’t his mother tongue. I’m writing original novels for the German market, so Tim is taking my novel, written in English, reading it, converting it to German in his head, and making suggestions to improve what will be the final German language version of the book. That’s impressive. And there is no doubt that the process works. Each and every time our partnership has produced a stronger, more marketable book and that is good for both sides of the equation.

I have thirty days to turn this manuscript around and I’m about halfway through. (Which is good, because I’m halfway out of time, too!) I’m enjoying the work because, while it can occasionally be frustrating to rewrite something several times, I know that in the end both myself and my fans will be happier with the finished product.

I’m curious to hear from other writers about their editorial input. What editors do you particularly like working with? Why? Is there something your editor does at this stage of the process that you’ve found to be especially helpful? Is there something you’d like to see more of?

Let’s talk.