Author Archives: jmdattilo
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 42 trips to carry that many people.
10 Plus 2 Tributes to Time
Time is. Time was. Time is past. Time is a difficult thing to pin down! As one year turns into anther, we thought this would be a good time to explore that most elusive of all concepts. Here are some thoughts on the subject:
1. Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. William Faulkner
2. For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work. Doug Larson
3. The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time. Abraham Lincoln
4. The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. C. S. Lewis
5. Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go. Henry Austin Dobson
6. Time is money. Benjamin Franklin
7. Time is what we want most, but what we use worst. William Penn
8. We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone. William Shakespeare
9. You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. James M. Barrie
10. Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back. Harvey MacKay
Our own take on time:
Time is a concept, not a reality. We create the illusion of time, but time, as most beings define it, doesn’t really exist. Orazio, the Time Master (Time’s Secret)
And our all-time favorite remark about time:
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. Albert Einstein
A Cat-Friendly Book Trailer
While experimenting with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) we created the following book trailer for Time’s Edge.
Writing in Layers
The first draft of Time’s Illusion is nearing completion. And the next step? You’d think it was editing, right? Nope. It’s layering.
When we write, we look at the first draft as the basic structure of the book. It establishes where the action is, who is present, how the characters move through the story. A bare-bones, action-and-dialogue scenario. A lot of experimenting goes on in our first drafts, a testing of story boundaries and character limits.
Upon this base we add layers. This process fleshes out the details that really bring the tale to life. Descriptions are expanded. Dialogue is enhanced. This is the five-senses phase, when we get to play with color, sound, and sensation. Like a stage production, we decide what our characters will be wearing, we paint the scenery, adjust the lighting. The worlds we have created come alive.
For those who aren’t into play production, think of it as baking a cake. The cake itself is the basic story. The icing holds the story layers together. The fancy flourishes give the tale depth and beauty. When it is complete it is a feast for the eyes. It smells delicious. Your mouth waters in anticipation. The first bite makes you want to take a second bite.
Just like a good book.
The Thankful Blog
When Mary was nine years old, she wrote her first blog. Yes, we know that the Internet did not exist then. In the olden days, nine year olds blogged by writing their thoughts on paper and handing them in to their teachers. If the teacher deemed the post worthy, she read it aloud to the class. We’d like to share Mary’s Thanksgiving blog:
We Are Thankful
We are thankful for food, homes, clothing, sisters, brothers, fathers, and mothers. But most of all we are thankful for love. We celebrate Thanksgiving by giving thanks to God for all the nice things He gave us. He gave us the Earth. He gave us water and the sun. We thank God for his love.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
Diary of a Power Outage
The recent Halloween storm left many of us in New England without power. Being writers, we recorded the event for posterity.
Day One. Power mysteriously goes out early Sunday morning, the day after the storm. WTF? The storm is over. We thought we were home free. Oh, well, we have a fireplace and some wood left over from last winter. We’ll just build a fire and spend the day relaxing and writing. After all, how long can it last?
Day Two. Took turns staying up all night keeping the fire going. The temperature dropped to 21 degrees overnight. Most of the state is without power. We have plenty of food in the fridge and a little hot water left in the tank. Do a little more writing. Speculate that that the power will probably come on sometime today. We’re not really worried about the dwindling wood supply. After all, how long can a power outage last?
Day Three. Took turns staying up all night keeping the fire going. Hot water gone. Husband goes forth and manages to score the last half-cord of wood from a local supplier. Haul pots of water out to grill to heat water for washing. Husband banned from kitchen while the womenfolk bathe. Starting to feel like Little House on the Prairie around here. But we laugh and joke. After all, how much longer can it last?
Day Four. Another night sitting up with the fire. Kittens have learned the art of hibernation and refuse to come out of their basket next to the fireplace. Had to throw out all the food in our refrigerator. We have bread, peanut butter, Cherrios, raisins, and ice cold tap water. No local grocery stores are open and many roads are still blocked by fallen trees and downed lines. Nevertheless, husband braves the wilderness and finds a deli running on a generator. He brings back warm hamburgers, and we marvel at his hunting skills while wondering, how much longer is this #@$!&! outage going to last?
Day Five. Becoming psychotic from lack of sleep. Fantasize about hunting down executives from the electric company. Wife has gone to happy place and is writing about idyllic lands with never-ending energy supplies and abundant hot water. Husband is writing about blowing things up. The next book is going to be interesting! As daylight fades, we sit staring at each other, unwashed, unshaven and contemplating another night of keeping the bleeping fire going.
And then we hear a distant rumble. We stare at each other, recognition of the sound hitting us both at the same instant. We leap to our feet. “The furnace!” we scream. We hug. We kiss. We dance.
Yes, the furnace is rumbling to life. Power has been restored. We are born again. (But keep an eye out in our next book for electric company-like executives. We have some interesting things planned for them.)
We’re Blogging When We Should Be Writing
We saw an interesting post on Twitter last week. An author wrote that he was spending more time promoting his books than writing them.
We know the feeling.
Facebook. Twitter. Blogs. Etc., etc., etc. Get the word out. Plug that book. Get another follower. Create some book trailers. Speak at a library, school, town fair, supermarket, doctor’s waiting room. (Yes, we did.) In short, SPREAD THE WORD.
Why do we spend all this time on promotion? We were asked that question by a student in a school where we recently spoke. Sigh. There are several reasons.
1. The book promotion elves are not taking any new clients.
2. The reading public, amazingly, had never heard of us before our first book came out.
3. Do you know how many books are published each year? (Um, we didn’t either. A quick check produced a figure of over 955,900 according to worldometers. The scary thing was the counter that was recording the number of published books changed every few minutes. Goodness knows what it will be when you are reading this.)
4. The cost of hiring someone to do it for us made us hyperventilate.
Seriously, book promotion is a necessary evil. Evil? Well, perhaps, time-suck would be a better term. Yes, yes, we have read the blogs from authors who tell us we should glory in promotion, look it in the eye, wrestle it into submission. We’ve also seen the posts about making book promotion our friend, lavishing it, loving it for all the good it does for us.
We admire the authors who are gung-ho about promoting their books. We marvel at them, wondering how they do it all, where they get the time. We are secretly convinced some of them have a time machine, or perhaps a Time-Turner just like Hermione in the Harry Potter series. Write a few chapters, turn back time, do some book promotion. Write a few more chapters, turn back time, do some more book promotion.
However, the small, rebellious writer in each of us resents the time spent promoting books. Time spent on promotion is time spent not writing. And writing is what we love to do. Does this mean we are going to stop blogging, tweeting, posting on facebook? No. We’re committed to our writing careers and therefore committed to promoting our books.
But if anyone has a spare Time-Turner they aren’t using, please let us know.
10 Reasons We Love Book Trailers
1. They are fun. Fun to watch, fun to create. (The Highlander Trilogy by Maya Banks)
2. They give novels a visual dimension. It’s a quick peek into the world created by the story. (Give Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe)
3. They give readers another tool to help them decide if they would like to read the book. (Time’s Edge by J.M. Dattilo. Yes. Shameless self-promotion.)
4. They can tell a story in (usually) two minutes or less. (The Hot List by Hilary Homzie. 45 seconds.)
5. They whet the appetite. (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs)
6. You don’t have to be a professional book trailer designer to create a good trailer. (Demon Hunter by Cynthia Vespia)
7. They make you laugh. ( Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart).
8. They can be artistic. (Tell Me a Secret by Holly Cupala)
9. Some are really beautiful. (Beautiful Places by Chad Prosser)
10. They don’t always take themselves too seriously. (Magic Slays by Ilona Andrews)
J.M. Dattilo 