Category: Laura Tobias

Giving Thanks


Thankful13This blog post originally ran in 2013. Aside from needing a few tweaks, it’s as fresh now as it was back then. And since we just celebrated Thanksgiving, I decided to run it again. Happy
Thanksgiving, belated though it may be!

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When I do author talks or school visits, one of the questions I’m often asked is what I like best about being a writer. Until now, my answer has usually been twofold. I’m most thankful, I generally say, that I can write in jeans and slippers (there’s something incredibly freeing about not having to pluck, mousse, iron, and endure heels before plonking down at the desk). I also like that I can spy on people at the grocery store without feeling at all guilty about it. Character is truly revealed in the mindless acquisition of food. Is my subject buying Kraft dinner or quinoa? Wearing sweats or silk? Do they stack and toss? Smile or glare? Rush or linger? Treat the cashier with kindness or indifference?

But there are many other reasons I’m thankful to be a writer.

I can ask questions of anyone, anywhere, and at any time, all under the guise of research (Although I do refrain at weddings, funerals and during bikini waxings).

I have a valid excuse for a few extra pounds since writing requires sitting for many long hours. Even a regular gym routine and using a treadmill desk hasn’t helped (and, no, copious quantities of mint Girl Guide cookies have nothing to do with it).

I get to read. A lot. And this I can do on a treadmill or an elliptical. Even in the car at a stop light. Until the guy behind me honks.

I can write anywhere and at any time. Though I don’t recommend mixing laptops and hot tubs. Especially after midnight. Trust me on this.

I set my own hours which means I can get a root canal or take off to watch a movie do intense research at the archives in the middle of the day. And I don’t have to ask my boss.

I am always learning. Fun, neat facts like ‘intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair’ and ‘women blink twice as often as men do.’ Without these random bits of trivia my life would be seriously incomplete.

I don’t have to draw – not characters, not covers, not inside art. And everyone else is thankful for this too, believe me.

I get to experience the thrill of the unknown twice a year when the royalty checks land in the mailbox. Sometimes I even get to shop afterwards. On a related note, self-publishing as Laura Tobias means I don’t have to wait nearly as long for royalties. The money shows up much faster. And that’s much better.

I’m allowed to daydream. Staring into space for long periods of time is mandatory. And my family understands that even when I look like I’m paying attention, sometimes I’m not.

I play every single day. And that, really, is the thing I am most thankful for. I play with words, with worlds, with people and emotions. In my slippers, on my laptop, at the gym or in my office. I play. Only everybody else calls it work.

And So the Story Grows

plottingimageI have no shortage of ideas for novels. In fact, I have files of story ideas going back two decades. They’re filled with random scraps of paper, detailed notes, newspaper clippings and magazine articles, even transcriptions of interviews I did as a journalist for the CBC.

Ideas are cheap, easy, and beautifully compelling, like that picture of an impressive 9-layer chocolate ganache cake you might see on Pinterest. Make me! the cake says. I’m impressive and delicious and everyone will love me. Book ideas may not come cloaked in ganache (a serious flaw, in my opinion) but they have the same shiny draw as a gorgeous cake.

Only you can knock off a cake, even a complicated one, in a day or two. It’s impossible (for me at least) to do that with a novel.

I looked through my files the other day. Mostly what I have are plot points – ideas for situations and events – and stories are so much more. I thought about that after coming home from the Red Door last month where the five of us brainstormed a new Laura Tobias book (thanks, ladies!). I came away with the skeleton of a situation and the sparks of two characters.

Those sparks are key because most of my stories are character driven. Before I even start to write I need to know how my character will change over the course of the book. How will he or she be different when the story ends than they are when the story opens? The plot matters of course – it determines what will happen along the way – but the character is the one making the journey. The character is who I care about and who I want my readers to care about too. So I’m spending some time getting to know my new characters. I’m not so much plotting as I am gestating. It takes time, space, silence. And the occasional slice of a decadent chocolate cake doesn’t hurt either.

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Cover It

In Plain Sight CoverBook covers are on my mind. Last week I received an advance copy of the cover for In Plain Sight. If you missed it on my Facebook Author Page, here it is on the left.

I’m thrilled with the way it turned out though I’ll admit my first glimpse of the cover raised concerns. Megan, the girl you see, finds out early in the story that the father she thought was dead is very much alive, he’s a convicted terrorist, and he’s Middle Eastern. For my story purposes, Megan needs to look a little like him. Not a lot, but enough that one could argue for some similarities.

The first time I saw the cover I identified Megan as a beautiful girl with a strong Celtic look. Her hair was reddish rather than the dark hair I’d referenced in the story, her eyebrows were light, and her face was made even paler by direct sunshine. I asked the art director if she could darken Megan’s eyebrows as well as her hair, and possibly give her skin more of a golden tone. I did get darker eyebrows, but messing with skin tones is problematic, so instead the art director removed the direct sunlight which gave Megan’s skin a slightly golden look. The hair, which remained a lovely reddish hue, remained the same and that posed a bit of a problem for me.

Luckily Orca shared the proposed cover before my final page proofs were done so I was able to go into the manuscript and tweak. Where a couple of girls make racist comments and insult Megan because she looks just like her father, I have the girls referencing the fact that Megan must streak her hair to hide the fact that she has the same coloring as her terrorist father. I think it’s a stronger passage than what I originally wrote and it’s realistic too: most teenage girls mess with her hair color at least once or twice in their lives. I made a few other subtle modifications here and there, allowing for Megan to look the way she does on the cover.

I’m grateful to Orca Book Publishers for sharing the cover early enough in the process that I could make some changes to the manuscript. It’s wonderful to have a strong cover that matches your story. Watch for In Plain Sight in 2017.

Meanwhile, I’m just starting the cover design process for Million Dollar Blues, my next Laura Tobias title. It’s a novel about love, money and relationships. I’m excited to be working with Viola Estrella of Estrella Cover Art. www.estrellacoverart.com. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with!

 

 

Million Dollar Blues

money bundle_1Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. On this date back in 1690, the first piece of paper money was issued by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the United States.

 

Life would never be the same again.

I’m thinking about money quite a bit these days because I’m working on Million Dollar Blues. It’s a women’s fiction novel about a contested lottery win and the impact it has on the lives and loves of three different women. I’ll be self-publishing it under my Laura Tobias name but first I have to get it in some kind of shape for the editor. There’ll probably be revisions to tackle after she’s finished with it too. And then there’s the cover to commission and the formatting to take care of and all the other details that go into self-publishing a book.

It’s been a real learning curve since I uploaded What Lainey Sees a little over a year ago. Changes are afoot with that title too. It started life as an ebook available only on Amazon, but in the coming months I’ll be making it available on more platforms and getting print copies made as well.

Stay tuned for details.

Meanwhile, happy February!

The Renovations Continue

We’re still working on converting Teen Freud’s bedroom into my new office. In the process, we painted and put down a new oak floor. Team Sheltie didn’t like the noisy air gun or all the activity so I sat with the two of them in my current office while Mr. Petrol Head nearly broke his back doing the floor. That was a few weeks ago. It’s almost time to put the handles back on the door and start moving furniture.

But one half of Team Sheltie is not impressed with all the changes. Trace, our male, is not at all sure of this new space.

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No, Mom, I can’t come in and walk on the shiny, new floor.

 

 

 

 
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I’m leaving and you can’t make me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I can maybe sit here if my sister is beside me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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But there’s no way I’m going past this doorway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hopefully Trace will change his mind when we get my filing cabinet and desks upstairs. Stay tuned!

And Now For Something Completely Different

laineyfinalI’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of self-publishing for a long time.  When it comes to traditional publishers, I’ve worked with some of the best. They’ve done more for my books than I could ever do on my own.  They’ve edited, they’ve promoted, they’ve distributed. Sure, there’ve been glitches (and times when I wondered what kind of rabbit hole I’d fallen into) but show me an endeavor without glitches and I’ll show you a fairy tale.

So the idea of publishing a book on my own didn’t hold much appeal. I love the writing and the editorial process, but the business and promotional side of things? Not so much. And I knew if I ventured down the self-publishing highway, I’d have to wear those hats occasionally.  Since I’m already wearing a few too many hats, it was an easy choice to say no.

But I had this book. Note the word ‘but.’  That but is a big but.  It’s the equivalent of a teenager saying ‘but it was just that one time’ or a confirmed bachelorette saying ‘but I met this guy.’   It’s a but that leads to change.

I first wrote WHAT LAINEY SEES years ago. It received very positive attention from a number of editors. One wanted to buy it and held onto the manuscript for a year only to be overruled by her publisher.  In the end, there were two main reasons he said no.

First, WHAT LAINEY SEES is a hybrid. It’s the kind of novel marketing departments don’t know what to do with. It’s a romance with suspense and paranormal elements. It’s both contemporary and historical. It’s not time travel, which is an established category, it’s more of a time slip novel, where two distinctly different story lines play out at the same time.  Time slip is a quirky, barely-there genre. Publishers prefer a sure thing over quirky, particularly from a mid-list author.

An even bigger hurdle had to do with Native Americans.  As the story unfolds, Lainey Hughes starts remembering life as a Native American woman living in the Pacific Northwest. She believes the memories from that life could stop a terrible tragedy from occurring today. But the one man who can help her is a man who doesn’t believe in her visions – the Native American lover who died in her arms centuries earlier.  Native Americans, I was told repeatedly, don’t sell.  One editor even went so far as to suggest I lose the Natives and use another culture, another time period (I think she suggested Scotland; Diana Gabaldon was big at the time).

I couldn’t – and didn’t – do that. The Native American element was intrinsic to the novel. So I put the novel aside for a number of years. But like a sliver that won’t go away, WHAT LAINEY SEES remained with me.  I wanted it published. I wanted people to read it.  So I took the manuscript back out, rewrote and updated where I needed to, and weighed my options.  Since I didn’t have the patience to listen to more editorial feedback about how I needed to replace the Native Americans with Vikings . . . or make the time slip less time slip and more time travel, I decided to publish it myself.

From the cover design process, to working with an editor followed by a formatter, it’s been quite a process. It’s given me even greater respect for traditional publishers. It’s opened my eyes to a world that’s not going away – direct, author-controlled publishing. And it’s made me grateful for the many friends and colleagues who traveled the road before me and were so willing to share their stories and expertise as I bumbled along.

Is self-publishing the future for me? It’s one probable future, but traditional publishing remains my future too.  I’m a hybrid . . . like WHAT LAINEY SEES.  It’s up on Amazon. If you have a minute, check it out: http://www.amazon.com/What-Lainey-Sees-Laura-Tobias-ebook/dp/B00UZK92M2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1427395698&sr=1-1&keywords=what+lainey+sees

 

Rewards can be a Long Time Coming

DSC00518Years ago, a friend and I rescued dozens of plants from a city lot not far from where I live. The lot was being gutted in preparation for an apartment block. Over a period of weeks and with permission from the builders, we went in and dug up lilacs, hydrangeas, and reams of smaller things like California poppies and Shasta daisies. We also rescued a number of peony bushes. They were old and we weren’t sure they’d survive the move.  They did, though it took years to nurse them back to productivity.  But now, every spring, I’m rewarded with handfuls of blooms to bring inside.  Tangible evidence, as one friend said, of the reward of hard work.  Those peonies are also a reminder of my early gardening days, when I felt like anything was possible, slugs notwithstanding. Those days when the garden felt more like a blessing than a chore.

Coincidentally, I’ve spent the last few months revisiting and readying for publication an adult novel I wrote years ago.  Much of it was done when my daughter napped, and after I’d spent the morning writing magazine articles or assembling radio documentaries.  Back in the days when I felt like anything was possible, publishing climate notwithstanding.  Those days when the writing felt more like a reward instead of a responsibility.

At some point in the coming months I hope to have “What Lainey Sees” uploaded and for sale under my other writing name – Laura Tobias.  When it hits the Amazon shelf, it will be tangible evidence of the reward of hard work. And the pleasure of the journey itself.

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