Are You Being a Passive Voice Patsy?

January 12th, 2012 § 2

Do you know pas­sive voice when you see it? Can you pick up on it instantly? I won­der. Because if you’re an Amer­i­can and Eng­lish is your first lan­guage, the answer is prob­a­bly no.1 Though it’s not your fault if you don’t really know. Many times along the path between kinder­garten and grad­u­at­ing high school, in col­lege Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing courses as well, I was taught that pas­sive voice and to be verbs were essen­tially the same thing. A few books along the way may have defined it cor­rectly, but if so, this was lost on stu­dents and teach­ers. (I had at least one teacher who cer­tainly would have known the dif­fer­ence but it never came up.)

The pre­em­i­nent Amer­i­can book of all things gram­mat­i­cal and fussy, the Strunk & White, doesn’t seem to fully grasp the pas­sive voice either.2 And so many Amer­i­can Eng­lish teach­ers wor­ship this text, per­pet­u­at­ing the problem.

Now if you learned Eng­lish for­mally as a sec­ond lan­guage in a coun­try other than the U.S., you prob­a­bly learned pas­sive voice cor­rectly and the arti­cle I’m about to link to may be sort of duh to you. My apolo­gies. I first learned pas­sive voice wasn’t what I thought it was due to a blog com­ment (not on this site) by some­one who for­mally learned Eng­lish as a sec­ond language.

For­tu­nately, by that time I had already fig­ured out that there wasn’t any­thing wrong with was’s or is’s in my writ­ing. A few years back after read­ing sev­eral Rowl­ing, Gem­mell, and Moor­cock books back-to-back, it occurred to me that with their fre­quent use of was their writ­ing was tech­ni­cally bad. (Based on advice I’ve seen from teach­ers and Amer­i­can fic­tion edi­tors.) I had a good laugh, real­ized that voice and story are far more impor­tant, and over­came much that had restrained my writ­ing style. (We must all come to these points in life, in one sub­ject or another.)

This fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on Pas­sive Voice from the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina will help you fig­ure out what pas­sive voice really is. I’ve excerpted their list of pas­sive voice myths below.

Myths

  1. Use of the pas­sive voice con­sti­tutes a gram­mat­i­cal error.
  2. Any use of “to be” (in any form) con­sti­tutes the pas­sive voice.
  3. The pas­sive voice always avoids the first per­son; if some­thing is in first per­son (“I” or “we”) it’s also in the active voice.
  4. You should never use the pas­sive voice.
  5. I can rely on my gram­mar checker to catch the pas­sive voice.

All of these are well explained on their site. I highly rec­om­mend it for any­one who spends any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time writing.

Don’t be mis­led like I was. Too many to be verbs may result in lack­lus­ter writ­ing that lacks action and verve, but that doesn’t mean the result is pas­sive or wrong. Pas­sive voice itself isn’t wrong when used appro­pri­ately. And trust me, too many active verbs ends up giv­ing your prose a strained and unnat­ural feel­ing, lack­ing in nat­ural rhythm and style.

Any­ways, you can be the judge of my own gram­mat­i­cal fol­lies and idio­syn­crasies in my books: Wrath of the White Tigress and The Storm Dragon’s Heart. Check them out and just see if you can remem­ber to pay atten­tion to gram­mar all the way through. (There’s no reward if you can. Copy­ed­i­tors need not apply.)

  1. I have no idea if this is true for peo­ple in other English-speaking nations and cul­tures, though I will say this: In my expe­ri­ence, British fic­tion tends to have a lot more is/was action going on, which I sus­pect is an indi­ca­tion that British writ­ers don’t auto­mat­i­cally sus­pect that any inclu­sion of was indi­cates pas­sive voice. But I could be wrong. ↩

  2. As I recall the descrip­tion of pas­sive voice is at least mostly cor­rect, if not com­pletely, but the exam­ples are incor­rect. I’d double-check but I tossed my copy out. It really is a vile lit­tle book, based on one fussy professor’s opin­ions of the lan­guage rather than actual usage in respected lit­er­ary works, a book that E.B. White later regret­ted hav­ing worked on. If you doubt me, con­sort with Google and learn the truth. Oh sure, the book is mostly cor­rect as are some of the sen­ti­ments, but it’s poi­so­nous to any writ­ing that aspires to cre­ativ­ity. Slav­ishly fol­low­ing that book will kill your fic­tion style. ↩

How To Help Your Favorite Authors

January 3rd, 2012 § 0

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker.

As authors, we spend a lot of time try­ing to pro­mote our books. Our biggest obsta­cle is obscu­rity because there are a lot of books out there. No, really. A lot.

We like to think that good sto­ries are all it takes to make it (in author terms “make it” usu­ally means “become well known enough and sell enough books that I can quit my day job and write for a liv­ing”), but you can doubtlessly think of mediocre books that are sell­ing bazil­lions of copies and authors you love who never make it out of the “mid-list” category.

Some­times it’s just the author (or pub­lish­ing house) with the biggest mar­ket­ing bud­get who wins, but you, as a reader, have amaz­ing power. Don’t believe for a sec­ond that you don’t have any­thing to do with whether an author makes it, because you do. A lot. No, really. A lot.

Why does this mat­ter to you? Well, authors who get to quit their day jobs can write faster and put more books out for you!

The fol­low­ing are some lit­tle things you can do that can make a big dif­fer­ence. Some of them only take a few sec­onds. Your favorite authors will appre­ci­ate the effort. Trust me.

Help­ing out on Amazon

Ama­zon is the big kahuna of book sell­ers, espe­cially when it comes to ebooks, so help­ing an author “get found” on there can give them a big boost. You can cer­tainly do these things on other book­store sites as well (noth­ing against copy­ing and past­ing a review, for exam­ple), but Ama­zon tends to have more cool fea­tures to help an author get found.

Here’s the list (any one of these things can help):

  • “Tag” the book with genre-appropriate labels (i.e. thriller, steam­punk, para­nor­mal romance). You don’t have to leave a review to do this; you just need an account at Ama­zon. A com­bi­na­tion of the right tags and a good sales rank­ing can make a book come up when cus­tomers search for that type of story on Amazon.
  • Give the book a thumb’s up. This takes less than a sec­ond and prob­a­bly doesn’t do much, but it may play into Amazon’s algo­rithms to a lesser extent than reviews/ratings.
  • Make a “List­ma­nia” List and add your favorite authors’ books to it. This cre­ates another avenue for new read­ers to find books. It’s bet­ter to cre­ate lists around sim­i­lar types of books (i.e. gen­res or sub-genres) than to do a smor­gas­bord, and con­sider titling it some­thing descrip­tion so folks will be more inclined to check it out, ie. “Fun heroic fan­tasy ebooks for $5 or less”

 

Help­ing out with Social Media

If you’re involved with Twit­ter, Face­book, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon, etc., you can give your favorite authors a shout-out when they release new books. If they blog, you can fol­low their site (through Google Reader or other RSS read­ers) and share the link when they post some­thing that may be inter­est­ing to your friends. If they’re on Twit­ter, you can fol­low them and retweet their links now and then.

Authors don’t expect you to fol­low them 24/7 and repeat every­thing they say (that might actu­ally alarm some folks…), but a lit­tle pro­mo­tional help now and then is greatly appreciated.

If you like to be social about books, you can join sites such as Goodreads, Shel­fari, or Library­Thing. You can help your favorite authors by post­ing reviews and talk­ing about their books on those sites, or you can just use those places to find online read­ing bud­dies with com­mon interests.

Help­ing out with Your Blog

Do you ever talk about books or what you’re read­ing on your blog? You might con­sider review­ing your favorite authors on your site (you could even make a few dol­lars if you signed up as an Ama­zon affil­i­ate).

Also, if most of your favorites main­tain web­sites, you could add an “author blogroll” list in your menu with links to those sites.

And Lastly…

These days, most authors have web­sites and con­tact forms so you can get in touch. If you enjoyed their work, con­sider send­ing them a short note to let them know. While it won’t help them sell more books, it’ll make their day.

Thanks for read­ing (this post and books in general!).

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker and is shared with permission.

The Season of Discontent

November 27th, 2011 Comments Off

Alter­nate Title: The Sea­son of Famil­ial Obligation

Some of you may be won­der­ing: Where are all the books David promised us in late 2011? I’ve read Wrath of the White Tigress and The Storm Dragon’s Heart and now I want more. More, damn it, more!

I am deeply sorry. Noth­ing would make me hap­pier than hav­ing more books out for you to read.

I am work­ing on the next book, but things are going slowly. And at this point I’m four months behind on my pub­lish­ing sched­ule. It’s likely that I’ll be five months behind once Decem­ber ends.

I’ve been stressed by inter­mit­tent famil­ial oblig­a­tions over the last 16 months. For most of that time I was able to keep pace with my work and so I thought I could get out a num­ber of books late this year in spite of it all. In June, the stress of oblig­a­tions ratch­eted up but then cooled off again. I was a month behind pace then, but fig­ured I could catch up.

Then came September.

I won’t go into details because they would do nei­ther me nor you any good and most of it is pri­vate in nature. Suf­fice to say, my par­ents have been in dire need of my assis­tance. And when my time isn’t directly occu­pied by help­ing them, I find myself unable to work. The stress of the sit­u­a­tion some­times leaves my mind vacant of cre­ativ­ity and I want noth­ing but rest or some mind­less endeavor.

In short, I’m hav­ing to take care of things only I can take care of, things I do out of love and respect for my fam­ily. Things that are not pleas­ant and leave me lit­tle cre­ative time.

But in Jan­u­ary, my time will be my own again. The bits of work I can man­age now will become tor­rents and new work shall appear.

Interview on Darkcargo

September 10th, 2011 Comments Off

Here’s an excerpt of an inter­view I did for Dark­cargo. Go check it out!

A com­mon argument–complaint, maybe–that I over­hear is that there’s noth­ing new to fan­tasy, every­thing is either a re-hash of Tolkein or para­nor­mal romance. How would you con­test that?

As far as basic story struc­ture goes, noth­ing is new. I’ve stud­ied a lot of mythol­ogy and sto­ry­telling and… I don’t want to bore your read­ers. Suf­fice to say: Every­thing is new; noth­ing is new. Orig­i­nal­ity is over­rated. I think sci-fi and fan­tasy fans tend to worry about this a lot more than most read­ers. I mean, there’s noth­ing new in thrillers or mys­tery or romance either, so why should fan­tasy be any dif­fer­ent?
On the other hand, the details and specifics of every story are dif­fer­ent and fre­quently highly orig­i­nal. Every author mixes the basics dif­fer­ently and brings new things to the table because every writer is intrin­si­cally dif­fer­ent.
And I have yet to see as many Tolkien clones as some read­ers like to claim. I have only seen two or three close copies, and even those didn’t have the same tex­ture as LotR.

And for the record, a read­ing of North­ern Euro­pean mythol­ogy will dull one’s view of Tolkien’s orig­i­nal­ity. Not say­ing he didn’t cre­ate a lot or orig­i­nal mate­r­ial, but he also bor­rowed a good bit himself.

The Keys to Conan: Blood and Thunder on the Underwood No. 5

August 30th, 2011 § 2

Under­wood No. 5 in the REH Museum

You might think the new Conan movie inspired this arti­cle. Alas, you would be wrong. Its source is my immense appre­ci­a­tion of Robert E. Howard’s work and my love affair with vin­tage man­ual typewriters.

To under­stand the blood and thun­der style of REH, indeed all our clas­sics of swords, sor­ceries and hero­ics, I think you need an appre­ci­a­tion of the man­ual typewriter’s effect on the craft of fiction.

There’s this great scene in The Whole Wide World where Robert E. Howard pounds away on his type­writer, dic­tat­ing to him­self with the pas­sion of the pos­sessed. That machine, which Howard pur­chased in 1928 and used till the very end, was the clas­sic Under­wood No. 5.

For decades, when most peo­ple thought “type­writer” this 30 lb. desk­top machine was what they had in mind. Mil­lions were pro­duced between 1901 and 1932, so even today the Under­wood No. 5 isn’t a rare find, nor par­tic­u­larly valu­able unless in mint con­di­tion. When Howard bought one of these machines, he knew he was get­ting a reli­able com­pan­ion for his career. Think about the invest­ment value. Many of these machines still work now. Think your Dell Insp­iron or Mac­book will be work­able in 80 years? Me neither.

You can get a No. 5 on eBay for $50 or less, non-restored. (For restora­tion you’d need a type­writer repair place, which is becom­ing increas­ingly rare.) You’ll pay almost as much for the machine as for ship­ping. Sadly, I don’t have one myself. Yet. I own ten type­writ­ers already and my wife scowls when I men­tion a new one… I do have an L.C. Smith from the mid-30’s and a Royal Portable from 1929 (mint con­di­tion and ever so pre­cise), so I can well attest to the action and expe­ri­ence of these old machines.

Many of you have likely never used a man­ual type­writer before. Per­haps an elec­tric, per­haps none at all. (I touched my first com­puter in 1983, resented the elec­tric type­writ­ers we learned to type on in school, and didn’t expe­ri­ence the true plea­sure of the man­ual type­writer until early 2010.) If your expe­ri­ence is lim­ited to elec­tric machines, then you only know half the story. It’s just not the same.

There’s an almost pri­mal expe­ri­ence to using a man­ual, like a sculp­tor chis­el­ing or a car­pen­ter ham­mer­ing. The strik­ing of the keys, the smell of oil and metal, the gun­fire stac­cato of strik­ing keys (the sharp feed­back as they rebound), the bell ring warn­ing the end of the line approaches, the scrap­ing return of the car­riage, the scroll of paper. It is a thing of art and beauty.

As for the effect on writ­ing… Take a look at some books from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Notice some­thing? They got big­ger with each decade, huh? There was a mar­ket­ing dynamic, sure. But com­put­ers allowed writ­ers to match the dynamic. Allowed us all to eas­ily become messy and long-winded.

REH Bed­room with Desk and Typewriter

You don’t often see writ­ing with the fast-paced, blaz­ing action you find in old pulps. Some of that is style, but when you type on a man­ual machine the very writ­ing of the story has an imme­di­ate phys­i­cal­ity to it, not unlike the fast-paced action in REH’s work. There is sound and action.

I notice the sounds more in older books. The brevity of the words. The rush of the action. Com­put­ers, gods know I love them, sim­ply don’t have this kind of soul. And writ­ing with them, I think, becomes more cere­bral and less a phys­i­cal act of cre­ation. And it shows. Our books today tend towards lengthy descrip­tion and intro­spec­tion far more than the thun­der­ing heroic fan­tasy pounded out on the old manuals.

When you write some­thing on a type­writer, you have to mean it. Remem­ber, if you mess up or change your mind, that’s the whole page to retype. There’s no time for ram­bling and dither­ing along through a story. You get to the point. You say what you mean. And you say it right the first time. And, I think the nature of the machine itself changes how you write. For bold pulp action, I think it changes it for the better.

Note: I have thus far writ­ten one novel on a man­ual type­writer, a 1955 Her­mes Rocket. I plan on com­pos­ing all my future works on var­i­ous type­writ­ers. Nat­u­rally they will get scanned in and edited on the com­puter. There are advan­tages to our mod­ern world.

This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared on Rogue Blade’s Home of Heroics.

Dragon*Con Sale!

August 28th, 2011 Comments Off

In honor of my favorite hol­i­day of the year, Dragon*Con, both of my ebooks are cur­rently on sale for $.99. So if you haven’t bought your copies yet, get moving!

The print ver­sion of Tigress remains at its reg­u­lar, highly afford­able price of $11.99 at Amazon.

After Dragon*Con, the ebook prices are likely to increase. Though if sales are strong, I might leave one of them at $.99. Maybe. But only one.

The World of Kaiwen

August 27th, 2011 Comments Off

It may not be bla­tantly obvi­ous to you, dear reader, not at this point any­way, but The Storm Dragon’s Heart (SDH) and Wrath of the White Tigress (WWT) are set on the same world: Kai­wen, Kawan, Qawin, and other var­i­ous spellings appro­pri­ate to the respec­tive lan­guages of the planet. I’ve writ­ten six nov­els, and only one of them doesn’t take place on Kaiwen.

Pawan Kor from Wrath of the White Tigress

SDH takes place on the island con­ti­nent of Okoro, which I’d guess is about the size of Aus­tralia. It is on the other side of Kai­wen from Pawan Kor which is the south­ern por­tion of a mas­sive con­ti­nent, the name of which I can­not remem­ber at the moment. (Yeah, I know. Cut me some slack. I came up with all the big pic­ture stuff a decade ago and haven’t needed all of it yet.) Pawan Kor is big­ger than Okoro. Per­haps as big across as Spain to India.

A few clues that show the books share a com­mon world:

  • Two moons: Zhura Dark Moon and Avida Bright Moon. You’ll note that their names are the same in both set­tings. An odd but inten­tional choice.
  • Magic func­tions the same and a chan­nel­ing stone is gen­er­ally required. The chan­nel­ing stones are called qavra in WWT and kavaru in SDH. Note their names are dif­fer­ent, an odd but inten­tional choice. Qavra are best worked by peo­ple of Zin­darhi descent, or their mys­te­ri­ous, remain­ing ances­tors the Qaiar Zin­darhi. For those beings, use of the stones is nat­ural. I will say no more.
  • The nature of deities is the same. Greater deities linked to celes­tial bod­ies and big con­cepts. Such deities are dis­tant and per­haps have no direct impact on the world. Many lesser deities of vary­ing pow­ers, mostly minor spir­its. (The world is pri­mar­ily ani­mistic.) There’s a lot going on in the back­ground that will be revealed in time. I mapped out the source of magic and deities for the world, based on events that took places tens of thou­sands of years before the events of these nov­els. I will say no more.
  • White steel which can cut through mag­i­cal ener­gies and beings. Dark iron which is the oppo­site of white steel. It’s able to soak up ener­gies. I’m sure there are other small details that I’m just not think­ing about at the moment. Hell, I’m likely for­get­ting some­thing major. And I may be hold­ing out on some­thing.

I have included in this post the maps for SDH and WWT, but these are sim­pli­fied views of larger, more detailed maps that I’m not shar­ing yet.

North­ern Okoro from Storm Dragon

Chains of a Dark God­dess should have the larger view of Pawan Kor along with a focused map for the story itself. The big­ger map of Okoro will appear with Legacy of the Lost Gods. Why am I hold­ing out? Because I’m still refin­ing some of the loca­tions and want them to be as accurate.

My Writing Process

August 14th, 2011 Comments Off

This is excerpted from my inter­view with David Wise­hart on Kin­dle Author.

DAVID WISEHART: What is your writ­ing process?

DAVID ALASTAIR HAYDEN: These days, I get up, climb the stairs to my office, and begin bang­ing out a tale on one of my vin­tage man­ual type­writ­ers, prob­a­bly the Her­mes Rocket or the Olympia SF or the Olympia SM-3, all from the 1950’s. (I have a lovely, mint-condition 1929 Royal Portable that’s beg­ging for some story work as well.) At some point I will scan in those words, using some OCR soft­ware, and edit them in Scrivener on my Mac­book. From there, I will gen­er­ate an ebook using Scrivener and Cal­i­bre. This week, I just did the lay­out for the print edi­tion of Wrath of the White Tigress in QuarkX­press 9.

On the artis­tic side of things, I have com­pleted five nov­els and my writ­ing process seems to change with each one. To fin­ish my first book, I had to break down and plot every step my char­ac­ters took. I needed to see the whole struc­ture of the thing to com­plete it. I had so many aborted starts before that. The sec­ond and third books didn’t need quite so much sup­port. I did a more basic chapter-by-chapter out­line for them, but ended up devi­at­ing off in more inter­est­ing direc­tions as I explored their sto­ries. My fourth book com­pletely ignored the plot I made for it, so I didn’t bother to plot the fifth one at all. I just devel­oped a basic con­cept and started writ­ing seat-of-the-pants style. Next time, I think I’ll write a one-page sum­mary and then go from there.

Read the rest of the interview.

“Like Johnny Quest in Fantasy Asia”: The Storm Dragon’s Heart

August 6th, 2011 § 4

If you’ve always thought Avatar: The Last Air­ben­der needed a shot of Johnny Quest vibe, this here’s the book for you!

The Storm Dragon’s Heart

Ture­sobei dreamed of adven­ture, a way to prove he was no longer a child.

Wiz­ards should be care­ful what they wish for.

Des­tined to become his clan’s next high wiz­ard, stu­dious Ture­sobei has con­stantly strug­gled to live up to other people’s demands and expec­ta­tions, but now he’s had enough.

When his treasure-hunting father arrives with impor­tant news to dis­cuss with the cur­rent high wiz­ard, Ture­sobei spies on their secret meet­ing and acci­den­tally foils an assas­si­na­tion attempt. As a reward his father invites him on an expe­di­tion to find an arti­fact known as the Storm Dragon’s Heart.

But when dis­as­ter strikes, their quest becomes a race for survival.

Aided by a sassy ninja cat-girl and a mys­te­ri­ous diary that trans­forms into a winged famil­iar, Ture­sobei must face deadly cultists, venge­ful spir­its, and a mad wiz­ard from a rival clan who’s deter­mined to use the arti­fact to destroy Turesobei’s homeland.

The Storm Dragon’s Heart will delight read­ers with a thrilling tale of exotic lands, mys­ti­cal crea­tures, for­bid­den love, and fast-paced adven­ture. (Ages 10 and up)

Pur­chase the ebook at: Ama­zon or Barnes & Noble.

The print book is com­ing later this month!

White Tigress Now On Kindle!

July 1st, 2011 § 3

Wrath of the White Tigress is now avail­able on Ama­zon!

Read a sam­ple on Kin­dle for the Web!

He thought he was a hero.
She showed him the truth.
Now he’ll do any­thing to stop the man who made him a monster.

For twenty years Jaska Bavadi has faith­fully served the Palym­far Order and its Grand­mas­ter, the pow­er­ful wiz­ard Salahn, but an encounter with Zyrella Anthari, last high priest­ess of the White Tigress, shat­ters the spell that chained Jaska’s mind.

Now faced with the hor­rors he unknow­ingly com­mit­ted against peo­ple he swore to pro­tect, Jaska must put Salahn’s reign of cru­elty to an end. Together, he and Zyrella race to save the White Tigress and stop Salahn from open­ing the Gates of the Under­world. An army of palym­far war­riors stands in their way, but the dan­ger­ous secrets that cloud their des­tinies threaten to doom them first.

In the tra­di­tion of ­­Michael Moor­cock, David Gem­mell, and Glen Cook, Wrath of the White Tigress deliv­ers a thrilling tale sword & sor­cery fans will love.

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