First Lines? Just How Important are They?

I love my first line series (see here). I started it years ago because I read a book about the importance of first lines (see here) and since then there have been some doozies in the list. In preparing for this post I went back and read a bunch and there are some good ones out there in the past of this blog, and there are some real disappointments too.

Plus as a new writer, you hear so much about the need to hook the reader, to get them involved immediately in the story. But you know what I've found. It's not so much the first line, it's that first scene. It's like I said in my last post on the subject (see here), it's not so much that first line, it's the first scene, the writer's library and stock pile of good will with the reader, and the overall writing in general. A well written book will overcome a shotty first line. A back ground of great books will provide a lot of credibility to overcome a boring first line.

In terms of my own first lines, I have mixed reviews (see here). I'm happier with On the Edge in general than I am with Toe the Line, but I think the first line for On the Edge, and the opening scene is weaker than Toe the Line.

There is a specific fear, a state of panic really, that takes root within most people, parents particularly when they first discover that they've lost track of their child. It's the moment when a father loses sight of his son in a crowded food court, the second or two when a mother realizes that the little hand that belongs to her daughter that was holding her hand is no longer there. A flush of extreme anxiety with undertones of foreboding follow that first moment and are quickly replaced by hope. Hope that as the crowd parts he will see his son, or she will feel the little fingers reach up and wrap around her hand again. When that doesn't happen the panic becomes terror. My terror began half way into my Monday, six mile run. It was Georgia I missed first. 

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the protagonist finding what happened to Georgia.

In Toe the Line, the first line is reminiscent of Max Shulman and his "Bang bang bang bang" opening (see here). 

"Go to hell, Wheeler." As last words go they were hardly what one would call poignant.

Sadly, I don't think that either first line would land on any lists of "Great First Lines" nor even on "Good First Lines." More sadly is the fact that I don't have a library of goodwill built up with my "fan club." All I have, I hope, is decent writing in one of the books and passable writing in the other. To say it precisely I have the following reviews. For On the Edge I received a review that stated:

Dick Hannah has created one fantastic novel. Simply put- I love it. There were a lot of plates spinning & he didn't drop any. What I'd thought would be a simple mystery novel became multiple novels in one: family drama, thriller, a little romance, inspirational- you name it! Fingers are crossed for a sequel. Five stars straight through- brilliant!

For Toe the Line the most scathing review stated:

When I read the synopsis this sounded like my kind of book, intriguing plot with a mystery to be solved. While the book did have these characteristics, at times I felt like I was reading an assignment in a high school English class. The scenery that Mr. Hannah created with his use of imagery was amazing. I felt as though I was in the Pacific Northwest as I read the book. His character development was scattered, at best. I agree with the other reviewer, in that Wynn drove me crazy! His character had much potential but his obsession with triathlons became quite old quickly. He lacked depth and was flat, whereas his ex-fiancee's character was fiery. The extreme personalities frustrated me several times throughout the story. Also, a few of the secondary characters could have been developed more. It would have provided the insight needed for the conclusion. I felt the premise of the story was good; I wish Mr. Hannah had expanded his storyline. He only touched the surface of what could have been a 5 star novel.

Yikes, right? So again, no credibility provided through Toe the Line. But regarding that first line stuff, see this review:

When I read the first page I was hooked. Usually, if I can't get into a book by the third page then I know I'm not going to get into it at all. 'Toe The Line' was an exceptional read right through to the end. At one point I THOUGHT I had well and truly nabbed the murderer, but then it twisted so I was caught off guard - which stunned me because I can usually catch the killer before the story ends (hence I was a bit cross with myself but pleased for Mr Hannah for making me as the reader think differently).

So, like I said, a great first line isn't the end all beat all by any means. It can help, but mostly it's great writing that's going to get the writer over the hump of readers acceptance and love for the work. What have I learned? First, although the first line and first scene are important for my next work, Vapor Trail, it's not what's going to win the battle. Taking that "writing is a road march" idea from several weeks ago (see here) it reminds me of a thirty-miler that we took in Fort Ord, California. We had a briefing the night before and one of of the more senior squad leaders talked about the importance of keeping your feet dry and clean,  . . . fresh socks, good boots, . . . that sort of thing. Then the next morning, bright and early we start off. We are winding our way through some foot hill trails and there's a ford through a stream that stops us cold just a mile or two into the five hour ordeal. Imagine that. A platoon of Spec Ops, Ranger, Paratrooper Bad-Asses stopped in the midst of our thirty-mile mission by a team leader who took the foot hygiene class so seriously that he stopped at a three inch deep puddle from a small stream. 

Eventually the platoon sergeant came along, yelled at us all for being ridiculous and strode through that puddle making as many big splashes as he could just to show how much he cared about his own foot care and we were back off. Still, bad start but great content. I'd much rather have that the alternative of a great start with a poor finish. So, for Vapor Trail I'm going to focus on that first line, but more of my focus will be on the work as a whole than just on that first few lines. I have a bit of credibility built up with the readers, no need to undercut that now.

As long as we are talking about my reviews, my favorite has to be this one about On the Edge. 

At first I hated Joe and didn't know if I was going to make it through the book. He seemed to be such a douche. But as the story began to unfold, I found that some of the douchery was really his own anxieties taking hold. From that point forward I wanted to learn more about this guy and what makes him tick. The novel is full of twists and turns that keep the reader engaged. The story line is realistic and detailed. I am sure the author's military background made all the difference for me in the flashback scenes. Many times I will gloss over these types of things (military stories just aren't my cup o' tea) but Hannah truly painted a picture with his words that keep me intrigued.

There is a little bit of everything in this book. Suspense. Mystery. A little taste of romance. And pretty deep character development packed into a fairly short novel. It was a really good read and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys "who done it?" mystery/thriller books.

As I said before (here) . . . who can't help but love a positive review that includes the term "douchery."

Are Books Like Sausages?

According to Wikipedia,  Nicolas de Chamfort is attributed with originally saying: “One would risk being disgusted if one saw politics, justice, and one’s dinner in the making.”

The following few weeks I will provide a series of posts  that will put paid to the question of whether novels should be added to this list. With the upcoming release of my second novel, On the Edge, I hope to first use all of the lessons learned that I cataloged in the AAR series following my release of Toe the Line. The hope is that by following the AAR advice On the Edge can morph my hobby into a business enterprise by actually turning a profit.

That being said, an update on On the Edge is probably a good place to start. I wrote On the Edge as a part of National Novel WritingMonth (NaNoWriMo) probably in 2007. Despite the years in-between, this novel came together far more quickly than Toe the Line and is much more complex. At the moment I have completed a final rewrite of the novel and have asked my personal editor (my cousin) to read it through for obvious mistakes in the story and any spelling, grammar or other easy to recognize problems.

So for the moment I have a paper draft with a plethora of red marks and suggestions in it. The last time I dealt with this I uploaded it to my Kindle, re-read it, and made edits in that format. As I outlined in my previous post, this was a huge mistake. I shant do it again. What will I do? I will keep it in MS Word and make the edits. I plan to upload it to the iPad and reread it one final time before Step 2, which includes advance review copies.

I plan to have a post a week on this topic. To find the most recent be sure to check Self-Publishing Label in the Labels list on the right of the screen. And for goodness sake if you have some advice let me know now before I go too far down the wrong path!

I'm the Maggot in the Metaphor

Last week, for the first in this series, I wrote about how writing a novel is alot like a long hard road march (see here). Then I followed that up by discussing how it's not glamorous or fun (see here). And although both of these things are true, today I'm going to write about how all of that leads to the finished product.

I bought a composter a year or so ago to replace my homemade composter that I built years ago. The model shown in the pciture above is the very type that I have. I bought it (and borrowed the above picture) from The Gardener's Supply Company. (Best place on the web to go get gardening gear). Nevertheless, although I use the hell outta that sucker I never use a shiny new pail, nor wear my gardening clogs, nor smile quite so heartily as the fellow in the image above.

Instead, I fill that sucker up regularly. Banana peels galore, coffee grounds almost everyday, used G&T lemon wedges, cilantro stems from the night before's dinner, pumpkins that turned into jack-o-lantern's then turned into moldy, stumpy, rotted messes that sit on the porch too long after Halloween (these are actually the coolest things to throw into that sucker).

Over and over, for weeks and weeks, months and months I keep cramming stuff into that left side of the composter and I tumble it around. Then after about six months I switch to the right side and leave the left alone except for the occasional tumble. All the while the bugs are inside and making babies and turning that kitchen waste into fertile soil. After 6 months or more of sitting alone and steaming, that compost is ready to be put into my garden, now rich and ready to grow things.

Here's the simile so pay attention.

First, writing is a lot like using that composter. I write a ton of stuff and most of it is trash. It's not till I've tumbled it around in my brain and written a bit more and revised and edited and rewritten that it becomes at all worthwhile. When I'm putting it in it's like that rotting pumpkin. Usually, hopefully, when I put it into book form it comes out as something worthwhile.

Simile number two . . . I leave lots of my stuff on the shelve to age. Just like my composter allows me to leave my garbage alone just to tumble and age, I leave my writing to the same. I leave it alone and write on something else then I come back to it and fine tune it.

I'm working on my third novel now. Tentatively titled Vapor Trail, it is a follow up to On the Edge (see here and below cover image) and I'm hoping to release it this fall. I'm rewriting it for the final time right now and I'm stunned by how different it is from that first trash I put in. Characters names and types are changes. The plot is different. The setting has changed twice. It's a completely different story than the one I started. This is what got me thinking about that composter. I used that composted soil in my herb garden the other day and it was completely broken down. That's the way this story is now that I've tumbled it around and lead it age.

It used to bother me how much writing and rewriting was necessary to produce a finished work, but now I see that it's just a necessary part of the process. If I just threw the trash I wrote out on the web it would be exactly that (and truthfully, there's already a bit too much trash out on the Internets right now). It takes time to get it just right. Vapor Trail is in the tumble phase and the maggots are squirming around in it now turning it into something epic. The only problem as I see it is that I'm the maggot in that metaphor.

Titles Come First

In one of my first writing workshops after college, a class on how to write a short story, I came to a class with a story that I had yet to find a title for. During the critique portion of the workshop one of the other members of the class castigated me about not having a title. It wasn't just a tick on a long worksheet of problems with the story, it was a thesis on why titles were so important. I didn't bite. I argued back that I just hadn't thought of a title, that the group should instead focus on the content of the story. Based on P.J. Parrish's post in The Kill Zone yesterday, my fellow writer had a very good point.

Miss Parrish's article, When Titles Go Bad, is a worthwhile article to read for anyone writing or trying to write a book. Among the many things she says is this:

How important? I found a marketing survey that asked readers what was the element that most influenced why they bought a book. Excluding Gigantoid Author Name (ie James Patterson can put his name on an Altoid can and it would sell) here is the order:


1. Title
2. Cover
3. Back copy
4. Opening paragraphs
5. Price


Now, none of what she wrote could be called original (reminds me of this post I wrote on there being no more truly original thoughts), but seeing it listed out like that sure does set ones mind to pondering, particularly when one has a book he'd like to release soon.

1. Title - On the Edge - Not too terribly prosaic, kinda run of the mill, but definitely fitting for a thriller cum mystery. Secondly, once a reader gets into the novel they'll see the double meaning that the title has for the story.

2. Cover - A blatant rip off of Dick Francis' style that looks far more amateurish (see here). Should I go with a professional designer? Sure. My goal however is to hold off on doing that till my hobby actually turns a profit. Based on the fact that cover is number 2 on the list I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not working myself into a Catch-22.

3. Back Copy -  None yet.

4. Opening Paragraphs - Personally I like em. I've got the series on opening lines (see here) and I have made sure that mine is not in the "not good" sub-catagory. Stay tuned for a snippet coming to this space in the next few weeks.

5. Price - $0.99 introductory price, $2.99 regular price. Can't beat that unless it's free and at that pricing level no one takes the work seriously.

Based on the above list of my own work, understanding that I need to update #3 so that I have some back copy to judge, it looks like I'm in trouble. Mayhaps I should spend some dough on a professional cover design before I release On the Edge. Thanks to Miss Parrish for setting me straight.

Vapor Trail

I am currently working on my next novel, Vapor Trail, that delves into the harmful and debilitating results of believing too much in a conspiracy theories.

One of my favorite things to do every month is to listen to a talk radio show that sponsors a conspiracy call in day, appropriately on the night of each month's full moon. I love listening to folks call in and explain their particular conspiracy. In most cases the conspiracies don't hold water, most deal with cabal's of bankers running the world in some sort of shadow government. Most people who call in believe in what Popular Mechanics calls "The Myth of Government Hyper Competency." I've worked for the government. We barely made it up to competency, much less "hyper."

The conspiracy I delve into in Vapor Trail is the mystery behind the downing of TWA Flight 800 back in 1996. I know that Nelson Demille has a great book, Sky Fall, that hits on this same subject, but mine doesn't focus on the flight as much as it does on the deterioration of a character's life due to his believe in a conspiracy, a subject I started researching by reading Among the Truther's by Jonathon Kay.

Today I ran across this snippet in the WSJ in an article by Amanda Foreman called Conspiracy Theories: Everybody's Doing It:

It doesn't help that some of the most absurd-sounding conspiracies have turned out to be true: The Central Intelligence Agency really did feed LSD to unsuspecting civilians in the 1950s as part of a mind-control experiment. Or that some of the technically plausible ones have been patently false: The moon landings were not filmed on a sound stage.

It is human nature to look for a linear cause to explain complex events. The worse the tragedy, the greater the need for a narrative that does not involve dumb luck. Eight hundred years after the destruction of Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches are still unable to agree on who or what tipped the two Christian empires into a ruinous fight against one another.

One aspect of conspiracy theories that I hope to dig down into is the theory of Occam's Razor, that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I love the way conspiracy theorist will create an incredibly complex series of event and solutions to a problem that has many more simpler solutions. 9-11 provides 75% of the material during the call in show, and what I like about that is that my character in Vapor Trail visits other "experts" (conspiracy theorists) along his journey to the truth and most of them are focused on 9-11. None are looking at his conspiracy, the one that he finds has the simplest, most plausible explanation that everyone could see if they were just looking at it correctly.

Just as On the Edge was a step up in complexity compared to Toe the Line, Vapor Trail will be a step in the same direction. It's a tough theme to take on, but so far it's exciting to be in the midst of it.

Couple More

So far the reviews from non-friends and family are positive. I received two more reviews from the blog tour. One from "ai love books" the other from "a book and a lattee.

The first, from ai love books said:

On The Edge by Dick Hannah is definitely a good mystery/crime novel. I like how the mystery starts right away in the first few chapters. The writing was smooth. I can’t stop reading to learn about the murder – why? And who did it? I can’t stop guessing until the end. The author did a really good job with the mystery and thriller. I love the bits on family and drama within the story. I wanted to know what will happen to Joe and his father’s relationship. Overall, On the Edge was a good mystery/thriller read laced with family drama and a little bit of romance.

I'm particularly happy with the phrase, "The writing was smooth." I'll take that.

The second review, this one from a book and a lattee said:

In Dick Hannah’s On The Edge is an extremely fantastic novel in which I absolutely loved every part of it. It wasn’t just one novel but became multiple novels all in one – a little romance, thriller, inspirational, and family drama all packed into one. I’m really hoping that Dick Hannah has a sequel to On The Edge just because I’m so intrigued by Joe’s story.

My take away . . . "It wasn’t just one novel but became multiple novels all in one."

So far none of this has resulted in any new sales, at least none that I've seen, but if nothing else this blog tour results in providing me much needed confidence boosts each week!

FLOTD (First Line of the Day)

I was all set to write about the first line of the book I'm reading now and was going to compare it to the first line in my own books, Toe the Line (here) and On the Edge (here) so went through my blog looking for the posts where I dissected my own first lines.

Couldn't find em.

May not have ever done it.

That's a problem. Here I have (what I think is) a wonderful series all about first lines (see here). It has shown me that first lines although important are perhaps not as important as many believe. I think it's proven to me that having a good quality product and reputation is more important than a super-fantastic first line. But without those other two qualities a first line that knocks the reader back a step can be a pretty good substitute.

All that being said, count on a post in the coming days and or weeks on my own first lines. What will be really interesting is reading the first line of my newest novel, Vapor Trail, to see if I've learned anything about first lines from this series.

I love reading Forsyth novels and he's had some doozy first lines (see here). This one . . . not so much.

It was the owner of the small convenience store on the corner who saw it all. At least, he said he did. 

He was inside the shop, but near the front window, rearranging his wares for better display, when he looked up and saw the man across the street. The man was quite unremarkable and the shopkeeper would have looked away but for the limp. He would testify later that there was no-one else on the street. 

The day was hot beneath a skim of grey cloud, the atmosphere close and muggy. The hysterically named Paradise Way was as bleak and shabby as ever, a shopping parade in the heart of one of those graffiti-daubed, exhausted, crime-destroyed housing estates that deface the landscape between Leyton, Edmonton, Dalston and Tottenham.

Forsyth, Frederick - The Veteran

Mostly scene setting. "He was inside the shop" . . . . "The man was quite unremarkable" . . . "The day was hot" . . . not really the type of thing that grabs the reader by the throat and compels them to know more. Saying "the day was hot beneath a skim of grey cloud," is hardly as profound as "The November sky over Manhattan was chain mail, raveling into steely rain." (see here).

This is what I meant by having a good quality product and a worthwhile library as a foundation. Forsyth certainly has the history. So far he's missed the first line and at the moment since the first part of the book reads like a particularly boring episode of Law and Order (the Ben Stone era, not the Jack McCoy era), he's taken two strikes and the next pitch is on the way.

Interviews on Digital Leadership

 For this report, I was able to interview three managers at the Health and Safety Council (HASC) (Health and Safety Council, 2022), a non-profit that supports safety and skills training for contractors entering and working in the energy industry. These managers had extensive histories with the organization and have risen through the ranks to become departmental managers and leaders at the organization. 

During these interviews, I asked the same series of questions focused on: (a) traditional education and digital education, (b) digital leadership, (c) the organization’s evolution both recently and in the past, (d) their own organizational leaders and the traits that make a good leader and finally, (e) the organization’s focus on training and developing leaders. In each case, it seemed as though the questions were generating thoughts for these leaders that they had not had to focus on before. These were distinct questions about digital transformation and digital leadership that were not a part of their ordinary management roles. The answers they provided, although unique, showed several common themes for the organization and the digital leaders within the organization. 

Interview Subjects

The three leaders selected for this project included: 

• A departmental manager who has been with the organization for eight years. This manager started as an instructional designer and is currently working as the manager of that department. She is a keystone manager for HASC in that she manages the team that produces and develops one of the organization's primary products, HASC's eLearning courses. She interacts with customers and senior leaders daily and she has been asked to lead an evolution within her department over the past few years to increase the level of engagement by HASC's learners and the quality of HASC's eLearning courses. 
• A director who focuses on HASC's second-largest revenue-generating product, the organization's hands-on and instructor-led safety and skills courses. This manager also has worked at the organization for over eight years and has risen from a manager/supervisor position to become a director of multiple departments. His history includes work at a larger company that was a client of HASC. 
• A departmental manager who leads the organization's customer service teams. This manager has a history at HASC of over 20 years and has worked in multiple roles and within several departments across the organization during that time. She has been asked to manage and lead several unique digital transformations during that time.

Each of these leaders was selected for their intimate knowledge of the organization's products, power structures, politics, and digital vision. They were all told of the reason for the interview and were allowed as much time as they wished to answer any of the questions. They all consented to be recorded to capture their answers more precisely to create this paper. 

Similarities and Themes

Despite not working in academia, all three of the leaders interviewed for this report agreed that they worked as leaders in the education industry due to their positions at the HASC. Another similarity between all of the leaders interviewed for this report was their agreement that the COVID pandemic acted as a change agent and sped up digital innovation in the organization. Many of the readings in this class focus on the fact that the COVID pandemic acted as a catalyst for organizations to begin offering more digital tools to deal with the limited in-person environment. There are other instances where the consumer of different products are the driving factor of the need for digital innovation. Writing in EDUCAUSE, Pelletier et al. (2022) state that consumers are used to the "benefits of being able to do things "anywhere" and (the) appetite for online and remote options as consumers is likely to persist" (p. 7). In the case of COVID, especially from these interviews, it seems as though the digital innovations were propelled forward by the organization's desire to be more cutting edge, but also by the learners who demanded more digital tools by which they could take HASC's training. The leader interviewed for this report who is in charge of HASC's eLearning products said this specifically when she said, the "pandemic was a catalyst. We had been discussing it because everybody is kind of moving towards that distance learning and computer-based online type training. But once the pandemic hit, it was like we had to find a solution and we had to find it fast." The director who oversees HASC's instructor-led training said, "I think COVID became a big-time accelerator." Wade (2022) discusses this in his article when he describes digital acceleration and digital adoption. It is clear to see that like most education institutes and learning communities, HASC was affected by the COVID pandemic and was challenged to find digital innovation to satisfy the demands of their clients. 

Another theme that was seen across all of the interviews and the discussions was the fact that digital leaders must be open to new ideas and understand the audience. As Kane et al. (2019) state, digital leaders “must also be change-oriented - that is open-minded, adaptable, and innovative" (p. 36). This was echoed by all of the interviewed leaders. However, there was also an expressed need to fit the needs of the organization’s digitalization of process to the needs of the learners. Both leaders who are involved in training discussed the need to understand the limitations of HASC's learners in understanding digital tools. The leader involved with customer service discussed how HASC's learners and clients need to be led to understand the new tools and technologies. As Brooks (2021) states “The worst student experiences were inevitably linked to policies, practices, and approaches to teaching and learning with technology that was designed without the student experience (especially during a global pandemic) in mind” (p. 3). The focus on understanding the needs of the learners who represent HASC's clients resonated with all of these leaders and speaks toward the mission of the organization, which is focused on improving the workforce within the industry (Health and Safety Council, 2006). This focus on the learner and the workforce is clear to see in all of the leaders' concerns for the happiness, well-being, and understanding of the learner. Additionally, the learning leaders both said, leaders need to be open to new ideas, and that leaders should be able to think outside the box (Health and Safety Council, 2022). An EDUCAUSE report highlights the need to use technology to transform learning especially in terms of remote learning tools when Pelletier et al. (2022) state "as we've learned through HASC's pandemic experiences, different modalities can be blended in much richer, theoretically grounded ways that challenge and expand those frameworks and approaches to teaching" (p. 27). The eLearning leader echoed this sentiment when she said that her team members were being exposed to more adult learning principles and capabilities than she as a developer eight years prior ever had access to. 

Finally, in terms of the organization's willingness to be innovative and a digital leader within the industry, all three leaders interviewed for this report agreed that HASC acted as an early adopter and tester of new digital tools. One leader who had been at the organization for over 20 years discussed the changes that the self-serve kiosks created for learners. The leader in charge of the learning products discussed how her team was changing the way that they create and develop training to keep up with the new expectations of the learners and to keep up with the competition. As Grajek and Reinitz (2019) state digital transformation "initiatives can succeed only through the strategic application of a changing set of technologies in support of the institutional missions" (p. 9). Additionally, writing in EDUCAUSE, McCormack et al. (2019) found that the COVID pandemic “acted as an inflection point for what quality entails” for learning institutions (p. 30). HASC was well positioned for the acceleration that the the COVID pandemic caused as they were already an innovator in digital transformation. This made the change to a more digital learning environment less stark as it might have been and will continue to be for safety councils that are not as digitally oriented as HASC. 

Conclusion

These interviews (Health and Safety Council, 2022) were illustrative of several major themes including: (a) how HASC is continuing to be an innovative leader, (b) that the COVID pandemic acted as a digital accelerator for digital tools, and learning, and (c) that digital leaders need to be open to ideas and be adaptable and flexible to the changing nature of HASC's learning community and business. In several instances, the pace of change and the nature of change left these managers feeling overwhelmed and wanted a chance to catch up with the changes. This leaves HASC with an opportunity where HASC can provide: (a) better digital help to their employees, learners, and leadership, including helping leaders understand digital leadership, (b) an organization-wide learning and growth plan for both traditional leadership and digital leadership, and (c) opportunities for solidifying the digital gains HASC has made in the past few years and continued use of the catalyst type action that the COVID pandemic causes to help accelerate the pace of digital innovations within their organization. 

 

References

Brooks, D. C. (2021). Student experiences learning with technology in the pandemic. Educause. Edu. Retrieved May 21, 2022, from https://www.educause.edu/ecar/research-publications/2021/student-experiences-learning-with-technology-in-the-pandemic/introduction-and-key-findings

Grajek, S., Reinitz, B. (2019). Getting ready for digital transformation: Change your culture, workforce, and technology. Educause.Edu. Retrieved May 17, 2022, https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/7/getting-ready-for-digital-transformation-change-your-culture-workforce-and-technology

Health and Safety Council. (2022, May 16). Digital leadership interviews project. https://ksuemailprod-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rgh8373_ksu_edu/EtpSEXFzu9NJuMgRcJeA7EMBLaubfCfw0uKKHRCrW5wvig?e=1OuOok

Health and Safety Council. (2006). Vision and Mission Statements. https://www.hasc.com/about-hasc/vision-mission/

Kane G. C., Phillips A. N., Copulsky J.R. and Andrus G. R. (2019). How digital leadership is(n't) different. MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring): 34-39

McCormack, M., Brooks, D. C., & Reeves, J. (2021). 2021 EDUCAUSE horizon action plan: privacy 2021 educause horizon action plan: privacy. Educause.Edu. Retrieved May 21, 2022, from https://library.educause.edu/resources/2021/10/2021-educause-horizon-action-plan-privacy

Pelletier, K., Mccormack, M., Reeves, J., Robert, J., Arbino, N., Al-Freih, M., Dickson-Deane, C., Guevara, C., Koster, L., Sánchez-Mendiola, M., Lee, S., & Bessette, J. (2022). Thank you to our teaching and learning horizon report sponsors. Educause.Edu. Retrieved May 17, 2022, from https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2022/4/2022hrteachinglearning.pdf?la=en&hash=6F6B51DFF485A06DF6BDA8F88A0894EF9938D50B

Wade, M. R. (2020, May 27). Scenario planning for a post-COVID-19 world. IMD Business School. https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/reports/scenario-planning-for-a-post-covid-19-world/

Test Case for Others

Over at BookBlogs there are several forum posts regarding the use of blog tours and PR folks to handle the release of a novel. It was a couple of months ago that I went ahead and signed up for one. I chose a package that provided 15-20 "blog stops" and reviews.

For the most part I feel that I was given what I paid for, but in some ways I'm unimpressed. Although the tour is not yet complete, so far the evidence is that there is no difference in sales to justify the expense. The last time I released a novel I did more work, but was able to tailor the blogs and reviews to blogs that more closely matched my genre, but more importantly there was a bit more rigidity to the schedule.

To the first part, last year I had to investigate and identify different bloggers who might be interested in reading and reviewing my book for their blogs. Many, in fact I would say 50% of them, told me that my novel might not fit their genre and passed on the opportunity. For the most part however, I found about 15 total bloggers over the course of three months and received decent reviews. How much of that translated into new sales, probably not that many. When I look at the types of blogs that have been used for this blog tour, I feel like I've really missed the mark.

Last year there seemed to be more rhyme and reason to the ersatz tour I planned. It was based on reviews. If an interview popped up, which it did at times, then that was found money. This tour has not had that foundation, one of being based on reviews. I have gotten good reviews (here, and here) but I got good reviews last time as well. This has been based on cover, banner and summary. I'd rather have reviews. Secondly, and this might have been the impetus of this post, the most recent stop on the blog tour was just an interview. A short summary to be sure, but mostly interview. Personally, I'd rather have a review that leads to an interview not the other way around.

All in all I think that the old adage, "if you want something done right . . . do it yourself" has been proven out here. One of the aspects of this experiment I didn't like was that I was using two different experimental media . . . ie. two different books. Last years novel was Toe the Line, this years is On the Edge. How would I know if a decrease or increase in sales was or was not directly related to the blog tour. Now that I've come to the end of the blog tour experiment, I think I am going to try last year's approach and measure my success rate there too. Because at the moment my answer to the Bookblogs question of "are blog tours worthwhile" . . . it would be a resounding . . . nope.

UPDATE: 6-29-13 - the original post included a diatribe regarding missed dates on behalf of bloggers on the blog tour. This was not accurate. Sage and her bloggers on this tour have hit each of their dates as scheduled and as promised.

Update

So, here is a quick update.

Toe the Line
I'm still sending out requests for representation to agents. I recieved to negatives yesterday. I am working at a pace of one request per week and easily have enough prospects to last the rest of the year.
My roommate read Toe the Line and was quite enthusiastic about it. She had some edits, but she loved the last few lines the most. Almost gushed.
A friend of mine also read the manuscript, she too liked it.
JA Konrath spent nine years sending out requests before finally getting a positive . . . I'm not through with year one yet.

Muzzie's Memoirs
Muzzie is exceedingly frustrated and frustrating. I can't tell how she wants to proceed. We're about 50K words into her manuscript and she is talking about starting over. She says she doesn't find it worth reading or exciting. I bite my tongue when I want to reply with "well, it's your life."
One of her favorite things to write is: "There was much hugging and kissing, and love all around." She never says this, but she writes it alot. Pehaps the title should be "Love all around" or "Love all Around Me."
I completely deleted the paragraph long description and explanation regarding her episiotomy. I'll save the rest of the family that particular horror and bare the burden myself.
Nevertheless, I plan on finished the first draft edit and sending it to her in paper format by the end of the week. Needless to say this has slowed down my editing of Running on the Edge.


Running on the Edge
I wrote this three years ago. It's about an adventure race in Big Bend. I'm rewriting/editing it and boy it's a ton better following the rewrite. Much better characters, new twists, new plots. I plan on being done by August so I can get ready for NaNoWriMo next year.
My hope is that when I run out of agents for Toe the Line, I'll be ready to start again with Running on the Edge.

So that's how things are going.

Walking Away Girl Covers . . . How Prevalent Are They?

Truth is that the first few lines of Dead End Girl (see here) did not grab me, and based on my reading speed so far, it hasn't helped me get into the book. I have had a change in the way I see first lines and catalog them (see here).

Based on the cover, and it's similarities to the cover of my own book, On the Edge, I wonder if I should do a series on covers where the reader only sees the back of the girl (see here).

Corduroy pants swished between Teresa’s thighs as she crossed the parking lot. She had a headache. That drive-thru headset gave her a headache every damn time. The band squeezed her skull like an old man trying to find a ripe cantaloupe in the produce department. Pressing and pressing until her temples throbbed. When the headaches were really bad, she got the aura. And it was gonna be a bad one tonight. She could already tell. By the time she got home, she’d be nauseous from the skull throb along with the stink of fryer grease clinging to her clothes and hair and skin. Sometimes she swore she could feel it permeating her pores. 

She placed a hand under the lid of the dumpster and lifted. The overhead lights in the parking lot glinted on the surface below. It looked like water, but it wasn’t. It was oil. Every night they emptied the fryers, dumping the used oil into this dumpster. It was a disgusting task. Worse than taking out the trash on a 90-degree summer day, when the flies got real thick, and the meat went rancid almost as soon as they put it in the bin. It was dead out. No traffic. No noise at all but her fiddling with the dumpster and the bucket.

Vargus, L.T - Dead End Girl

I'm hoping it comes along, but I just noticed this: the title is "Dead End Girl: A Gripping Serial Killer Thriller." If the author has to put into the title that it's "gripping" it doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.

BUT! It was free and it's not all THAT bad yet. It's very much in the vein of Silence of the Lambs. We shall see where it goes.

An Apple A Day

Yesterday was an Apple heavy day. My older brother offered me an AppleTV. Don't know what I'm going to do with it. I don't have an HDTV. Even if I had an HDTV, I'm not sure what I'd do with it. I look forward to finding out though.

I also spoke with a client. He came into my office and mocked my PC. He has several Apple products, several meaning a dozen. An iPad for each kid, iPhones for the kids, couple of laptops, iMac, Apple server, a real connoisseur. We eventually got around to discussing Steve Jobs. I've just finished a book about how to give a presentation like Steve Jobs and in the book the author goes into great detail about the product rollout presentations that Jobs conducted. This client thought that Apple's days would be numbered without Jobs. We both agreed that what we liked most about Apple was that it was cutting edge, iPod, iPhone, iTunes both cutting edge technologies. How astonished was I to read an article (here) entitled "How Apple Foot-Dragged to Victory - Steve Jobs's formula for success: Don't Rush" by Holman Jenkins, Jr. in the Wall Street Journal.

In this article, which is a compelling read, Mr. Jenkins argues that it was not the pace of innovation that made Apple so successful, it was the way in which they innovated and the design behind the innovations.

"Let's try out a hypothesis: Mr. Jobs's slowness is the key to Apple's success. His focus on the device, his emphasis on perfecting the user experience, meant holding back, not overreaching. The iPod would only be a music player. The iPhone and iPad would be Web-browsing devices that wouldn't play most of the video on the Web. Apple TV remains "a hobby" (his words) because there's no way yet to deliver an acceptable user experience. And notice that each of these device categories had been around for five or 10 years by the time Apple entered (clobbered) them."

It's an interesting train of thought to take, and the article is quite convincing. Much more emphasis on design and function than on revolutionary devices. Perhaps its not the revolutionary the piece of equipment is designed to address, but it's the design of the equipment that makes it revolutionary. Kinda like what Chris said in Northern Exposure when he used a catapualt to launch a piano: "It's not the thing you fling, it's the fling itself."

Back to my client? What about the future of Apple. Jenkins offers this.

"Of course, this fundamental strategy orientation might now change. Apple has allowed itself to be drawn into a battle for mobile-platform market share with Google's Android. Apple's management is increasingly focused on growing an ecosystem rather than on creating devices. The Microsofting of Apple may be at hand, the company becoming a feckless and inefficient user of capital as it seeks to protect itself on every front from every perceived threat to its privileged position. Before long, Apple might even need a Steve Jobs to come back and save it again."

A Bit of a Retraction

Despite what I wrote earlier about the first line of Wool (here) the five books that I read that formed the Omnibus edition made the story "in toto" really quite good. In fact, I remember dissing Wool and saying Hugh Howey weren't no Vernor Vinge. Well, by book five Hugh Howey came pert near damn close to Vernor Vinge-esque-ness.

I'm glad I made this a "commitment book" by reading the Omnibus edition. I think it would have been maddening to read each in turn. Kind of like waiting for each successive book in the Song of Ice and Fire series to come out. But reading them together, and they do read like a continuous story, made the entire story more worthwhile and fun to read.

I did take a note or two and avid readers of the blog will already know that I posted this description of the morning as a part of my writing about the morning series and my frist line. Beyond those I offer these:

This first note I highlight illustrated a perfect example of providing a setting without hitting the reader over the head.


Each step was slightly bowed from generations of traffic, the edge rounded down like a pouting lip. In the center, there was almost no trace of the small diamonds that once gave the treads their grip. Their absence could only be inferred by the pattern to either side, the small pyramidal bumps rising from the flat steel with their crisp edges and flecks of paint. Holston lifted an old boot to an old step, pressed down, and did it again. 


He lost himself in what the untold years had done, the ablation of molecules and lives, layers and layers ground to fine dust. And he thought, not for the first time, that neither life nor staircase had been meant for such an existence. The tight confines of that long spiral, threading through the buried silo like a straw in a glass, had not been built for such abuse. Like much of their cylindrical home, it seemed to have been made for other purposes, for functions long since forgotten. What was now used as a thoroughfare for thousands of people, moving upand down in repetitious, daily cycles, seemed more apt in Holston’s view to be used only in emergencies and perhaps by dozens.
Another floor went by— a pie-shaped division of dormitories. As Holston ascended the last few levels, the last steps of his life, the sounds of childlike delight rained down even louder from above. This was the laughter of youth, of souls who had not yet come to grips with where they lived, who did not yet feel the press of the earth on all sides, who in their minds were not buried at all, but alive. Alive and unworn, dripping happy sounds down the stairwell, trills that were incongruous with Holston’s actions, his decision and determination to die.


This next note shows the mayor of the silo, an older lady who knits, thinking about her job. I liked the way that the Howey made her thoughts drift back toward knitting.


Jahns lived under the weight of this pressure, a burden brutal on more than knees. She kept quiet as they made their way to the central stairwell. A handful called for her to make a speech, but the lone voices did not gain traction. No chant formed, much to her relief. What would she say? That she didn’t know why it all held together? That she didn’t even understand her own knitting, how if you made knots, and if you did it right, things just worked out? Would she tell them it only took one snip for it all to unravel? One cut, and you could pull and pull and turn that garment into a pile. Did they really expect her to understand, when all she did was follow the rules, and somehow it kept working out, year after year after year?

Then, later, with a different character, he does it again. This time instead of knitting, the character, a mechanic, thinks in terms of stabilizing a machine.



She forced the wavy needle through the breast of her coveralls and clasped the catch on the back. Looking down at the star was a little surreal. There were a dozen folders at her feet demanding her attention, and Juliette felt, for the first time since arriving at the up-top, that this was her job. Her work at Mechanical was behind her. She had left that place in far better condition than she’d found it, had stayed long enough to hear the near-silent hum of a repaired generator, to see a shaft spin in such perfect alignment that one couldn’t tell if it was moving at all. And now she had traveled to the up-top to find here the rattle and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a misalignment that was eating away at the true engine of the silo, just as Jahns had forewarned.

I like this attention to detail and consistency. How many times have we been occupied with our thoughts and bridged them or the resolution of them over to our day to day lives.

There is a long simile that goes on and on about what the silos are for and how any why humans are housed in them, which is really a focal point of the story. I would have liked to share it but is really just too long for this space. I bring it up because of this:


It turned out some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.

This was when the conspiracy was revealed. It tied everything up nicely and even hearkened back to the knitting from book two.


My favorite part about this series though had to be the villain. Right now my company is trying to purge its network and computer systems of a virus. It is not uncommon to hear my co-workers lambasting and cursing IT through the hallways. The villain in this story is one that anyone who has worked with an IT department has dreamed about making a villain, because the villain is the IT department. It made me think that Hugh Howey had some unresolved issues with his own IT group when he wrote this.

The one thing I didn't like as a reader, but I appreciated as a writer was seeing the way the author developed his writing over the course of the series. His first three novels all focused on one character solely. Then by four and five he had a whole cast of characters. I was hoping he would keep the one character mein throughout. Despite this one, itty, bitty, thing, it was a great series to read. Ranked right up there with watching the new BSG and other current, excellent Sci-Fi. Still not quite Vernor Vingian though.

A Bit More Self Promotion

So over the past week, two more blogs have reviewed my novel On the Edge. Again, I'm not yet seeing any resulting downloads or purchases of my book, but the reviews are nice to read.

This first is from My Name is Sage, a blog run by the publicist, Sage Adderly, who I hired to run my blog tour for this book.

On The Edge is the second novel I've read by Dick Hannah and the growth in his writing is evident. While the plot of this story revolves around the military and disciplined fitness, two things that normally wouldn't hold my attention, Hannah's writing captivated me until the last page. 

This is a solid mystery with a group of characters that aren't what they appear to be. Protagonist Joe Malone attempts to juggle life after the war, family drama, and deceit within his work community. Hannah kept my interest with multiple twists and turns, which is necessary when executing a suspenseful tale. I liked that Dick Hannah added a light romance to the story. It added to the action-packed book without being distracting from the overall plot.

This second review is by Liz Wilkins of the Blog Liz Loves Books.

I liked the way this story flowed – well written and intriguing enough in the early stages to keep you turning pages, and with a good dose of interesting characterization it was an easy but involving read. Joe himself is well imagined – the challenges he faces to restore his mental health after the horrors he faced in Iraq are cleverly written and add great depth to his character. As for the adventure racing angle, I found this exciting to read – I don’t know a lot about this area but I found myself enjoying finding out. The author has written what he knows – and it shows.

All in all I would say this was worth a read if you like adventure, mystery and a great story well told.

Naturally I can't help but agree with both of these reviews. Secondly, these are the two most indepth reviews I've yet gotten. Unlike one or two of the others, these read as though the bloggers took time in reading the books. Of all the blog stops that did reviews I've yet to get a negative review (which is good to have) but like I mentioned above, no changes in purchases based on the blog tour.

Meat on the Bone Monday

I like this little ole blog, but sometimes I think there isn't enough meat on the bone. There's fun stuff, and interesting turns of phrase, and some clever lines, and some news every once and again, but there's no long thoughtful pieces. So, today I'm starting to write some posts with a bit more meat.

I wrote a piece called Targeting Your Perfect Job a while ago for a blog called Hullabalog. To read the whole thing you can still find it here, but I will give you the high points as a part of this post. Basically I said that when going after a job you should attack it like we attacked objectives in the military. First we pounded it with artillery, then we raced in with Bradley's full of Rangers, we had Rangers fast roping onto roof tops of the target buildings, we had Rangers coming in from the wood line and finally we had air support the whole time. We hit every target like that, with a thought out plan that attacked the objective from multiple angles. I wrote about attacking job hunting the same way.

At first I thought about a post about writing novels with this same philosophy, but I realized that it didn't really fit the mold. Writing novels I find is not like what I described above. Selling and publishing is, but that may be a post for a different day, in terms of just writing a novel, it's more like a thirty-mile road march.

In the Battalion we had to complete a thirty-mile road march twice a year. Once a week was a ten-miler. Once a quarter was a twenty-miler. Once a half year was a thirty-miler. Road marching is rough. When I first joined the military I knew that this would be something I would have to do so I trained. I didn't train enough. The first road march was heavy and grueling and I think we only walked three miles with thirty pound ALICE packs.

By the time I got to Battalion a ten-miler with a sixty pound pack was nothing. My hardest challenge in this regard was in Best Ranger when we had a twenty-five mile march with an eighty-five pound pack. Missed it by "that" much.

What's all this have to do with novel writing. Just as road marching is grueling and monotonous, writing a novel is the same. There's no glamor in the writing part. There's no fast roping in. Or sitting on the edge of a Little Bird and jumping onto a roof. There's no parachuting, or Bradley's or motorcycles on the airfield. It's the hard slog, and grueling foot steps, and the tightness in the upper back and pinched neves in the shoulders from the shoulder straps. Writing a novel is an exercise in monotony and a mental and physical challenge as much as anything else, just in a slightly different way.

But also like a long road march, when you finish the since of accomplishment is unlike any other. We completed one thirty-miler in Oregon and it became a march to the sea. The deuce-and-a-half drove us thirty miles from the coast and dropped us off. When we made it to the ocean we dropped in place and rested, but we also felt pride in accomplishment. That's finishing a novel.

Book Review: Catch-22 - Who Knew a Word Like Infundibuliform Even Existed?

Finished Catch-22 last week. If you read this blog you knew I was reading it based on this post about déjà vu. Also if you read this blog you’ll know that my book reviews aren’t book reviews per se where I recommend reading or not reading the book, or discuss it’s strengths and weakness. I might do that, but in general, my aim is to pick out the words, phrases and passages that catch my eye and mark them down so I can better remember them. That being said; Catch-22 is a terrific book to read in terms of vocabulary. The below are just a small sampling:

Infundibuliform - shaped like a funnel

Denudate – to lay bare by erosion

Otiose- producing no useful result; futile

Argosies - a fleet of ships; a rich supply

Fustian - a strong cotton and linen fabric; a class of cotton fabrics usually having a pile face and twill weave; high-flown or affected writing or speech; broadly; anything high-flown or affected in style

Callipygous- having shapely buttocks

And, perhaps the most apropos word in Catch-22 as it so elegantly states the Yosarian’s nature in one word:

Captious- marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections ;calculated to confuse, entrap, or entangle in argument

As I said in my previous post, I remembered many of the lines and the same is true of the vocabulary words. I recall asking my grandfather about the word fustian. He didn’t know the definition. I believe he made me go look it up.

I also remember several passages, including this one about one of my favorite characters, Major Major Major Major:
“Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieved mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”

When describing Doc Daneeka, Heller writes:
“He was like a man who had grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed”

My question, shouldn’t it be “thawed?” I mean unthawed is frozen, right? You thaw a steak to make it not frozen?

Finally, a rather significant scene occurs when a naked Yossarian is sitting up in a tree watching Snowden’s funeral. Milo comes to hang out with him and the following passage appears:
“Milo was stung and made no effort to disguise his wounded feelings. It was a muggy, moonlit night filled with gnats, moths, and mosquitos. Milo lifted his arm suddenly and pointed toward the open-air theater, where the milky dust-filled beam bursting horizontally from the projector slashed a conelike swath in the blackness and draped in a fluorescent membrane of light the audience titled on the seats in hypnotic sages, their faces focused upward toward the aluminized move screen. Milio’s eyes were liquid with integrity, and his artless uncorrupted face was lustrous with a shining mixture of sweat and insect repellant.”

I liked it for those final two words. Writing “insect repellant” seems to thrown the whole passage off kilter. Makes the reader wonder why it was used at all.

“The floor swayed like the floating raft at the beach and the stitches on the inside of his thigh bit into his flesh like fine set of fish teeth as he limped across the aisle.”

Great simile that…..like fine set of fish teeth. Perfectly describes stitches.

The final passage was used when Yossarian had to deal with a new group of young roommates.
“He could not make the shut up; they were worse then women, they had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.”

What I find the most interesting part about this book, and other Heller books is the way in which the ending is revealed at the beginning of the book. For the entire book the reader knows that Yossarian is struggling with Snowden’s death. The reader even knows how and when it happened. The final reveal is minor but significant in putting the entire puzzle together. It’s similar to most of Heller’s other books I feel, particularly “Something Happened.” But, it has helped me. I’ve been having trouble dealing with a similar aspect in my own manuscrip, On Edge. Perhaps I should take a cue from Heller. Instead of hiding it from the reader, just let them know a good part of it right up front, let a detail or two fall throughout the story, then reveal the entirety at the end.

Nevertheless, fun to read if you like long, run on sentences, confusing arguments, and words like callipygous.

The End of the Experiment (aka AAR 2)

Just like my original AAR, I'm a-doing one for On the Edge now.

I know that there was a variable "control group" since I had two different novels that I was promoting, but despite Sage's best efforts, I just don't see any great increase in sales due to the blog tour. Once again my family has come in strong ordering the bulk of the copies that have been digested by the market, and I'm wondering how many of my On the Edge novels will become "home-fill" for my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Richard's ski chalet, but I'll take home-fill over land-fill or no-fill.

That being said I'm going to try a couple more things.

First, I'm going to try a mass market promoter. This, I'm sure will provide a sterile experience that has been promised to be tailored to my specific genre. We shall see.

Secondly, I'm going to hit up the folks who reviewed my last novel, Toe the Line. Let's see if they like the second novel as much as the first.

Finally, one thing I've found, which is somewhat inspirational, for Toe the Line I got about five rave reviews and two "so-so's" and one straight up "this sucka is bad." Not so with On the Edge. By my tally, I've got about four "this is good's" and maybe two or three "I liked it alot and intend to buy more." That means growth in my book.

Book Review: Writing the Breakout Novel

Finished reading Donald Maass’, Writing the Breakout Novel. This is without hyperbole the best book on the craft of writing I’ve read yet. I have found that most of these craft books all say the same thing….character is key, increase conflict, yada, yada, yada. Although Writing the Breakout Novel includes many of these same tips, Maass provides quite a bit more, and most importantly delivers it an extremely easy manner.

There were times in college when I would be blessed with spectacular professors (a rare event in the Texas A&M English Dept). These professors seemed to be speaking directly to me, when in fact I was just one of hundreds in the auditorium. They were the professors of the classes that I looked forward to attending (and were usually spot-lighted by the atrocious professors in the History Dept). Reading Writing the Breakout Novel made me feel as if I was in one of those spectacular classes again.

A short snippet and some of his advice? “A breakout novelist is somewhat maniacal, possibly even sadistic. They discover what is the worst that can happen then make matters worse still.”
The book is filled with great passages that are both insightful and are fun to read.

Maass also stocks the book with passages from books that are representative of breakout novels. A great one, and one I intend to mimic in my book, On the Edge:

“I used to think that a fall was more than likely not the result of one stupendous error, or an unfortunate accident. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually you don’t lose your stomach or yourself landing. You don’t necessarily sense the motion. I’ve found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: you slip around the truth once and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.”
Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World

One of these passages was particularly memorable if only because I remember reading it years ago when I read Snowcrash, and I liked it even then. It’s about a pizza deliver man’s car in the near (dystopian) future.

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the asteroid belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches; talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash

Finally, I was astounded by how many of the breakout novels he cited that I have read. One that I apparently need to get, and very soon, is Shogun. He cited that more than any other novel.

Basically, I went into Writing the Breakout not looking forward to it, and thinking that perhaps it wouldn’t be geared to my particular capabilities as a writer. I was wrong. Not only did it have a strong message and easy to read content, but I would recommend it to new writers and experienced authors alike.

Why Writer's Write

So this is why people write! I should get reviews more often. A few months ago I wrote about a review that I got online for one of my novels (see here) and then before that another one (see here). Those two were nothing compared to the two I just got over the winter holidays. I've updated my author page with all of my novels now, and it's fun to see the reviews coming in (see here).

The first one I got was for On the Edge (see here) from Michael Best:

The aspect that really hit me was two things he wrote. The first was about the ability to add depth and richness to the story. 

The author skillfully creates a clash of characters, though adding to the depth and richness of the story, it requires the reader to remain exceptionally engaged without missing a beat. Given the nature of the story, that is not hard to do.

The second quote discusses the allegorical quality applied to the story. Was I trying to do that? Yep. What's funny is that Vapor Trail has a far more sophisticated touch of that than On the Edge. 

Dick Hannah’s book has an allegorical quality to it, in that, Joe Malone is symbolic of today’s war vet and emblematic of the struggles to adapt to civilian life. Leaving the cruelty of war, expecting to find peace and acceptance, becomes an illusion upon return to civilian life for the MC, as is the case in the real world.

The second review was for Vapor Trail (see here) and it's just as fun to read, this one from someone named "Romantic:"

I have to say, it feels good to say that character development was so good. Thanks so much!

Mechanically well done, dialogue exceptional, plot believable and tense (in just the right places)...but for me, it was the character development that really shot this one through the roof.

It feels so good to be recognized for your craft. This must be why writers strive to keep producing. I can tell you this much, reviews like these make me want to write more!

More on Virtual Classes

I've been posting alot on the work I did in virtual classrooms in 2010 or so. I had no idea we were so cutting edge. We started a network of zoom classrooms in 2011 using Google Hangout and ran them every day for over three years providing safety and skills training. Each class, every day, lasted 8 hours and we had a new class start each week. It was rigorous to keep up with that much training and in that style. We learned a lot very quickly. 

We made sure everyone had a participant handbook, we had lockers in each of the 50 training rooms that had real-world implements that the learners could touch and feel and try on as we went over the tools, we had a variety of media to keep them engaged and entertained; lecture, PowerPoint, videos, case studies, interviews with experts, and we made sure everyone had a tablet or smartphone for intermittent quizzes with immediate feedback. 

In terms of technology, it was this last addition that seemed to have the greatest impact. That ability to utilize a smartphone to take spaced practice quizzes and see immediately how they did and how they performed in terms of the rest of the class, was a game-changer. I think it might have been the blend of being a part of the class and still being in their training room. It helped to break that 5th wall. 

Another technique, irrespective of technology, that we found effective, was to engage the learners in frequent talk-back moments from the very start. The learners were encouraged through different means to engage with the facilitator and the other classrooms, and this helped them realize that the entire class was based on two-way communication and they were not expected to be passive receivers of the information. Another technique, was during the videos the facilitators and the producer made sure to say something to the class "Mike in Detroit, we need you to stop leaving the classroom so much or we will have to ask you to leave" or "Robert, can you please put your phone away during the video?" These little moments where the learners were reminded that they were on camera and being watched helped to ensure there was engagement and that the learners were not drifting. 

Lastly, as I see more and more organizations using zoom classrooms, I have found two other aspects. First, we had a mixture of classrooms with learners and the single learner who might be taking the class at home on his own PC. We found the classroom atmosphere, even though they were a part of a zoom network, acted as a natural facilitator. Those people who were solo were generally the learners who drifted off the quickest. 

We found that we had to have a suite of tools and techniques to keep the learner engaged, and it wasn't just one or two things, but an entire online tool and technique set. Sadly, the project ended when the company became too successful and we had to hire more and more people. We reached a max-out limit and had to find more scalable means of training. 

Anna have you seen success with any tools or techniques like these? How have you seen these problems overcome?