More on podcasts

I was very honoured that Isabel Swift enjoyed my blog on Tote bags so much that she reprinted it on her blog. She had contacted me before to let me know and I was totally thrilled.

Liz Fenwick had asked about the donut and the hole posts, plus Isabel's comments and they can be found in early March 2008. Some day, I will figure out how to do links to individual posts and do a greatest hits thing.

But the bottom line about the podcasts is that they are a fantastic education in series romance (as well as romance and writing in general). They should be required listening for any aspiring author or indeed for any author who is currently writing. You can either listen via your computer or download them to your ipod/mp3 player. All the ipods in my house belong to the children, so I listen through the computer.

And once you become started on podcasts, you will realize how easy they are and what a great auditory learning tool they are. They do say that there are four different types of learning styles -- visual, auditory, kinetic and my mind has gone blank on the last one... But podcasts are a chance to exercise the auditory.

Doughnuts and holes

Life can be odd. You hear phrase that resonates -- for example Isabel Swift's mantra of heeping your eye on the donut and not the hole, and suddenly, it seems to keep appearing.
I was rereading Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer and he used a variation on the phrase. He used in the context that sometimes writers are so fixated on the exception that they forget the rule. In fiction, every world that the writer creates operates by a certain set of rules. Unless the writer has shown the reader that the world operates by a different set of rules, the reader will assume it operates by a general set of commonsense, societal rule. For example, gravity, or phoning the police when your house is broken into. Or that intense fire burns. But sometimes, you become so focused on the exception that you forget the rule and then the heroine may seem like she is Too Stupid to Live and the reader forgets to suspend disbelief.
If you are going to break a rule, show that it is possible before you break it. This goes back to the whole plotted plant thing.
And it is always a matter of keeping your eye on the doughnut, rather than actually eating it...because the other problem for many writers is the tendency to eat after expending brain power...