I can’t even tell you how much I love this PowerPoint slide show about book beginnings. Let me count the ways:

1) Common 1st Page Troubles: Backstory, Info Dump, Character Dump

2) Biggest Bad Advice: Start with “action”

3) Action But No Character: Offers an action scene for the sake of excitement, but without any connection to the real plot, conflict, or story arc

4) Parting Wisdom: Writing is rewriting

5) Resources: ANYTHING by agent Donald Maass

An Invocation for Beginnings – Ze Frank

Yuvi Zalkow

A xebec was a Mediterranean sailing ship that was used mostly for trading. It would have a long overhanging bowsprit and protruding mizzen mast. It also can refer to a small, fast vessel of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, used almost exclusively in the Mediterranean Sea.

The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.

My good friend Loreth Anne White sent me a link to this article from which I’ve snipped the above. I’ve talked before about how much I love walking. As long as it’s outdoors. Because I cannot STAND to walk on the treadmill. So stupid when I could be in the air conditioned living room watching the big screen TV. Walking to me is about being outdoors. Usually in the sunshine and slathered in sunscreen, but even gloomy days will do, and misty days, and frosty cold ones, which we almost never get here.

I can’t even tell you how many words I’ve dictated while walking. I used to walk at lunch while working the day job, sometimes on the downtown streets, sometimes on the health club track. I specifically remember dictating a lot of LOVE IN BLOOM on that track. And I’ve walked the dogs in the neighborhood and dictated, two birds with one stone, and all. I’m quite sure people think I’m strange, but moving doesn’t require thought, so it’s the perfect time to let the muse have her way. And then there’s the part about my brain working better, and having more energy, and sleeping like a baby, and not wanting to turn to junk food (or at least as much) when I’m stressed.

I’ve slacked off the last few months, but am determined to get back to it. I feel amazing when I’m moving, even if it makes it doubly hard to sit and write when done!

This makes it a bit hard to give a sexy excerpt but I’ve posted a short PG-13 rated one after the cut.

He came closer, one step, then another, stopping in front of her, close enough to touch but doing so only with his eyes. They held hers as he shrugged out of his shirt, and she breathed deeply, scenting him, the hint of sun and heat that stayed with him.

The skin of his hands, his wrists, that of his face and neck was baked to a darker bronze than that covering the rest of his torso. A cowboy’s tan. A working man’s tan. His pectoral muscles and his shoulders and his neck telling the story of the manual labor he required of his upper body.

She couldn’t help herself, and she reached out, sliding her fingertips along his collarbone, the skin beneath resilient and firm. He kept his hands at his hips, but pulled in a sharp breath, and her stomach clenched in response. This thing between them…

“Hurry,” she whispered. It was all she could say, her chest rising and falling as she watched him shed his jeans and his briefs.

Then he was naked in front of her, his forehead against hers, his toes on hers, his hands holding hers at her sides, his cock between them insistent. They stood together, breathed together, let the room disappear as together they became one.

She closed her eyes and felt the sting of tears, but left them to well behind her lids. Wiping them away would mean taking her hands from Dax’s and she couldn’t bring herself to do that.

He lifted his chin, brushed his lips along her hairline, whispered, “Do you know how beautiful you are?”

A shiver ran like a river down her spine, pooled at the base, spread lower and worked its way between her legs to ready her. “You’re the one who’s beautiful. Your mouth. Your hands. The way you touch me. The way you look at me.”

“Just not the way I look, eh?” he asked with a laugh.

She opened her eyes, lifted her hands and threaded her fingers into his hair, holding him. “I didn’t know what to expect. When I heard you were back. I’d pictured you all this time as I knew you in high school. Cocky and brash and always with the sort of grin that turned girls to puddles at your feet. But now…”

“I hear I look really good in jeans.”

“In them, but even more so out of them.”

Sleep
I’m very fortunate to work from home on my schedule. My kids are grown and gone, my husband doesn’t leave for the office until 9:30, getting home around 7:00. I don’t set an alarm clock any longer. I did for a gazillion years. I’m finally sleeping enough to keep my brain functioning at its best, and it’s showing in my work. It’s cleaner, deeper, more thoughtful. I lost many hours of sleep in the past, writing at 3:00 a.m. before leaving for the day job, and I know many many authors write on similar schedules. But sleep is vital. get as much as you can! And if you don’t believe me, there’s this study:

Belenky’s high-tech brain images show that sleep debt decreases the entire brain’s ability to function — most significantly impairing the areas of the brain responsible for attention, complex planning, complex mental operations, and judgement.

Support System
Every writer needs a strong support system, though not every writer will find it in the same place. Again, I’m very fortunate that my husband is behind me 100% through all the industry ups and downs. I also have a handful of close writer friends to whom I can say anything about what’s happening in our careers. The trust network we share is invaluable.

Slow and Steady
I’m not a speedy writer. I don’t fast draft. In my entire career I’ve written 20 pages in a day one single time. I’m comfortable at 5. Maybe 7. But I also polish as I go. It’s how my brain works. When I get to the end of a book, I’m done. Slow and steady works for me, and my process is exactly how James Rollins describes his in the video below.

The wind was brittle, bitterly cold. She sat on the park bench, waiting, the wool of her coat and pants no match for the cold seeping up from the cement. Her toes were frosty, her fingertips near to frozen, her breath formed a cloud when she exhaled into the cold air.

Yes, I wrote that. Just now. With very little thought. Yet if I saw that same paragraph in a book I would grumble. If I saw it in one of my own finished works, I would weep (and I have, because no matter how many editing passes, bits of bad writing always slip through)! Why? Because of the overuse of the word cold in that one single paragraph. It’s unnecessary and smacks of inattention. I once read a paragraph on the first page of a book that described a character’s short white skirt three times. Again. Unnecessary. We got that it’s short and white the first time, just like we got that it’s cold outside up above in the first line. This is, for me, what comes out in my first draft. When revising, I’ll roll my eyes when I run across passages such as this. I was in the moment while writing. I was feeling the cold. I wasn’t thinking about word choice as much as sensation. The words frigid, frosty, chilly, or icy were out of reach. During revisions, however, I will rewrite and rework to keep the above from happening. And, yes, this sort of repetition is totally different than words or phrases repeated purposefully for rhythm or emphasis. The above is just lazy writing. It’s so so SO easy to make different word choices, to give a different feeling to the snippet with an evocative selection of descriptive words.

The wind was brittle, bitterly cold. She sat on the park bench, waiting, the wool of her coat and pants no match for the icy chill seeping up from the cement. Her toes were frosty, her fingertips near to frozen, her breath formed a cloud when she exhaled into the frigid, biting air.