The Summer of Letting Go Karma or Coincidence? Countdown (Ian T. Healy)

As some of you may know, THE SUMMER OF LETTING GO, my second novel for young adults comes out March 25th from Algonquin Young Readers.

THE SUMMER OF LETTING GO tells the story of almost-16-yr-old Francesca “Beans” “Frankie” Schnell who, four years ago witnessed her baby brother, Simon, drown. Guilty and broken, Francesca has hunkered down in the shadows of her life, resolved to play second fiddle to her dead brother’s memory and to her best friend Lisette, a blonde bubbly beauty Francesca lives vicariously through. That is, until she meets a young boy named Frankie Sky who bears an uncanny resemblance to her brother. Frankie brings humor and hope to Francesca’s life, but are all the similarities between Frankie and Simon merely wishful coincidences, or could he be Simon’s reincarnation?

Curious coincidences abound in THE SUMMER OF LETTING GO —not only the overlaps between Simon and Frankie Sky, but also Bradley’s gift to Francesca, Bradley’s bird sighting, and the ties to the statue of  Saint Florian (you'll have to read to know what these are ;)). Midway through the story Francesca starts to think these events can’t really be coincidences, “but something bigger and magical at work.”

Have you ever experienced strange events that seemed like more than coincidence and made you wonder if fate was at work or that soul and or reincarnation exist?

Throughout the month, I've decided to pose that question to friends, some writers, others bearing other artistic talents, for a brief account of their own experience with karma, kismet or a mystical connection. I leave you to answer the question, “Karma or coincidence? Random or something magical at work?” 

- gae

Today I have writer Ian T. Healy, author of the Just Cause Universe series of superherofiction, including JACKRABBIT, which releases in print and ebook versions worldwideon April 1, 2014. Ian puts a twist on a theme by talking about how much fate, if any, is involved in love. . . 

Love at First Sight

Love at first sight is a terribly overused cliché, but I do think it can happen to anyone once in a lifetime, and this was mine. We met by chance in high school, during a convention that only lasted two days. She lived far away. She had a boyfriend. I had a girlfriend. And yet, we both found something in those two days that couldn't easily be explained or forgotten.

Call it what you will. Call it puppy love or a fling or whatever, but this was Love in the Time of No Internet. We burned through hundreds of stamps, sending letters back and forth, making the sort of great romantic plans that teenagers do. All the while, we each lived our own lives, with our own relationships, remaining each others' pipe dreams. We graduated high school and went off to different colleges, and still the letters flowed back and forth. And then she transferred to my school. She wound up in the dorm room directly above mine. What are the odds, right? She was in one of my classes. The letters stopped due to proximity, but somehow the love we felt as kids never blossomed into anything more.

Over the years, we still ran into each other in the most unlikely of places. We talked about it, and have talked about it at length. I was never much for the guiding hand of Fate, because I am a firm believer in free will. But if there is such a thing, the Universe has expended a lot of energy and effort to push us together, and if that can give anyone hope for their own stories, may it be an inspiration.

- Ian

Please check out The Summer of Letting Go and all of Ian's books! Thanks for reading. 

Friday Feedback: Ready, Set, Action!

Hey Friday Feedbackers!

I am definitely not in this position today.

We're having some fun today, all about action -- which is kind of ironic since I pulled my back out on Tuesday and have been the picture of unhappy inaction this week.


But no worries about lame old me . . .  ;)


My friend Ian T. Healy* joins us today in conjunction with the release of his new novel The Archmage ("The would-be Archmage has slain nearly all the magic-users in the world, taking their power for himself. If he succeeds in killing the Lucky Seven’s own mage Stratocaster, the Archmage’s power will become absolute and plunge the world into darkness under his cruel reign. But not if Mustang Sally and the rest of the Just Cause superheroes have anything to say about it. OUT OF TIME Only time will tell if Sally can run fast enough to escape the Archmage’s clutches, fast enough to outwit his evil plan, fast enough to save the world."), book 2 in his Just Cause Universe series.

Ian was with me once before for the launch of his first Just Cause book. He is also the creator of the Writing Better Action Through Cinematic Techniques workshop, which helps writers to improve their action scenes.

So, I asked Ian to share with us his top 5 tips for writing effective action scenes. I must say, I thought these were pretty darn helpful, and one of them even surprised me. I've added a few of my own comments in pink (because I'm a girl, yes, sue me).

See what you think, and if you have an action scene to share today, Ian is your guy! (of course, share any excerpt you want!)

Ian's Top Five Tips for Writing Authentic and Awesome Action:

    1. Set your scene before the action begins.

    -As writers, description is important. But there is a time and a place for everything, and that place is before your action sequence begins. Putting lengthy description into the middle of an action    sequence bogs it down to a standstill.

    2. Pacing, pacing, pacing.

    -Action sequences move at a rapid pace. Think about the great movie action sequences you've seen. Try to duplicate that kind of energy in your writing by keeping things and people moving, reacting, and taking action. Remember that all action scenes have an ultimate goal, like Escape The Bad Guys or Catch The Robbers or Kill The Other Guy Before He Kills You. Your characters should always be working toward that goal. An action scene without a goal is like a fish with a bicycle.

    3. No shaky-cam or jumpcuts

    -It's important to keep your scene flowing from one event to the next. Keep the action centered on one character. Moving your focus between multiple characters makes a scene read as choppy and hard to follow. Imagine if you were a film director and tried to do an action sequence with as few cuts as possible. (Me: this is great advice. I've seen some of my action writers on here make this mistake. Focus on too many characters in the scene, which definitely confuses the reader and slows down the scene!)

    4. Long sentences read faster than short ones.

    -This one is tricky, because it seems to go against common sense. (Me: It does! It does!) But when you read a sentence out loud, the way many people read in their minds, every time you come to a period, you pause. You pause with commas, too, but it doesn't feel as slow. The effect of this in an action scene is that short sentences feel like stuttered pacing - the literary equivalent of the shaky-cam. Longer sentences feel like smooth, fast action, and increase both the pacing of the scene and the tension. Save your short sentences for things that need to be highlighted, or events that might be filmed in slow motion.

    5. Use words that imply motion, movement, and action.

-Don't let your characters walk or crawl or step aside. Instead, make them sprint or scramble or leap clear. Say you had to describe someone going from one end of an obstacle course to the other as fast as possible. You would use words like climb and jump and duck. Now give that person a gun and set up a couple other people shooting at them. That adds a whole new spectrum of potential terms. Don't be afraid to use words that add a sense of energy, excitement, and danger. They're an important part of your writer's toolbox.

So, now that Ian's given you some pointers, are you curious to read an excerpt from him? Okay, well, it's Friday Feedback, so you know the RULES.

Here's a short action scene from early in Ian T. Healy's The Archmage:

Doublecharge had said speed was of the essence, and nobody was faster than Sally.

Nobody.

She ran down the line of guards and pushed clip releases with one hand while she popped the chambered rounds out of the slides with the other. She’d practiced the technique for hours until she could perform it faster than even a seasoned gunman like Jack could pull a trigger.  In spite of her speed, one guard got a surprised round off.  Sally cursed and changed direction instantly, something she could do no matter how fast she was running. She could see the bullet spiraling through the air right toward a hostage. She slapped it aside with one of her horseshoes to send it toward a wall.

She paused in front of the guard who’d fired just long enough to disable his gun and waggle a reproachful finger in his face. Then she sped away and headed for the three villains who held civilian hostages. One of them twitched suddenly in her direction faster than anyone should have been able to with a motion almost a blur even to Sally.

Something wrapped around her legs, constricted, and she skidded hard into a printing press. Her goggles cracked with the impact. At least it wasn’t my skull, she thought in a daze. Blotchy stars danced in her visions from the force of the impact. What the hell was that? She looked down toward her feet. A sinuous ribbon of ruby-colored energy wrapped around her ankles and held them fast. The end of the ribbon curled away to end in the fist of a tall, reedy cowboy with a real soup-strainer of a mustache.

---

- Ian (& gae)

p.s. If you want to get in touch with Ian you can find him here:

on Twitter as @ianthealy

on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorIanThomasHealy

Author website: www.ianthealy.com

Got superhero?

me, in my first wetsuit, 2008

Those who've known me for a while, know a few things about me:

1. I want to be a superhero, and I think my wetsuit will turn me into one. Given that I've swum more than a 5K (at once, mind you) since this photo, and this year I've swum in the open waters of the Long Island Sound well into December, it may just be (slowly, but surely) working; and

2. My life hasn't been the same since I entered the first ever Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award* contest in 2007- 2008, not just because, from there, I took my writing seriously, got agented (and reagented, and then re-re-agented, oy), and got a book deal, but also because I made some of the best friends of my life through that contest, and met some amazing writers, many of whom have gone on to some pretty cool success.

So, what's my point? Um. If you combine those two things, superhero'ing (yeah, sue me, I made up that word) and ABNA friends, you get that I'm happy to be congratulating one such dude today, and introducing Ian Thomas Healy, a/k/a He, of the Hair.

This is Ian (and his hair):

And this is his brand spankin' new Superhero book, Just Cause:

Isn't it cool looking!? Ian says, "Just Cause is available directly from the publisher, New Babel Books (http://newbabelbooks.com) in both ebook and print editions, and to shop small businesses!" And I agree!

I asked Ian to describe Just Cause in a single sentence, so here you go: "a rookie superhero races to earn her place on the world's greatest team, but first she'll have to confront the villain who killed her father."

Of course, she will, Ian. Of course she will. :)

I also asked him to describe a bit about his book's genre: "If New Adult was a real genre, Just Cause would fit. The main character is 18, just graduated high school, so it fits into the upper edges of YA. But Superhero fiction is its own subgenre, straddling the line between science fiction and fantasy, with its own set of recognizable tropes and conventions. It is a growing genre, the way cyberpunk took off in the early '80s, with authors including Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge, Carrie Vaughn, Austin Grossman, Rob Rogers, Van Allen Plexico, and oh yes, George R. R. Martin.

 And, finally, I was curious how he got into writing Superhero fiction: "I'm a longtime comic book geek. The moment I realized I could write superheroes in prose instead of graphic form was when I read the first Wild Cards book, written by numerous authors and edited by George R. R. Martin."

 Of course, me and my sound-bite love wanted to know just a few other tidbits.

• First, Ian's favorite Just Cause scene: "My favorite scene takes place at the climax, in a huge battle in Guatemala, when Sally finally faces down the villain who killed her father and ends up fighting him while he rockets off into the stratosphere (did I mention she can't fly?)."

• Second, the hardest part about writing Just Cause: ". . . was realizing that it required massive changes. I wound up cutting 40Kwords entirely and writing 20K new words to transform it from the mess it was before into the tale it is now."

Yeah, yeah, tell me something I don't know (and live... ;))

• And last, of course, I wanted to know what kind of superhero Ian is, himself, in real life. Okay, fine, would want to be, if he weren't one Of the Hair already:  "For me, trying to pigeonhole a single superpower I'd want to have is like asking a food critic what his one favorite dish is. I've always kind of liked the idea of a non-powered superhero like Batman, so maybe I'd be this guy, Black Dog:

I like that Black Dog seems to be in some sort of water universe... ;)

Black Dog has no powers, just pure badassery, like a mixture of Chuck Norris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Gates."

Badassery, hmmm. I guess if I couldn't breathe underwater, some plain old badassery would be nice.

So, there you have it: Ian, Hair, Badassery, and an intro to Just Cause. So, what are you waiting for, peeps?! Go and get your copy. Or, one for your favorite superhero lover. Wait, not superhero lover. Superhero lover! Oh, geez, never mind, I don't care. Just check it out, and get one for someone you love.

*stretches on wetsuit and leaves.*

- gae

*This year's Amazon Contest starts 1/23. Check it out if you're itching to be a published writer!