D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

female hero

A Swann for the Dawn and the Sundown

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I cried as I first watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End in the theater. Why, you ask? Let me tell you. Forget Jack Sparrow (a stellar performance from Johnny Depp). Forget Will Turner (Orlando Bloom in all his matinee-idol glory). Because the story, contrary to popular belief, is about neither of them. No, the tale recounted in the first three movies of this franchise begins and ends with Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly in dazzling form).

Remember the lilting voice of a child singing the pirate song at the beginning of The Curse of the Black Pearl? That’s Elizabeth Swann singing her heart out as she and her father sail to the Caribbean. Mother gone, father all that’s left, and she dreams of being a pirate.

The plot twists and turns around a myriad of obstacles and self-serving characters, but watch the movies and you’ll see it. We wander off with an often seemingly lost Jack Sparrow. We follow the perils of Will Turner as he attempts to save both Elizabeth and his own father from doom and destruction. But it is Elizabeth who rises above it all, who, as she matures, gains confidence and the ability to save her own self, thank you. And when we get to At World’s End, she has blossomed into the character most instrumental in determining the course of the conclusion of the story.

I mean, think about it. The battle on the Pearl with Will and Elizabeth almost single-handedly taking on the attackers from the Flying Dutchman, while Captain Barbossa marries the two of them? A girl sword fighting? While sparring verbally with the love of her life? And then marrying him while they’re still fighting the villainous hordes? For this fan of strong roles for women in story-telling and female heroes who aren’t afraid to get dirty, it was heaven. But that wasn’t where I cried. That moment came a little earlier in the movie.

The Brethren Court of the pirates had spoken and named Elizabeth the new King of the Pirates. (I value the screenwriters’ choice of keeping it the “King” even though the new King was not male, but I digress.) As King, Elizabeth leads the pirate lords and their ships into the ultimate battle with Davy Jones and the East India Company. As they face their foe and realize they are massively outgunned and out-shipped, spirits drop.

And then…Elizabeth takes a deep breath, jumps up on the railing and rallies the troops in a speech reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach, dear friends….” This young woman—whom some might call a “slip of a girl”—stands up there proud and defiant and smacks these big, strong men around verbally and drags them into fighting mode. I cried.

railing

I literally cried in that theater. Whether consciously or not, the story-by and written-by guys had created the first TRUE female hero to rise to the surface in mainstream popular culture. I know there are many strong women holding their own in movies and books these days, but here’s the thing. Elizabeth Swann seized the mantle of leadership like a man while still maintaining her womanhood, and she did it under the near-impossible odds of a major motion picture with Johnny Depp at the helm of the performance vessel and Orlando Bloom as her love interest. At that moment in time, all eyes were on her, including Johnny’s and Orlando’s, and everyone in the audience knew it. She had commandeered a movie of testosterone-driven derring-do and made it her own.

All hail Elizabeth Swann, the King of the Pirates!

Applause, Applause, a Little Applause

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Many, many years ago, I began collecting buttons. Not the kind you use for fastening clothing; the kind with statements on them. You know, the original memes? My first one, given to me by a guy in my senior English class in high school after the summer I first fell in love with The Lord of the Rings read “FRODO LIVES,” in dark blue letters on pale pink. Many more TLoR buttons followed—“COME TO MIDDLE EARTH!,” “FRODO FOREVER,” “FRODO FREAKS OUT,”  and my favorite, “FRODO GAVE HIS FINGER FOR YOU.” I keep those in a small cloth drawstring pouch in my Wedgewood tin along with the rest of these treasures.

The summer after high school I visited Wales, Ireland, England and France. I must have come home with a dozen buttons from that trip. My favorite is the one that reads “UNINHIBIT.” Well, it was the 60s, after all. I loaned that one to someone who never returned it (and if you’re reading this, I want it back). There were also the requisite 60s staples—“MAKE LOVE NOT WAR,” “LONG LIVE THE ETERNAL NOW,” and “MELTS IN YOUR MIND, NOT IN YOUR MOUTH.” Others that were not so common were “EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG” and “UP IS A NICE PLACE TO BE.”

I also own several political buttons, from Tom Hayden’s Senate campaign in 1976 to Kerry/Edwards in 2004. I have a great quote on a beautifully crafted piece which reads, “Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got!” credited to Janis Joplin. And how about “NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO THERE YOU ARE”? Ain’t that the truth.

“HOMOPHOBIA DESTROYS FAMILIES”

“to Life, AIDS ACTION COMMITTEE”

“PRO CHILD PRO CHOICE”

You can see it’s an eclectic selection (though the politics remain fairly stable). I even have one that simply says, “HERO,” in white on red.

Today I’m a hero to me. Today I can announce that I am now officially “Award-Winning Author D. Hart St. Martin” whose second book in the Lisen of Solsta series, Tainted, won the Indie Reader Discovery Award in young adult fiction. See their review. Long live the eternal now!

front cover shot - low rez (2)

Celebrate this event with me. Both Fractured and Tainted books are free for Kindle from 5/30 through 6/3/14.

*The theater cat from Archy and Mehitabel

A Cover, A Cover–My Kingdom for a Cover

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When I set out on the journey to share Lisen of Solsta’s journey with anyone who would listen, I really had no idea what I was in for. All I could see was that independent publishing meant I didn’t have to write any more query letters, that no agent or publisher would send me one of those one-size-fits-all rejection letters ever again, and that the control was all in my hands.

Well, not quite.  Self-publication requires a multitude of skills beyond just writing.  Here are a few of them:

  1. More-than-amazing proofreading skills and the patience to do it just one more time.
    Or…the money to pay someone else to proofread it for you, someone you trust or someone a friend knows and trusts.
  2. A knowledge of what Word can do and the willingness to follow the suggestions on your print-on-demand (POD) publisher’s web site in order to make the print copy look professional.
    Or…the money to pay someone else to format it for you, after which you must make sure they formatted it to your specific instructions and it looks the way you expected it to look (unless they have a logical explanation for why they did it differently, of course).
  3. An average intelligence in order to fill out the forms for the POD publisher, making sure the name of the book is correct, you’ve included all pertinent authors and contributors, and have chosen tags that will call others to your book when they search.  (And don’t forget your cover artist as one of those contributors—see #4 below).
  4. The artistic expertise to create a stunning and seductive cover.
    Or…the money to hire someone to collaborate with you, listen to your ideas and then bring them to life.

It is this last item I have opened up Word today to address.

I wrote my first book, Fractured, with a great deal of care. I rewrote it and rewrote it, submitting it over and over to the writing workshop I trust with my life, and when I’d reached the magic moment of READY, I did everything listed above.  Except for the cover.  I used a template from my POD publisher and a painting that was in public domain.  It wasn’t a bad cover; I did a fairly good job at it.  But it wasn’t the sort of cover that attracts young people, and my book was YA fantasy.

And it bombed.  Big time.  Fractured was named an IndieReader.com Best Indie Book of 2013, but I think I sold no more than a dozen copies.  I did get 5-star reviews from everybody who read it, but they were all friends and family, save for that IndieReader.com review (also 5 stars).

There was a disconnect.  Great book, no response from potential readers.  What was the problem?  I’ve written before about how even the larger details of marketing elude me, but I do keep getting myself and my books out there.  No, the disconnect was that adequate-but-uninspiring cover.

So…I hired a cover artist—a good one.  I had her start on book 2 (Tainted) so I could get that one published.  She did a wonderful job.  See?

 Image

A couple of weeks after Tainted’s publication, my artist, Aidana WillowRaven, asked how we were doing in sales.  Nowhere.  I hadn’t wanted to look because I knew it wasn’t doing that well.  Who’s going to buy the second book in a series if they haven’t read the first one, and clearly few people had read the first one.  I came clean with Aidana and said that things might go much better if we got the first cover done and out there.

So now I’m on the line.  The new cover for Fractured is finished and available on Kindle.

Image

Gorgeous, isn’t it?

The paperback is another story.  Between typos in the back cover copy due in part (only in part) to making modifications too quickly to proof it properly and my dear POD publisher’s digital proofer somehow making the cover look like a printer somewhere had run out of ink, I’ve had to submit the thing, so far, a total of three times.  Aidana remained loyal and committed to getting it right and spent most of an entire day on my project when she could have been moving on to other work.  Heaven and the Goddess bless her.

Here’s my point.  Spend the money on a cover artist.  Find someone you can work with, someone who cares, someone who will put their arm on your shoulder and tell you they are your collaborator and they want it to be perfect as badly as you do.  In the beginning, I couldn’t afford this, and many who read this won’t be able to afford it either.  But spend as much as you possibly can.  Go as high as you can to get the best you can afford.  Look for sales, look for discounts, whatever it takes.  Because a book is like a beloved child, and first impressions do count.  If it’s truly good enough to publish, it deserves the very best you can give it.

Cue the Muse

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Today, I have a guest blogger who needs no introduction on my part.  She’s perfectly capable of introducing herself.

Call me Grace.  I am a muse.  Specifically, I am Hart’s muse.  We bonded when she was ten.  Her fourth grade class’ tarantula died a few days before open house.  Heartbroken, she wrote her first poem which her teacher posted above the abandoned cage.  And that’s how we met.  Though she didn’t actually know me yet.

In seventh grade, she decided to write a book about her adventures at a private girls school from the point of view of a bug.  Don’t mess with me here; I came up with the idea, and it was a good one.  Unfortunately she never got very far with it.  She still hopes to write a memoir about her experiences at the school, but I think the bug didn’t make the cut.

In high school, she and her best friend began writing a screenplay based on a historical incident.  She also fell in love with the Beatles.  I couldn’t compete with the Beatles, and her friend served as her muse for some years.  I retreated, remaining idle for a long time.

This is the way of it for us muses.  Unless the creative one opens her soul up to us, we wither a bit, but we never die.  Some artists—and I’m using the term in its general sense here—believe their muse has deserted them when in reality their fertile field needs to lie fallow for a little while.  Or for those of a more technical bent, their computer needs to reboot.

I reentered Hart’s life when her high-school-and-after friend had moved on, and she opened the door to me once again.  I handed her the third book in a series she’d begun reading many years earlier, and after she reached its end disappointed, I offered my best to her—a story in need of telling, a story she’d ache to tell.

Poor Hart.  It took her years to fully realize what I had given her, but when she finally surrendered to my magical gifts of whimsy and myth, the story took off.  She has now published book 1, Fractured, with book 2, Tainted, to follow within the next couple of weeks.

I have to admit, though, that I can’t wait to dig into the final book, Blooded, as this book hasn’t been written over and over.  Save for the characters, everything about it is new.  Nothing more enticing to a muse such as myself.  I plan on participating fully throughout the entirety of the process of creation on this one.  All I can say is it’s gonna be fun.  And there’s nothing more exciting to a muse as the potential for fun.

Fatal Retribution by Diana Graves, A Review

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I love finding a new female hero who steps onto the stage at the beginning of the book already strong and willing to grow stronger. Raina Kirkland is just such a hero. Raina lives in a world no one I know has ever visited even though Fatal Retribution is set in the Pacific Northwest. Her world is our world turned on its head, where elfs and vampires and witches and many more paranormal entities reside, existing within a society which knows them and for the most part accepts them as part of the landscape. To me, a novice to this particular subset of urban paranormal novels, the only word I could use to describe it is steampunk.
Raina’s tale begins with her joining her siblings for a camping trip which turns into the camp-out from hell as they are attacked by a raging newly “born” vampire. Two of her brothers are bitten and must undergo dying and being reborn in a VCC (Vampire Care Center–see what I mean about an alternate reality?) before being allowed back out into the world. For some reason, Raina, part elf, part witch and part human, survives her bite and must learn what it means to be a “living” vampire. It all has to do with genetics, and I must say that Graves does an admirable job of explaining the physiology behind vampirism as she takes us through Raina’s experiences and the experiences of her relatives and friends, old and new.
Raina, like any only slightly post-adolescent young woman, suffers from self-esteem issues and endures a meddling mother who means well but refuses to admit that her little girl is a grownup. (Living at home doesn’t help.) And yet, she is feisty and forever questioning what she doesn’t yet understand. No waiting for some guy to come along and save her; this gal has spunk and she uses it as she becomes involved in the mystery of who is illegally offering humans the opportunity to become immortal by shooting up altered vampire blood.
My only quibble with Fatal Retribution is the grammar and word usage issue. Graves is an excellent storyteller, but too often one gets caught up in the lack of punctuation that could have helped a sentence make sense and the use of the wrong word, usually a homonym of the correct word. I would have given a 5-star review had the quality of the text come up to the delight of the storytelling. Regardless, I do recommend it and look forward to more from Graves’ prolific imagination.

Shut up and Write

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I made a significant decision today about how I’ve been approaching the writing/rewriting of book 2 (Tainted) in my trilogy (Lisen of Solsta).  I’m going to let the forest be.

As those few who frequent my blog know, I’m writing a trilogy about a young woman named Lisen who believes she was born on Earth but discovers within a few pages of the beginning of book 1 (Fractured) that she is not human, and Earth is not her home.

What are now books 1 and 2 were once book 1 of a slightly different trilogy in which Lisen never spent any time on Earth.  I invested a couple of years into pulling that book together.  A couple of drafts made their way through my writing group.  And then I changed everything.

The short of it is—Lisen went to Earth and then came back, and I broke up the big book into two books with a concluding volume still in the imagining process at the moment (though my notes are quite detailed and I do know how it ends).  I worked on Fractured for a couple more years, continually refining until I was satisfied.  Then I independently published it, both in paper and electronically, and entered it in a couple of contests, the results of which are still pending.

Although I have tackled (and achieved) perfecting the electronic version over the last several months, I’ve also had pressure from my solid block of a dozen or so fans who continue to clamor for Tainted.  So I’ve kept at the reworking of the draft which, when I began, lacked any reference to Lisen’s Earth experiences and contained references to plot points which I chose to eliminate in order to make room for new, more productive twists and turns.

(It is truly amazing how many little tiny changes must be made in order to accommodate one added character.  And the choices I’d made proved more complicated to incorporate than I’d imagined.  Not complaining, mind.  They’re good, and they’re worth it, but here’s where the aforementioned decision comes in.  Are you still with me?)

Part of my process includes what I’ve come to call the read-aloud.  (I recommend that all writers read their work out loud to themselves in a quiet room with no interruptions.  Read it more than once.  And perhaps more importantly—LISTEN as you read.)  For some reason, in this mightily modified draft, I’ve done whatever I can to avoid the read-aloud.  I put off writing for days because I have a scene awaiting that step.

Today I realized that I’m working with a draft that I’ve already vocalized multiple times.  Yeah, I’m adding stuff and taking stuff out, but who cares in this draft.  I’m going to be back to work on it at least once more (two or three times more for the newly added scenes), so why stress over it now?

Because right now I’m clearing my forest of old branches and laying down new seed.  Which means when I’m done, the forest will have altered in ways I can’t see now.  I’ll only be able to see the damn forest once the trees have settled into place.  So tonight, three scenes went to the printer in one day (rather than the usual one scene in three or four days), and now I’m more than two-thirds of the way through.  How’s that for progress.