25% off Pre-order Sale of Lost in France in the US, and an inspiring writing craft tip
This will be a quick newsletter to share an exciting craft tidbit, and an opportunity to pre-order Lost in France at 25% off at Barnes & Noble, which is so fabulous.
The promo only runs Tuesday, March 24-Thursday, March 26, including audiobooks and eBooks. Premium members get an additional 10% off their print book pre-orders. If you’re in the US, I hope you can take advantage of this offer.
The Code is PREORDER25.
Here’s the link to the book on the Barnes & Noble website:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lost-in-france-claire-ross-dunn/1148361553
If you aren’t in the US, the book is also available to pre-order in Canada and elsewhere, via whichever online platform or bookstore you choose. Published by Alcove Press, the book is being distributed through Penguin Random House, so it is available widely.
In case you don’t know much about Lost in France, it’s about Marlow, an overworked, underpaid film festival staffer in Toronto who feels lost, gets drunk at her daughter Sabine’s high school graduation party, and when she wakes up in the morning (with a wicked hangover, natch), realizes she’s bought a charming house. In rural France. For one euro. Merveilleux! But turns out, maybe not so merveilleux: there are conditions—lots of conditions—a €30,000 security deposit charged to her credit card, and no online refunds. So Marlow and Sabine have to go to France to sort it all out, and life, love, and adventure ensue.
Can you change your life with one click of a button? Yes, you can. All it takes is one tiny leap.
I can’t wait for you to meet Marlow and Sabine, and tag along on their escapades in France. I mean, who doesn’t want an escapade in France? The answer is, no one.
Pre-orders mean everything to authors, because they tell the publisher and the retailer that this is a book to be paid attention to. So I thank you in advance for your support, and if you’re in the US, the Barnes & Noble 25% off deal is a great one. But only until tomorrow.
And here’s a great writer’s craft tidbit:
I had a chance this week to attend several sessions at a wonderful (and free) online writer conference called Perfect Your Process, hosted by Daniel David Wallace, an English writer who lives in Tennessee.
There were so many good writer craft things being discussed at the summit by so many authors and author coaches that I could barely keep up (and if you’re so inclined, there is a pass you can purchase here that will enable you to see the recordings post-summit), but I’ll just share one craft lesson that really spoke to me because it addressed an issue I was having this week in writing Lost in France book 2.
Daniel opened the summit by giving attendees an intro chat and then kicked things off with a mini craft lesson on what to do when the spark goes out.
(Now this is not to say that my spark has gone out on LIF 2 – far from it. But I was experiencing what may have just been a bit of delayed jet lag after my recent writing research trip, or overwhelm about how to organize said research, or a combination of both. So I was finding myself drift towards, you know, sweeping the whole house, alphabetizing the bookshelf, and rewatching the last three seasons of The Diplomat. Which are, obviously, entirely worthy endeavours, but not maybe when I’m trying to make my daily word count goal on the next book.)
What I liked about Daniel’s mini craft chat was that he was offering a very practical solution to what can be a confusing feeling (loss of spark, otherwise known as the desire to epically procrastinate).
Here was his thought in a nutshell: If you’re experiencing a loss of spark about your writing and feeling stuck, look at what you’re putting on the page. Go back to the fundamentals of how your story is building, and escalating, scene to scene. Are you putting the right things on the page? Scenes need to follow the logic of the drama: the character has a want, and goes after that want in each scene, and meets obstacles (a ticking clock, an antagonist, etc.) that thwart them, so they have to try harder. That harder effort is the escalation in the story arc, scene to scene. Scenes earn their place by serving this key dramatic principle. Scenes that don’t earn their place should, by and large, get kicked off the island.
Daniel proposed that, if you’re feeling spark-free, you might not be escalating your scenes properly. You might have a bunch of other elements—a fun location, an exciting activity, a bevy of secondary characters and their wants/needs/situations—crowding the field. If you go back and check for this escalation—aka the active drama, or the chain of drama—and find that you have veered off course, then course-correct. You the writer, are, in a sense, your own first reader. And if you’re not feeling it as the first reader, the next reader won’t likely feel it either.
If you find yourself losing interest, it could be because the scenes aren’t building on this core want of the character. If you make sure the character is going after their want in each scene, and there are obstacles to that want in each scene, the spark of writing will likely return, because your story has energy, and so will you.
I immediately went back to the scene sequence I was writing this week, and checked that I was escalating the scenes properly, making sure that what went on the page was focused on Marlow’s want, and that the rest was allowed to drop to the back.
I’m happy to report, I’ve stopped sweeping, alphabetizing, and rewatching The Diplomat for now, and am back on track. Thank you, Daniel.
Happy writing, happy reading,
Claire