Mysterious

Being a Better Writer: The Mysterious Character

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Emergency update: Got my right arm smashed at work Saturday night. Seven stitches. All is recovering well, but can’t type well and am restricted from hand use until at least Wednesday. Further updates will come when I can give them.

 

Welcome back readers! Today’s post was written in advance since I’ve got a shift at my part-time this morning (when I would normally be writing the post). So I’m sacrificing my Saturday—or chunks of it anyway—to bring you this post!

With that said, there’s not much news out there to bring up save the slow climb of the reviews and ratings left on my books. The end-goal by year’s end is 400 ratings and reviews between Amazon and Goodreads, and as of writing this everything is sitting at 193! Only seven more to go to the halfway mark, and it’s only February!

That is literally the only news I have for you all this Monday. Or at least it was at the time of writing. Only future-me knows for sure. But since I lack the capacity for time-travel on that scale, let’s dive right into today’s topic: the mysterious character.

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The Rolling Sale – FINAL ROUND!

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FIGHT!

No, I’m kidding. But most of you who had a childhood in the 90s probably thought that. But moving on …

So, in a surprise, last second upset, Unusual Events sold enough to unlock the fourth sale tier for Colony! Which means that Colony, starting next week, will be 50% off!

Except it won’t.

Okay, that was mean. What I meant to say before I gave into the urge to yank the rug out from beneath you guys is that due to Amazon’s 90-day cycle being in the middle of a renewal next week, if Colony did go on sale starting Monday, said sale would also end Tuesday, since you can’t crossover between cycles.

So yeah, this one’s partially Amazon’s fault for having such a dumb restriction in the first place, and partially my fault for not seeing it coming in the first place.

However, this does not mean all is lost. No, the sale is still going to happen. Just it will be delayed by a few days. Possibly until Friday (you have to put these sales in a few days in advance, so with Wednesday being the renewal day) … I swear it’ll come as soon as I can make it happen.

However, I feel bad, since I know for a fact many of you were waiting eagerly for Monday (I’ve gotten e-mails and messages to that effect). And this one was kind of my own fault, so to make up for it, I’m upping the reward tier to rank five.

That’s right, Colony won’t be 50% off. It’ll be 63% off. And I’m thinking I’ll make the sale go for seven days as well, as an additional apology for the delay.

So yeah, extra discount and two extra days to rack up sales for the final reward tier.

What’s that? You thought Colony would be the end of it? Oh no … I’ve got a surprise coming. But I’ll save that for another post. But suffice it to say that you can expect that copies purchased during this sale will … well, you’ve seen how the rolling sale has worked thus far. So you might be able to hazard a guess.

Regardless, that’s the news for today. Apologies for the delay, sincerely, and I’ll see you all Monday.

Being a Better Writer: Sidekicks

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The original concept for this post, or rather I should say request as that’s what it was, was for information regarding a comedic sidekick. But I’ve decided to expand on that a little for two reasons. First, dying is easy, but comedy is hard. Really hard. I envy those who can write comedy, like Adams, Prachett, Taylor, or Korman. It’s a serious talent. The art of regularly keeping a comedic tone, building things up for comedic beats not just every once and a while, but with a regular rhythm? That’s really hard to pull off, to start. It takes a lot of practice and understanding.

Second, because a comedic sidekick isn’t exactly a great point to cover. It’s like looking only at one side of a building. Sure, a comedic sidekick is great an all … but what about the other sides, those other types of sidekick? What about the foundations of having a sidekick at all? What makes a sidekick different from, say, a partner character?

See, I consider these questions just as valid and important to consider as the original question of a comedic sidekick. Also, I can answer many of them to my satsifaction, or at least give a much more concise, clear opinion on things. I can’t really do that with a comedic sidekick in more than a glancing manner. After all, comedy is not my specialty. I can give a few pointers, but that’s a pretty short post.

Sidekicks, however? I can talk a bit more about that. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

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Being a Better Writer: Mysteries

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I think it was inevitable that this post was going to happen sooner or later.

I’ve not written too much about genre thus far on BaBW. It just … hasn’t happened. I’ve written about other, closely critical elements of story, such as pacing, stingers, hard and soft openings, or what drives a story forward, but to date I’ve not actually talked much about genre-specific writing. Not so directly, anyway,

Maybe that needs to change. Perhaps starting with today’s post. Which would be a fitting one to begin with, considering that of my earliest five major works, three of them were direct mysteries while the other two contained trace elements of it. So, when it comes to writing mysteries, I have more than a passing bit of experience with what goes into them.

So, with that in mind: what is a mystery?

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