10 Things Your Opening Chapter Should Do: A Check-List for Self-Editing

Let’s face it: first chapters are hard.

When you’re writing your first draft, you’re writing for yourself—getting to know your characters and their world. You should let everything spill out on the page free of your inner editor’s censorship.

But when you’re revising, it’s a different story. You’ll need to cut a whole lot of info you’ve put into the opening chapters. Don’t delete anything—save it for later to scatter through the book.

You’re going to end up with an opening chapter that’s way different from the one you started with. And that’s as it should be. In fact your entire original Chapter One may end up being one of those darlings you have to kill.

I usually write the final draft of my first chapter last. That’s because I won’t know exactly what needs to be in there until I’ve got the ending all polished up.

An ideal first chapter should do the following things:

1) Introduce the main character. 

You want to open with a scene involving the protagonist. Yes, I know the standard opening of every cop show on TV involves random strangers discovering a body or getting killed. This is something that works great in drama but not in a novel.

Whoever we meet first in a book is the character we’ll bond with. If that person gets killed on page five, we feel cheated.

We don’t need to know a huge amount about the MC right away, but we need to know enough to care. You can be very sketchy about looks (all Jane Austen told us about Elizabeth Bennett is that she had “fine eyes”.)

We probably need to know gender, age and maybe social status/work/position in society, but most of all, we need to know the emotions the character is feeling in the scene—preferably something the reader can identify with.

Here’s how I open Ghostwriters in the Sky: 

“The subway car was so crowded I couldn’t tell which one of the sweaty men pressing against me was attached to the hand now creeping up my thigh. I should have known better than to wear a dress on a day I had to take the subway, but in the middle of a New York heat wave, I couldn’t face another day in a pants suit.”

I haven’t used any description of the protagonist, but we can tell she’s 1) female 2) a worldly city dweller who takes things in stride 3) not rich enough to take a taxi 4) employed in some way that usually requires wearing a suit 5) way too polite for her own good.

We can also identify with her distress at being groped. She’s in an uncomfortable situation and we hope for her to escape without harm.

2) Make us care enough to go on a journey with that character. 

This is trickier than it sounds. What makes us care? There’s no formula and no one thing will work for every reader in every genre.

Agents and editors are always telling us they want a “sympathetic” protagonist, but that doesn’t necessarily mean somebody you’d like to like to have as a friend.

Scarlett O’Hara is shallow and narcissistic, but readers have found her fascinating for nearly a century. Dexter Morgan is a sociopathic serial killer—not exactly a guy you'd want for a BFF. And who’d actually like to spend time with Lisbeth Salander? Even Jane Austen’s Emma is something of a witch.

You don’t have to present us with a protagonist as flawed as those characters. But they do need to have weaknesses. My sleuth, Camilla Randall, is terminally polite, and always believes things are going to be perfectly fine, although the reader can see sure-fire trouble looming.

Some people like a kick-ass-first, ask-questions-later character, and some prefer a more thoughtful, honorable hero. It will depend on genre and tone.

What readers generally don’t find sympathetic is arrogance, whining, or a victim mentality. A hero needs to be brave in some way, so let us see the potential for that right away.

3) Set tone. 

You don’t want to start out a romantic comedy with a gruesome murder scene, or open a thriller with light, flirtatious banter. You want to immerse your reader in the book’s world from the opening paragraph. Since novelists don’t have music and visuals to set the scene, we need to use words that convey tone.

Long descriptions of weather or setting aren’t in fashion these days, but broad descriptive strokes can offer a lot in terms of setting the mood of your story.

My above opener is light and humorous. The sticky weather echoes Camilla's sticky situation. In another kind of book, this could be a situation of grave danger, or something that would cause the heroine extreme distress. Then describing the humid weather in terms of darkness or heaviness would convey a different mood.

But you don’t have to use weather or description to set tone. Sharp, staccato dialog can convey danger, or a self-deprecating narrative voice can show we’re going to be in for some laughs.

4) Let us know the theme. 

If you’re going to be dealing with a particular theme, you don’t want to hit us over the head with it, but give us some foreshadowing. Great authors can do this in the first sentence.

Look at how William Gibson began Neuromancer, the novel that defined cyberpunk: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Gibson lets us know from the get-go this is about the dark side of technology.

I start my mystery Sherwood, Ltd with this paragraph:

“Anybody can become an outlaw. For me, all it took was a little financial myopia, an inherited bad taste in spouses, a recession—and there I was, the great-granddaughter of newspaper baron H. P. Randall, edging around in alley-shadows, about to become a common thief.”

You know right away we’re dealing with a theme of poverty, outlaws and thieves—echoing the Robin-Hoody title.

5) Let us know where we are.  

Don’t give us a ton of physical description, but we need to know what planet/historical time period we’re in.

In spite of everything you’ve heard about showing-not-telling, it’s perfectly all right to give the reader some basic information in a straightforward way, as Jeffrey Eugenidies does in Middlesex:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

In SciFi and Fantasy especially, you need to do some world-building, but limit it to the absolute necessities and fill in the details later. Most new writers tend to tell us way too much about their fantasy world up front. You want to tell us just enough to allow us to picture the scene that’s taking place, but not bog down the action.

6) Introduce the antagonist.

An antagonist is someone/something that keeps the protagonist from his goal.

The concept of an “antagonist” is probably the hardest thing for most new writers to grasp.

You may think that if you're not writing a mystery about a sadistic serial killer, or a spy novel where the hero must thwart the evil genius plotting to take over the world, you don’t need an antagonist.

But there’s a difference between an antagonist and a villain.

An antagonist can be a whole society, an addiction, a judicial system, or anything that might thwart a hero from achieving his goal. But you absolutely need one. (I found that out the hard way. I wrote a novel for 10 years that had no antagonist and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t end.) The wonderful Kristen Lamb writes some of the best stuff I’ve seen on the subject of the antagonist, which she calls the Big Boss Troublemaker. Here’s one of Kristen's great posts on the BBT.

7) Ignite conflict.

We need conflict not only in the opening scene, but we need to see an over-arching tension that will drive your plot.

In the Hunger Games, the burning question in the opening scene is who will be chosen for the games. But the larger conflict is with the Hunger Games themselves. When the conflict of the opening scene is resolved, we still keep turning pages because of the underlying tension from a bigger story question—how will Katniss survive?

Conflict does not have to mean an actual battle. In fact, starting in the middle of a battle can be awfully confusing for a reader. It’s better to start with something like the heroine preparing for battle by stealing her brother’s armor after her father forbids her to fight.

8)  Give us a goal: tell us what your protagonist wants.

We need to know what he wants right now, which might be for the troll who just killed his companions to stop swiping at him with that pointy sword.

But we also need to know pretty early in the story what your hero really, really wants (apologies to the Spice Girls)—his ultimate goal, like maybe taking a magical jewelry item to Mount Disaster to destroy it forever.

I realize this ultimate goal doesn't always show up in chapter one. But we do need a goal in chapter one that will lead to the ultimate goal.

9) Present an exciting, life-changing inciting incident.

This incident has to cause something to happen that will propel us to the next scene—and the one after that—and through the entire book. Think of it as the explosion that launches the rocket of your story.

This one is easier for some genre writers.  If you’re writing a mystery, you can find a dead body and the story is off and running.

Or in a romance, the lovely Griselda can meet Lord Puddlesbury when his horse accidentally knocks down her grandfather’s vegetable cart and she vows to hate him forever.

But in other genres, it may be tough to get the inciting incident close to the opener. Do work on it, though, because everything else will seem like throat-clearing to the reader. Most readers aren’t going to admire your lovely prose until you’ve got a story going.

10) Introduce the other major characters. 

“Major” is the key here. Don’t let minor characters upstage the hero in the opener. In fact, you’re better off without any minor characters in the opening scene. We’ve got so much stuff to cram in there, we don't have much room for the maid/sentinel/pizza delivery person character who opens so many dramas.

We need to be introduced to Lord Puddlesbury fairly early on—or at least let us hear about him. Ditto Griselda’s bratty sister whose loose morals threaten to disgrace the poor but honorable family of vegetable mongers, and maybe the stalwart plowboy Jack, who has loved Griselda since childhood. But we don’t need to know about his Lordship’s groom or his tailor unless the bratty sister is going to run off with them in a scandalous ménage a trois in chapter ten.

A lot of new writers tend to clutter up the opener with colorful characters who never appear in the story again. This can irritate a reader, who expects people in the opener to re-appear and play an important role.

***

Hold on there, sez you. I can think of half a dozen bestsellers off the top of my head that don’t do these things.

 Yup, I can too. I didn’t say these are hard and fast rules. But they’re something to aim for. If your prose is so mesmerizing the reader doesn’t notice, then more power to you. But for most of us mortals, our readers are happiest when they get as much info as possible in the opener.

If your opener doesn’t do any of this stuff—and most first drafts don’t—try this trick: try cutting off the first two chapters. Does chapter three give you a better beginning? Start there. Then feed us the info from the first two chapters a little at a time later on in the book.

How about you, scriveners? Are there any other things you absolutely want to see in an opener? Do you have hard time cramming all this stuff into chapter one? 

Book Deal of the Week

Sherwood, Ltd is 99c for Kindle this month.

"It's not yer typical whodunnit, nor is the protagonist anything like a cop. Ms. Allen...has crafted a wily tale of murder, deceit, and intrigue that can stand with the best of them. Her characters are all too real and her dialogue took me from laughter to chills to suspicion of everybody in the book"—David H. Keith

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

1) Escargot Books is expanding its catalogue and are now accepting submissions.  Crime fiction (dark thrillers to cozies), women’s fiction, wealth and fitness, children’s, sci-fi and dystopian. All books will be published in digital format. Some books will be chosen for print and/or audio as well. Escargot Books does not offer an advance, but they offer higher royalties than traditional publishers, especially for direct sales from our website, as well as editing, formatting, promotion, and the company of bestselling authors. They have some big name authors and a good track record. Here’s their online submission form.

2) Chick Lit Plus is currently looking for reviewers and contributors to add to the team. If you are interested in joining a popular book and women’s lifestyle blog, and you love Chick Lit, this could be a great opportunity. This is an established site with a big readership. It's a great place to get started as a reviewer. (I personally know two book blog reviewers who have become literary agents. This is a great place to start a career in publishing.)

3) The Lyttoniad contest for the WORST first sentence of a novel. The classic Bulwer-Lytton Contest makes news every year. Each entry must consist of a single sentence but you may submit as many entries as you wish. E-mail entries should be sent to Scott Rice at srice@pacbell.net in the body of the message, Ariel 12 font. One e-mail may contain multiple entries. Entries will be judged by categories, from “general” to detective, western, science fiction, romance, and so on. There will be overall winners as well as category winners. No prizes that I know of, but lots of admiration from your fellow writers.  Deadline is June 30th.

4) FREE book advertising to British readers from EbookBargainsUK 

(I've had fantastic luck with these guys. I used them after my free run of No Place Like Home and my bounce was three times higher in the UK than the US—I'm sure because of the ad.)

DEADLINE EXTENDED! Lots of authors and publishers have had huge successes with their FREE or SALE books by advertising on BookBub, ENT, KND, POI, etc. But none of those target the UK, and their links go to US sites Brits can't use. But now there’s a newsletter for UK readers only. It links to all the big UK retailers like Apple UK, Waterstones and Foyles as well as Amazon UK. They don’t sell books direct or get paid for clickthroughs, so they don't have any restrictions on how many free books they can spotlight like BookBub and the others. So it's THE place to tell Brits about your book when it goes free or on sale in the UK. Since Brits have the highest number of readers per capita of any country in the world, this looks like a great idea to me: Plus: the site will be offering FREE book ads until June 30th, on a first come, first served basis. Remember this is for books you have on sale or free. 

And if you're in the UK, do sign up for their newsletter. It brings links to free and bargain ebooks—at the UK bookstore of your choice—in your inbox every morning. You can subscribe here.

5) Become a CERTIFIED GHOSTWRITER through Cal State Long Beach online courses. Ghostwriter training is now offered by California State University, Long Beach as the "Ghostwriting Certificate Program" (GCP.) The label CERTIFIED GHOSTWRITER has become a Professional Designation. GCP is a life-changing, career-launching course of study. Details and registration at http://ccpe.csulb.edu – search for "ghostwriting". This is only class in existence! Contact instructor  Claudia Suzanne at 1-800-641-3936 Class begins June 22.

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Winners, Apologies and Whispers From Some Awesome Independent Women

I feel bad for all my east coast friends who are snowed in and/or power-less. I’ll have to have another contest for them soon. East-coasters, you’ve had way more than your share of natural disasters recently. Time for some good luck.

And here are two people who had some Halloween luck last night.

I assigned a number to everybody who posted in the last two days and used the number generator at random.org and came up with two numbers,

Winners of GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY!

#5  Kamille Elahi

#19 Donna Hole

So congratulations, you two. Send me the addresses you use for your Kindle (or your PC app) and I’ll send those along to you.

Now an apology: to anybody who has run into Amazon dramas while trying to buy my books. You’re not alone. The Zon seems to be undergoing some major growing pains. First they uploaded GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY with the cover and blurbs for THE GATSBY GAME. That was fun. Then they changed the prices on all my books—even FOOD OF LOVE—which has a different publisher—from $2.99 to $4.99. Then, over the weekend, THE GATSBY GAME disappeared entirely. My publisher heard there had been complaints from people who downloaded it and got only one page! (I’d complain too.)

So anybody who has had hassles trying to buy any of my books, email me at annerallen dot allen at gmail dot com and we’ll get you “sorted” as my Brit friends say.

Don’t you love the way the English find “sorting” the solution to everything? It’s as if proper categorization—perhaps with some cosmic “Sorting Hat”—could send one’s troubles off to their respective Griffindors, Hufflepuffs and Slytherins and make all things right.

And speaking of making things right, today we have a special mid-week guest post from the fabulous Cheryl Shireman, author of the bestselling ebook LIFE IS BUT A DREAM I feel very honored that she invited me to join her and the twenty-three other fascinating “Indie Chicks” to put together this anthology to benefit breast cancer research. Here is her story of what inspired the post. 

Is Your Life Whispering to You?

by Cheryl Shireman

I believe life whispers to you and provides direction. I call that life force God. You can call it whatever you want, but there is no escaping it. If we are open, and brave enough to say yes, life will take us in directions we never expected, and you will live a life beyond your wildest dreams.

Those whisperings often come in the form of a “crazy” idea or a nudge to move into a certain direction that seems odd or silly or daring. Then there is that moment when you think, Well, that’s weird. Where in the world did that come from?

And then there’s the second moment, when you have to make a choice. You can dismiss the crazy notion, and probably even come up with a dozen reasons why it’s a bad idea. You don’t have the time, the money, or the resources. Besides, who are you to do such a thing? What in the world were you thinking? So, you dismiss the idea. We always have that option - to say No.

But it comes back - that whisper. Sometimes again and again. But if we are practical, and safe, we can squash the notion until it is almost forgotten. Almost.

Such a notion came to me a couple of months ago. I began to think of an anthology composed of women writers. An anthology that would be published before the rapidly approaching holiday season. The title came to me almost immediately - Indie Chicks. It was a crazy notion. I was working with an editor who was editing my first two novels, and was also in the middle of writing a third novel. Working on three books seemed to be a pretty full plate. Adding a fourth was insane.

But the crazy notion kept coming back to me. It simply refused to be dismissed. So I sent out a “feeler” email to another writer, Michelle Muto. She loved the idea. I sent out another email to my writing buddy, J. Carson Black. She loved the idea, too, but couldn’t make the time commitment. She had just signed with Thomas & Mercer and was knee deep in writing. I took it as a sign. I didn’t have the time for the project either. Perhaps after the first of the year, when final edits were done on my own novels. I dismissed it, at least for the present time. I’d think about it again in another couple of months, when the timing made more sense.

A week later I surrendered, started developing a marketing plan for Indie Chicks, and began sending out emails to various indie writers - some I knew, but most were strangers. I contacted a little over thirty women. Every one of them responded with enthusiasm. Most said yes immediately, and those who could not, due to time commitments, wished us well and asked me to let them know when the book when the book was published so they could be part of promoting it.

One of the first writers I contacted was Heather Marie Adkins. Earlier this year, while I was browsing the internet, I came across an interview with Heather. The interviewer (oddly enough, Michelle Muto) asked Heather, When did you decide to become an indie author? Heather’s answer was:  About a month ago. My dad had been trying to talk me into self-publishing for some time, but I was hesitant. One night, I sat down and ran a Google search. I discovered Amanda Hocking, JA Konrath, Victorine Lieski; but it was Cheryl Shireman that convinced me. This is the field to be in. I was shocked (Astonished! Flabbergasted!). I had no idea that I had ever inspired anyone! To be honest, it was a bit humbling. And,okay, yes - it made me cry. So, of course, I had to invite Heather to be a part of the anthology. Heather not only said yes, but she also volunteered to format the project - a task I was dreading.

As Heather and I exchanged emails, I told her about how I had been similarly inspired to become an indie writer by Karen McQuestion. My husband bought me a Kindle for Christmas of 2010. Honestly, the present angered me. I didn’t want a Kindle. I wanted nothing to do with reading a book on an electronic device! I love books; the feel of them, the smell of them. But, very quickly, I started filling up that Kindle with novels.

One day, while looking for a new book on Amazon, I came across a title by Karen McQuestion. I learned that McQuestion had published her novels through Amazon straight to Kindle. Immediately, I began doing research on her and how to publish through Kindle. I had just completed a novel and was ready to submit it through traditional routes. Within 48 hours of first reading about McQuestion, I submitted my novel, Life Is But A Dream: On The Lake. Twenty four hours later, it was published as an eBook on Amazon. Within another couple of weeks it was available as a paperback and through Nook. Did I jump into this venture fearlessly? No! I was scared to death, and I almost talked myself out of it. Almost. The novel went on to sell over 10,000 copies within the first seven months of release.

As I shared that story with Heather, another crazy notion whispered in my ear - Ask Karen McQuestion to write the foreword for Indie Chicks. Of course, I dismissed it. We had exchanged a couple of tweets on Twitter, but other than that, I had never corresponded with McQuestion. It was nonsense to think she would write the foreword. I was embarrassed to even ask her. Surely, she would think I was some sort of nut.

But, the idea kept whispering to me and, with great trepidation, I emailed her. She said yes! Kindly, enthusiastically, and whole-heartedly, she said yes.

Karen McQuestion had inspired me to try indie publishing. I had inspired Heather Adkins. And now the three of us were participating in Indie Chicks, that crazy whisper I had been unable to dismiss.

The book began to develop, and as it did, a theme began to form. This was to be a book full of personal stories from women. As women, one of our most powerful gifts is our ability to encourage one another. This book became our effort to encourage women across the world. Twenty-five women sharing stories that will make you laugh, inspire you, and maybe even make you cry. We began to dream that these stories would inspire other women to live the life they were meant to live.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted the proceeds of this charity to go to some sort of charity that would benefit other women. While we were in the process of compiling the anthology, the mother of one of the women was diagnosed with breast cancer. Almost immediately upon learning that, Michelle Muto sent me an email. Hey, in light of *****’s mother having an aggressive form of breast cancer, can I nominate The Susan G. Komen foundation for breast cancer? I mean, one of our own is affected here, and other than heart disease (which took my own mother’s life), I can’t think of anything more worthy than to honor our sister in words and what she’s going through. A daughter’s love knows no bounds for her mother. Trust me. I know it’s a charity that already gets attention on its own. But, that’s not the point, is it? The point is there are 25 ‘sisters’ sticking together and supporting each other for this anthology. I say we put the money where the heart is.

We had our inspiration. All proceeds would go to the Susan G. Komen foundation for breast cancer research.

The stories started coming in. Some were light hearted and fun to read. But others were gut-wrenching and inspiring - stories of how women dealt with physical abuse, overwhelming grief, and a host of bad choices. It was clear; these women were not just sharing a story, but a piece of their heart. I felt as if I were no longer “organizing” this anthology, but just getting out of the way so that it could morph and evolve into its truest form.

Fast forward to just a few days before publication. Heather was almost done with the enormous task of formatting a book with twenty-five authors. We were very close to publishing and were on the homestretch. That’s when I received an email. An unlikely email from someone I didn’t really know. Beth Elisa Harris and I were involved in another indie project and Beth sent an email to all of the authors in that project, including me. She attached a journal to that email. For whatever reason, Beth had been inspired to share a journal she wrote a few years ago. She cautioned us to keep her confidence and not share the journal with anyone else. I tend toward privacy and don't tend to trust easily. This is a HUGE step for me. I've only read it once since I wrote it.

Intrigued, I opened the journal and began reading. It dealt with her diagnosis, a few years back, with breast cancer! Before I was even one third of the way through the journal, I felt I should ask Beth to include this journal in the Indie Chicks Anthology. It was a crazy notion, especially when considering her words about privacy and trust. We didn’t even know each other, how could I ask her to go public with something so personal? I tried to dismiss the notion (are you noticing a pattern here?), but could not.

I wrote the email, took a deep breath, and hit send. She answered immediately. Yes. Most definitely, yes.

So here is the anthology INDIE CHICKS: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories, with foreword by Karen McQuestion and afterword by Beth Elise Harris.

It’s now available through Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The book includes personal stories from each of the women, as well as excerpts from our novels. And it began as a whisper. A whisper I did my best to ignore.

The Indie Chicks Anthology

Foreword by Karen McQuestion
Afterword by Beth Elisa Harris

Stories included:
Foreword by Karen McQuestion
Knight in Shining Armor by Shea MacLeod
Latchkey Kid by Heather Marie Adkins
Write or Die by Danielle Blanchard
The Phoenix and The Darkness by Lizzy Ford
Never Too Late by Linda Welch
Stepping Into the Light by Donna Fasano
One Fictionista’s Literary Bliss by Katherine Owen
I Burned My Bra For This? by Cheryl Shireman
Mrs. So Got It Wrong Agent by Prue Battten
Holes by Suzanne Tyrpak
Turning Medieval by Sarah Woodbury
A Kinky Adventure in Anglophilia by Anne R. Allen
Writing From a Flour Sack by Dani Amore
Just Me and James Dean by Cheryl Bradshaw
How a Big Yellow Truck Changed My Life by Christine DeMaio-Rice
From 200 Rejections to Amazon Top 200! by Sibel Hodge
Have You Ever Lost a Hat? by Barbara Silkstone
French Fancies! by Mel Comley

Life’s Little Gifts by Melissa Foster
Never Give Up On Your Dream by Christine Kersey
Self-taught Late Bloomer by Carol Davis Luce
Moving to The Middle East by Julia Crane
Paper, Pen, and Chocolate by Talia Jager
The Magic Within and The Little Book That Could by Michelle Muto
Write Out of Grief by Melissa Smith
Afterword by Beth Elisa Harris

Stop by our Facebook page! http://www.facebook.com/IndieChicksAnthology

********

What whisper are you ignoring? What crazy notion haunts you? What dream merely awaits your response? I urge you, say Yes. Live the life you were meant to live. Say yes today.

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Bad Critique Groups—8 Things That Can Push a Group Over to the Dark Side. Plus a Halloween Contest!

Good critique groups are the easiest (and cheapest) way for new writers to learn the nuts and bolts of the craft and keep those cringe-making first drafts from gumming up agents’ and publishers’ desks (or becoming part of Konrath’s tsunami of crap.)

UPDATE: If you're looking for a good online critique group or beta reader, Lynnette Labelle has formed a critique matchmaking service on her blog. She's got a great questionnaire that I think will weed out any of the following problems. Here's the link to Lynnette's Blog.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Group feedback can help skilled writers as well. A lot of us like to process our work through a group before we send it out into the unforgiving marketplace. (Nobody’s snarkier than the one-star Amazon reviewer.) I’ve read that even Amy Tan still runs her work by her critique group for feedback and suggestions.

I personally belong to a fantastic group that has become like family to me. I trust them with everything from nurturing my sucky first drafts to polishing final copy. We’re all veteran critiquers with long history together. Critiquing is a craft, just like any other aspect of writing, and abilities grow with practice. After fifteen years together, these folks are pros.

But I lucked out. Not all groups are useful. Group-think can be dangerous. One or two empathy-challenged control freaks can goad a group of mild-mannered scribblers into a verbal Lord of the Flies attack-fest that will stifle the most faithful muse and damage a fragile creative spirit.

And you can’t be sure the advice is worth heeding. As journalist Jim Bishop said, “A good writer is not, per se, a good critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.”

Here are eight things that can make a critique group go sour:

1)     No rules. Without following standard protocol—like no cross-talk and no arguing—meetings can turn into free-for-all shout-fests.

2)     No moderator. Somebody needs to be in control and make sure rules are being followed and emotional arguments don’t derail the procedings.

3)     Misinformation. People who are full of false or outdated ideas of what constitutes good writing can ruin yours. For my tips on bad advice to ignore, click here. 

4)     The Grammar Taliban. You’re not going to be helped much by critiquers who harp about sentence fragments and how you should never use a preposition to end a sentence with. If you listen to them, your work will end up sounding like a high school term paper.

5)     Power Trippers. I’ve been to critique groups where one member went into a rage when it became obvious the writer being critiqued wasn’t going to make the changes the power tripper thought were required. These people need therapy, not a writing group.

6)     Praiseaholics. To them, any string of words typed onto a piece of paper is genius. Nothing is ever wrong and nothing can be improved. They might even get angry when you come in with a second draft, because the rough draft was “perfect.”

7)     Co-Authors. There’s often somebody sooooo helpful that she tries to re-write your story entirely—to sound exactly like one of hers.

8)     Dogmatic PC/Religious Policepersons. Critiquers who think you should only write stuff about people exactly like you, or them—or stuff that supports one political or religious world view—create tension that’s hard to overcome. Small minds create small books.

I’ve seen a number of wonderful writers pummelled by misguided critique groups. I first met author Catherine Ryan Hyde in her pre-Pay it Forward days when she read at a local critique group. Her story was brilliant. Scenes from it are still vivid in my mind. But the critiquers hated it—mostly because they didn’t think a woman who has never been in combat should be “allowed” to write about a male character fighting a war.

I was only a guest, so I wasn’t allowed to speak, but on the way out, I stopped her and said I thought they were full of crap. She shrugged and said she’d learned to cherry-pick the good stuff and ignore the rest.

But later that year I attended a prestigious writers’ conference where I saw an equally talented, but not as confident young man bullied by a bunch of know-it-all Bozos in a workshop. What was worse, they were egged on by the workshop leader—who seemed more interested in wielding power than in improving anybody’s prose.

I tried to speak to the abused writer afterward—to say how much I disagreed with what had been said—but he dismissed me with a few angry words and took off running. I realized he was close to tears.

That night I tried to write about that awful scene. In my story, the critiqued writer was so damaged by the bullying critiquers, he killed himself. Of course the story was way too melodramatic, so I later changed it to simply the appearance of suicide. Then I added a few more murders (I had to kill off that workshop leader!) plus some romantic sizzle, a couple of ghosts, a cross-dressing dominatrix, and a lot of laughs.

The result was a comic mystery called Ghostwriters in the Sky, set at a Z-list writers’ conference in the wine-and-cattle country north of Santa Barbara, CA. It was originally going to be published by my UK publisher as a sequel to The Best Revenge. I thought it had a great shot at finding an audience, because at the time I was a columnist for a popular writers' magazine, and this was a story I thought most writers would relate to.

But my publisher went belly-up and I slowly discovered that nobody in New York would go near a story about the publishing industry. 

“We live with this stuff every day,” wrote one agent. “We don’t find it entertaining in a novel.”

After a few hundred rejections, I put the book in the file of “not a snowball’s chance in Hades” and wrote a couple more books. But I was sad to lose the story. It’s got the most fun humor and most intricate plotting of any of my work. And Marva, the dominatrix, is one of my all-time favorite characters.

So I sure was pleased when Mark Williams asked to read Ghostwriters last August. He liked it and had some great suggestions of ways to make the convoluted plot less confusing. His suggestions were great, so I jumped into some major revisions.  

And now, ta-da: here it is. The world debut of the ebook of  GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY It's available at the US Amazon.com for $2.99 and the UK Amazon.co.uk for what I assume is the equivalent, which they won't let us Yanks see.

And as a Halloween gift: I’d like to give away a couple of e-books to any of you with e-readers or a reading app on your phone, PC or whatever. (And I can get a Nook version direct from the publisher, since Smashwords can be so slooooow.)

Just leave your name in the comments between now and 9:00 PM on Halloween, Pacific Time. I’ll give everybody a number and use a random number generator to choose two winners, which I will announce on November 1, along with some other exciting news.

I’d also love for you to share any experiences you’ve had with nasty critiquers. Have you ever felt bullied by a critique group? Or has somebody said something so nasty about your writing that you considered giving up? (It’s OK to comment even if you don’t want an e-book. I don’t have a Kindle yet, either.)

You can also read an interview with me today on Morgen Bailey's wonderful blog. Plus I’ve finally set up a Facebook authorpage. If you go over, you can see the covers of some upcoming books (and if you wanted to “like” the page, that would be awesome.)

And for you readers who, like me, haven’t yet been Kindlized: FOOD OF LOVE is now available in paper! You can buy it for $9.95 from Popcorn Press or Amazon.com (eligible for super saver shipping.) 

Coming up in the blog: Next week, on November 6, book reviewer DANIELLE SMITH of Chick Lit Reviews and News  is going to tell us how to query a book blogger, what her pet peeves are, and how to find reviewers in your genre.

Then on November 13, legendary mystery author and writing guru LAWRENCE BLOCK will be guest posting about his personal adventures with self-publishing. Usually you’d have to go to a writers’ conference or an MFA program to hear from a superstar like Mr. Block, so I’m totally jazzed he’s going to be visiting.

And in December, we’ll have a visit from one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Romance author RONI LOREN, who has an erotic romance coming out in January from Berkeley Heat. She’s going to counteract some of that doom and gloom and tell us some of the good aspects of being  published by a Big Six publisher.

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