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The Silver Skateboard (Post 66)
The Silver Skateboard (2016) is the first in the Wiley Tyler: Monster Finder series. In most children's and YA quest fantasy, there has to be some in-story explanation for a child's involvement in a dangerous job that might seem better handled by an adult. There are several possibilities, the chief of which come down to credulity (the ability of a child to believe something an adult wouldn't), imagination (something that might be freer in a child), circumstance (a child is likely to have fewer family/work responsibilities) and bloodline (a child may be an heir to a kingdom or power without knowing it).
For Wiley Tyler, I went for a variation of the bloodline idea; Wiley is not related to the former holder of the post of Monster Finder, but has been selected by her to carry on the job when she becomes ineligible on her sixteenth birthday. You might call it coming of age in reverse. Shannon Banner, whom Wiley nicknames Spanner, in her turn inherited the post from Jonathan Marathon, who now, as a young man in his twenties, works at the school.
Spanner, having left it rather late in her tenure to choose and brief her successor, doesn't tell Wiley much, and what she does tell him he largely ignores because he's fixated on the silver skateboard that goes along with the office.
Wiley soon discovers he should have taken more notice, because a lady dragon named Nessa Copperdell arrives to send him after a monster that's disturbing people in the park.
The Silver Skateboard, as the title implies, deals with Wiley's sketchy initiation and his crash course in learning how to control the skateboard in question. At the end of the story, he decides he'd better study the contents of the backpack Spanner also left him...
As the series progresses, Wiley will develop his skills in monster finding, and in dealing with the monsters once found. He'll have to deal also with Nessa Copperdell, whose propensity for landing on his front lawn may cause him some nervous moments.
The Sliver Skateboard is available in paperback and epub, directly from the printer, from Amazon, and Booktopia, among other places. Review copies in PDF format are available upon request by commenting on this blog and asking for a copy.
ABOUT THE BLOG
Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)
The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. This preamble will be pasted to the top of each post, so feel free to skip it in future.
The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist.
Sunday, 5 March 2017
Writing Dialogue
Writing Dialogue (Post 64)
Writing Dialogue (2008/2017) is one of the how-to writing books that stem from my work at Affordable Manuscript Assessments. , As with Writing Metrical Verse (Post 61), 20 Top Tips (Post 33), and quite a few others, I wrote this to simplify my job and to give clients a much more detailed source of information that I could provide in a brief consultation.
Poorly written dialogue is one of the major problems I see in manuscripts. It can be poorly written in the sense of being unnatural, unbelievable in context, or dull, and also in the sense of being incorrectly punctuated.
Writing Dialogue covers just about everything I've learned about this aspect of the craft by observation, by practice or by editorial input. As usual with these how-to books, I discovered a lot by the act of writing it, including much information I hadn't known I knew. Explaining not only how-to but how-not-to made me think about why I think, believe, know this or that, and in clarifying it for clients I clarified it for myself.
Writing Dialogue is available as a PDF or paperback from THIS SITE, and an updated version forms part of a giant compendium on writing I produced in 2016. That's material for a different blog post.
ABOUT THE BLOG
Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)
The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. This preamble will be pasted to the top of each post, so feel free to skip it in future.
The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist.
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