If you ARE participating (or if you’re just writing in general) here is my top ten things to do before you begin a story. It’s my personal tips to creating a solid plot, and most of these are things you should be doing long before you begin your first draft. It’s pre-writing, and it’s a big deal.
1. Complete a detailed biography of your protagonist and antagonist.
2. List the changes you’re going to inflict on these two characters.
3. Start your book when something meaningful happens. This is called the inciting moment. It should be shocking, exciting, and interesting.
4. Know your back story but never start with it.
5. Create conflict from page one. Your characters need problems and reasons to solve them.
6. Show motivation. Great characters want to achieve their goals more than anything and will pursue them at any cost. What are your characters most afraid of losing? Make them fight for it. Desperately. Irrationally.
7. Tell a story in scenes. Scenes hold a story together. The number of scenes depends on your chosen genre, and your novel’s length.
8. You should have one plot, and one subplot.
9. Fiction needs a Dark Night of the Soul. Move your story to the moment when things look impossibly bleak for your protagonist. This is usually a few pages before the end of your book.
10. Create an outline. It doesn’t have to be detailed but everything in life works better when you have a plan.
So that’s it. Once you’ve got all that locked down, it’s time to begin. I hope this helps and thanks for stopping by my blog tour today!
Now, here is your chance to be a HACKER by decoding the third and final part of the #HACKER secret code:
01101110 01100101 01101001 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110010 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110010 01110000 01110011 00100000 01110000 01101111 01101100 01101001 01100011 01111001
Translate all three codes and leave your answer on sherry’s facebook page to enter to win an advance copy of #HACKER book 2, IN TOO DEEP.
In Too Deep
One talented hacker.
One dead body.
One explosive secret.
When
one reckless night leads Farris Barnett to the dead body of a
classmate, she’s as willing as everyone else to write it off as a
suicide. That is, until cryptic messages start coming in from someone
who knows the truth, and they want Ferris on the case. Putting her
hacker skills to work, she begins to unravel the life of a victim who
might just have been the guiltiest of them all.
Her personal life in
turmoil, Farris turns to the only person she can trust to help her get
to the bottom of things—a friend on the verge of becoming much more.
Together, they confront a killer with a secret not even she could have
decoded.
The biggest bombs, the ones that do the most damage, are the ones you never see coming.
Pre-Order Your Copy Today!!!
Playing With Fire
One brilliant young hacker.
One experimental government aircraft.
One chance to keep it all from going up in flames.
Still
recovering from her troubled past, Farris is no stranger to change. But
when the military transfers her father across the country to an
experimental aircraft squadron, settling in to a new life is the least
of her problems. As a series of apparent computer glitches threaten the
security of the fleet and the blame falls on her father, she decides to
put her computer skills to use digging up the truth. Soon she's drawn
into the perilous world of a hacker who is determined to ground the
fleet--at any cost.
When all signs lead to someone close to her
as the mastermind, Farris will have to burn more than bridges to get to
the truth. She will have to risk her fragile new life to uncover the
identity of the cyber criminal before they can escalate from harmless
tampering... to all out murder.
Order Your Copy Today!!!
About The Author
Sherry D. Ficklin is a full
time writer from Colorado where she lives with her husband, four kids,
two dogs, and a fluctuating number of chickens and house guests. A
former military brat, she loves to travel and meet new people. She can
often be found browsing her local bookstore with a large white hot
chocolate in one hand and a towering stack of books in the other. That
is, unless she’s on deadline at which time she, like the Loch Ness
monster, is only seen in blurry photographs.
