S.G. Browne

It’s my favorite time of year, when the weather grows cool and the air turns brisk and the trees burn bright with reds and yellows and oranges. Oh yes. And it’s football season.

Of course, it’s perpetually autumn in San Francisco, with cool weather and a brisk breeze. Minus the leaves changing color because everything here either stays green or just turns brown and dies. And as for football season, there are some who would say that what the 49ers play isn’t technically football.

Where were we? Ah yes. Autumn.

With the bloom of summer fading, I have a handful of appearances I’ll be making at upcoming signings and conventions from Seattle to San Diego to Sarasota. And Roseville, but it didn’t fit with the whole sibilant thing going on there.

Below are the relevant dates and times and locations. If you happen to live in the neighborhood or plan to attend one of the conventions, find me and say “hey.” I always enjoy a good “hey.”

September 24
Signing – Roseville, CA
12:00pm – 2:00pm
Barnes & Noble
Creekside Town Center, 1256 Galleria Boulevard
Roseville, CA

October 21-23
ZomBcon
SeaTac Hilton
17620 International Blvd
Seattle, WA

October 26
WFC Author Meet & Greet – San Diego, CA
6:30pm – 8:30pm
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite 302
San Diego, CA

October 27-30
World Fantasy Convention
Town and Country Resort & Convention Center
500 Hotel Circle North
San Diego, CA

November 30
Signing – Sarasota, FL
6:00pm – 7:00pm
Bookstore1Sarasota
1359 Main Street
Sarasota, FL

Congratulations to Melissa Rudberg, Angie Thomas-Davis, and Ghia Arroyo for taking home signed copies of Fated, UK style. It requires a great deal of skill to be selected by a random number generator, so never take that for granted.

And a big thank you to everyone who left your comments and thoughtful words and who helped to spread the love about Fated and Breathers. I’m grateful for your support. Thank you for reading.

It’s September 1, which means it’s the release date for my second novel, Fated, in the United Kingdom. To celebrate, I’m giving away several signed copies of the UK edition.

So how can you enter for a chance to win? It’s simple…

Just leave a comment on this post and presto! You’re entered.

But if you’d like to improve your chances of winning, all you have to do is share a link to this post on either your Goodreads, Facebook, or Twitter profile. Or simply mention Fated if you’ve read it and enjoyed it. Then let me know where you mentioned it in your comment to this post and you’ll get a second chance to win. Bonus!

However, while you’re more than welcome to spread the word in more than one place, there is a limit of two entries per person.

So who will win? Is it fate or is it destiny? Only time will tell.

Contest ends Sunday, September 4 at 11:59PM PST.

I’ve often heard others say that in order to write good dialogue, you need to write the way people talk. You need to listen to speech patterns and expressions and emulate what you hear. The problem with this is that most real life conversations require a good editor. Everyday speech is filled with repetition and fillers and unnecessary adverbs like “basically” and “really” and “very.” Not to mention that many conversations tend to be unfocused and repetitive and stray off on tangents.

One way to think of it is that dialogue in writing is good conversation, but conversation in real life is not necessarily good dialogue.

So in order to write good dialogue, the trick is to write the way people should talk rather than the way they actually talk. You want to write dialogue that sounds believable but in real life never happens.

To quote Alfred Hitchcock: “A good story is life with the dull parts taken out.” Good dialogue is very much the same.

So what’s one of the best ways to learn how to write good dialogue? By watching movies.

Movie scripts have to be crisp and efficient. They’re all dialogue and action without the fiction writer’s burden of having to fill in the blanks with narrative prose. Obviously not all movies are great examples on how to write dialogue, but those that are contain dialogue that has a rhythm, is filled with conflict, and moves the story forward. Some of the films that get it right include L.A. Confidential, The Departed, Airplane!, Diner, and The Graduate.

I’d also recommend watching a selection of films written by David Mamet, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks, and Joel and Ethan Coen. All of these writers have a flair for dialogue and do a great job of conveying the rhythms of speech and conversation. The Coen Brothers are especially adept at conversation.

Naturally, since we’re talking about writing, it’s a good idea to read dialogue, too. So read as much as possible and as many different authors as possible. Read mysteries, romance, social satire, and thrillers. And if you’ve never read any Elmore Leonard, Robert Parker, or Christopher Moore, you might want to give one or more of them a shot, if nothing else than to see how they handle dialogue.

I came across a blog post on Twitter yesterday via Publishers Weekly titled Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell? by Edan Lepucki. It’s a good essay about what happens when a writer has to admit defeat and give up on her first novel. To “accept the death of your first true darling,” to paraphrase Lepucki, who asks if she can “put my first book into the drawer and shut it?”

In Lepucki’s case, she’s talking about an agented novel that couldn’t find a traditional publisher, but it happens more often than you’d think. First novels by authors ending up in a drawer or in a box on the top shelf of your closet. Today it ends up in a virtual folder on your hard drive or on a flash drive rather than under your bed consorting with the dust bunnies, but the point is the same: eventually you have to accept the reality that it’s not going to get published and move on.

Of course, this was before Amazon and eBooks, when anything can get published now regardless of how many rejections you’ve suffered through. Or not suffered through. And with brick-and-mortar book stores folding like a bad hand in a game of strip poker, traditional publishing isn’t the same as it ever was. With apologies to the Talking Heads.

Although I don’t have any numbers to back me up, I’d venture to guess that the majority of “first” published novels aren’t first novels at all. They’re second or third of fourth. Maybe more. Lepucki lists a few in her essay. But it’s rare that a writer’s first attempt at writing a novel ends up on the bookshelf at your local stores.

I have three novels in my closet. Literally. The manuscripts are printed up and stored in Kinko’s boxes stacked one atop the other. My first novel is titled The Circle, followed by Mar Vista and finally Obsession. All three of them are straight supernatural horror novels and are devoid of the social satire and humor found in Breathers and Fated, which are technically my fourth and fifth novels.

I never had representation for the first and third novels, and my second, Mar Vista, had a short-lived relationship with an agent who closed up shop six months after taking me on. So my first three novels for the most part ended up in my drawer as studies on the art of novel writing. Six-hundred and four-hundred and three-hundred page exercises that helped to teach me how to write.

While it’s possible I could end up doing something with Obsession, my other two novels will remain in their boxes, gathering dust on my shelves.