Thursday 13 February 2014

SIGNED paperbacks for sale (with virtual signing video)!

After over a year since the last sale, I'm once more offering SIGNED paperbacks of ALL my books (U.S. and Canada only). Sorry about the delay and thanks to everyone who messaged me to ask about purchasing them :) All orders will also receive a virtual signing video of me signing one of your books.

All orders must be in and paid for by February 28th in order for the books to be printed and shipped. Orders can be made via FB message, Twitter message, Goodreads message, or e-mail to davidestesbooks(at)gmail(dot)com. Include which books you are ordering, the quantity of each if more than 1, the shipping name and address, and who the signed book(s) should be made out to. I'll confirm the payment amount which can be made via Paypal. The prices are as follows:

Young-Adult Books: U.S.- $15 per book  Canada- $22 per book
Children's Books: U.S.- $10 per book  Canada- $15 per book
*Note: orders of 3 or more books receive a 10% discount.

The signed books available for purchase are:

Young Adult Books:
The Moon Dwellers
The Star Dwellers
The Sun Dwellers
The Earth Dwellers
Fire Country
Ice Country
Water & Storm Country
Angel Evolution
Demon Evolution
Archangel Evolution

Children's Books:
Nikki Powergloves- A Hero is Born
Nikki Powergloves and the Power Council
Nikki Powergloves and the Power Trappers
Nikki Powergloves and the Great Adventure

Thanks for all your support!

Monday 10 February 2014

Indie Author Advice Series #7- Do all people sound the same?

Originally posted on Gliterary Girl.


Do all people sound the same?


That’s a stupid question, right? Of course they don’t. In real life everyone is different, everyone has their little nuances, ways of speaking, and unique mannerisms. That’s what makes life interesting and fun. If everyone sounded the same, we’d all die of boredom. There are funny people, serious people, angry people, kind people, and every combination of those qualities and a million other qualities.


Well, the same goes for books, and if you haven’t already guessed what topic I'm writing about today, it’s voice. If you’re like me and are obsessed with the myriad talent competitions that are out there, the first thing you might think of is The Voice, an entertaining singing competition with talent coaches Adam Levine (Maroon 5), Ceelo Green, Christina Aguilera, and Blake Shelton. Although that’s not the “voice” I’m here to talk about, it’s actually a good example. Each of the four coaches on The Voice has a very different voice. (And I don’t mean that Blake’s voice is deeper than Christina’s!) Blake’s the comedian, constantly cracking jokes. Adam’s more serious, although he’s sort of Blake’s witty counterpunch. Christina is all business, ruthless when it comes to winning over the hearts’ of the contestants she wants on her team. Ceelo is the poetic low-key coach. They’re all VERY different.


That’s exactly the way characters in books should be. Easy, right? NOOOOOOO! Differentiating your characters’ voices is EXCEPTIONALLY HARD. If it was easy, everyone would be a bestseller, as voice is one of a handful of challenges that an author has to master in order to write a good book.


So how have I done as a writer when it comes to voice? Let’s just say, I’m working hard at it and improving with every book. Have I mastered it? Not by a longshot, but I won’t give up until I do. Many critics of my earlier works, the Evolution Trilogy, said some of the characters sounded too similar, that they didn’t have their own personalities. That’s a failure on my part. Even my most popular book, The Moon Dwellers, has received mixed reviews in terms of voice. Some reviewers think my two main characters, Adele and Tristan, are as different as night and day. Others think they’re too similar. I knew I still had work to do. It wasn’t until my 7th YA book that I got it right. Siena from Fire Country is a strong voice, and regardless of whether the reviewer liked the book or not, they all agreed on that. So yes, even an author of 14 books has to work hard to get character voice right!


You might be asking yourself, “How do I know if I’ve done a good job on character voice?” I’ve read a number of books and articles on the subject, and they all agree that dialogue is exceptionally important. A good test is whether you can tell which quotes are from which characters when you remove the dialogue tags. Do the words they’re speaking ring true for that particular character? If not, you have to change them. Is a character with a hot temper being far too easy going? Is a flamboyant character being boring and uninteresting? Is your hero acting anything but brave? If so, you’ve got a problem.


After the dialogue, you have to tackle the inner thoughts of each character for which you have a point of view for. Are each character’s thoughts true to their voice? Do they sound too much like each other, or are they unique? A feisty character’s thoughts should match her dialogue and actions. She should be feisty inside and out. Obviously, there are exceptions, when a character is undergoing inner turmoil and trying to hide it on the outside, but for the most part these things should match.


A little trick I’ve learned is to read my books out loud during the revision stage. Use different voices for the characters, exactly the way you envision them to sound. Do the words match the voice and personality you’re trying to convey? If not, change them.


Another trick if you’re writing from multiple points of view is to write from only one point of view per day, rather than jumping around. If you jump from viewpoint to viewpoint, there’s a greater chance that your mind will still be stuck in another character’s head when you’re meant to be writing from your new character’s head. I might write three chapters from one character’s point of view on Monday, and then do three chapters from another character’s point of view on Tuesday. If the story is alternating chapters, I’ll then go back and slot the chapters accordingly.


A final trick I use is to list out the personality traits I want each of my main characters and key supporting characters to have. When I’m writing each character, I keep these traits in the back of my mind, or refer to my list from time to time. If those personality traits aren’t coming through, then I need to add dialogue or inner thoughts to fix it. If different personality traits are coming through (that aren’t on my lists), I need to remove those lines.


If I haven’t belabored the point enough, think of writing like acting. The best actors and actresses appear as characters in different movies and become completely different people. As a writer, you have to do the same thing, except all within THE SAME MOVIE. That’s why it’s so hard. Get in your characters’ heads and become them while you’re writing about them. Tell their stories the way they want you to tell them. Practice, practice, practice!


I hope this helps! Writers are all in this together, and we’re all learning and growing and trying to become the best writers we can be. I highly advise reading other books (by authors far more talented than me) on writing, which include commentary and advice on mastering character voice. Some books I’d recommend are: On Writing, by Stephen King, and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass.

Thursday 6 February 2014

Flashes of Humanity

Originally posted on JuliaBabyJen's Reading Room

When I started seriously writing about three years ago, I NEVER (like in a million-zillion years) thought I’d be doing it full time at this point, with 14 published YA and Children’s novels and more than 1.2 million words written. Never. And I certainly wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me that my wife and I would be 15 months into a two year trip around the world that would take us to six continents and more than a dozen countries, all while continuing to write and publish my books to a rapidly-growing worldwide ebook market. Seriously, I still slap myself sometimes and thank the Kindle gods for their merciful ways.

But none of that is what I want to talk about today. All of that is awesome and life-changing and a complete and utter dream come true, but it’s not what matters the most. What truly matters is what I take away from the experience, what I learn, and how I grow as a human being. There will always be more words to be written, more publishing deadlines to hit, and more promotions to organize, but sometimes you have to stop, take a deep breath, and just watch the world around you. Otherwise life might just whip by on its Harley, wearing a black bandanna and a leather Angels jacket, knock your hat off, and send curls of dust around you while it speeds off into the distance.

What do you see if you stop and observe? Do you see wars? The threat of nukes from cruel dictators? Global warming and melting polar ice caps and overpopulation? Rapes and murders and babies left in cars and financial fraud? It can be a bleak and hopeless world sometimes, and I must admit, many of the terrible events that dominant most of the news airtime most certainly provides me with inspiration for my dystopian novels…

…HOWEVER…

…my novels also contain a LARGE MEASURE OF HOPE in them, and that’s not me being an eternal optimist or a glass-half-full kind of a guy. That’s me being real, because hope is real and hope is evident in even the worst situations. And the hope comes from real people. Good people. And that, my friends, leads me to the single most important thing I’ve learned from everything I’ve experienced in the last three years: There are flashes of humanity all around us; we just have to look for them.

Some are big flashes, like when there’s a major catastrophe and people from all over the world come together to pitch in, to roll up their sleeves, to donate their much-needed money, TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE. That’s a BIG flash of humanity.

But most others are smaller, like when you see someone on a packed-like-sardines bus give up their seat for a pregnant lady or an elderly man with a cane. That’s a tiny flash of humanity, barely a blip on the radar, but SO MEANINGFUL. And when you pack those tiny flashes all together, they too become something BIG, something WORTH WRITING ABOUT.

I’ve seen so many flashes in the last three years that my glass half full is now overflowing, pouring over the edges and pooling around its stem. Today I want to share just a few of my favorite flashes of humanity:

1) FLASH! Christmas Eve, Merida, Mexico. Adele and I were staying with a Spanish family, planning on spending our Christmas Eve away from home eating cheap takeaway. But no, our host insisted that we join her and her family for a proper Christmas meal. She was the only one in the family that spoke English (her young daughter was learning and her father didn’t), but I swear to you, we laughed more that night than ever before, and most of the time it was at a joke that her father made. Using gestures and context as a guide, we were cracking up well before the translated punch line. On that night, we were their family, too, having only met them a few days earlier.

2) FLASH! Winter in Mexico, 80 degrees Fahrenheit. For just a moment, try to forget about the drug cartels and the gangs and all the other awful things you hear on the news about Mexico. Yeah, that stuff happens and yes, it deserves attention and concern. But that’s not Mexico. Not really. Mexico is families. Ginormous families and extended families who CHOOSE to spend their free time with each other, doing simple things like playing soccer in a dusty field using goals with no nets or having a basic lunch of beans and tortillas on the beach. Family is everything, and despite living in conditions that many of us would consider on the border of impoverished, the people ARE HAPPY. I learned a lot from the people of Mexico.

3) FLASH! Springtime in St. Lucia. On a touristy island that has constant cruise ships coming into port, some of the locals want to take advantage, just like in many other tourist destinations around the world. Everyone’s selling something, and if you want to take a photo of a local doing something “cultural”, you can expect them to ask for a small tip in return. Fair enough. Such was our surprise when we were walking down a long hill one day, only to happen upon a local man juggling a soccer ball using every part of his body but his hands. He was smiling, laughing, having a great time doing it, and he was very talented. “Take a photo!” he exclaimed when he saw us out of the corner of his eye. We were wary at first, because we’d been offered photo ops before, only to be harassed for “donations” afterwards, but soon it became obvious that this man wanted us to take his photo simply because he was proud of what he was able to do with that soccer ball. Adele snapped several photos, which we’ll cherish for years to come. And that man just kept juggling that soccer ball, probably long after we’d finished our trek down the hill.

4) FLASH! Moroccan desert storm! Morocco is a magical place that feels like you’re stepping back in time. From huge cities with cars, scooters and donkeys narrowly passing each other on thin cobblestone medina streets, to beautiful mountain villages, to seaside towns, to desert oases, Morocco has a bit of everything. Staying in Merzouga, Morocco, we decided to venture from our riad just outside of the village into town to have a peek around. We took some photos of camels, bought a bus ticket, and then had a long chat with a man in Arabic (Adele did the talking since she knows the language), when billowing dark clouds rolled in overhead, rumbling like they had a bad case of indigestion. We thought we had time to make the fifteen minute walk back to our riad. We were wrong. Caught in no-man’s-land (basically a cracked-earth desert tundra), the dust began swirling around us, getting in our eyes, covering our clothes, whipped into a frenzy by heavy winds. Thunder crashed, lightning flashed. The rain came seconds later and we started to run. We never had a chance. It was a torrential downpour and the conditions were dangerous to say the least. A truck passed us, stopped, and rolled down the window. The cab was full but clearly they were willing to let us jump in the truck bed, but then another car pulled up, one with a backseat. They motioned frantically for us to get in, which we did. They were hotel workers, wearing traditional garb, and we thought they were from our riad because their uniforms looked identical. Turns out they worked in a different riad and were cousins of the ones who owned our riad. They drove us all the way home and refused to offer payment for the gesture.

5) FLASH! Lake Peipsi, Estonia (Kallaste). We attended a wedding of two close friends, a Chinese girl and an Estonian guy, who we’d met in Australia. Upon arrival, the groom’s family invited us to their home. The groom’s father was a fisherman and offered us smoked fish caught earlier that day. BEST FISH EVER! For the whole four days, they invited us to everything, treating us like part of their family, only having just met us. It was enough that we were their son’s friends. Two barbecues, lots of smoked fish, a rousing game of soccer with—I swear to you—every single boy and guy in the town, ages six to sixty. I couldn’t speak a word of Estonian or Russian, but it didn’t matter. There were cheers, hugs, laughs, and bonds of friendship that will last a lifetime.

6) FLASH! Organic farm, Maiori, Italy. Some people don’t have much, and yet they give it all away anyway. Such were our hosts in a beautiful little bed and breakfast with stunning views of the Amalfi Coast. The 318 daily steps to our temporary home were well worth it! And our hosts were so generous, giving us fresh produce from their garden on a daily basis, as well as “samples” of their traditional Italian dinners that were the size of full meals. We laughed so hard at meal time, because the stories they told were so funny and interesting. And they laughed at us when we ran from their particularly unfriendly and brooding rooster, because, of course, they’d done the same many times before. (There’s even a video of our host running from their rooster on YouTube!) When we left, Adele and the host hugged and cried, and I might’ve teared up a little too.

I could go on for pages and pages about the incredible people and experiences we’ve had on this trip. There’s SO MUCH good in this world, even if it’s hard to see it sometimes. If nothing else, my experiences over the last three years have taught me to look for the spark of light in the darkness, to find the ray of sunshine peeking through a cloud-shrouded sky, and to never—not ever—pick a fight with a moody rooster.
 
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