 Oddly enough, Biohazard: Heavenly Island, is one of the better zombie stories I've read in a while. As you probably well know, Biohazard is the original title of the Resident Evil video games in Japan. This comic series takes place some time after Resident Evil 6 the video game. Biohazard: Heavenly Island is an original comic book tie-in series printed on premium paper and published in Weekly Shonen Champion. The premise is simple but loads of fun. It's basically the reality series Next Top Model South America meets the series Survivor, but when the girls engage in a competition to not get voted off the island, strange things are afoot. Lurking on the island are zombies! Suddenly the models start getting killed off one by one by the zombie horde. As luck would have it, Claire Redfield is sent to the island to investigate something even more dark and evil. As it turns out, the television network sponsoring the Survivor meets Top Model reality show knew about the zombies -- and thought it would make for great television. Some of the models band together to better survive what has become a hellish Nightmare Island. And just when our last group of bikini clad supermodels are about to bite the big one, quite literally, Claire Redfield shows up in the nick of time to save them. I am really enjoying this series so far. Japanese manga -- gotta love it! You can learn more about Biohazard: Heavenly Island at: http://residentevil.wikia.com/wiki/BIOHAZARD_heavenly_island 
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 Now everyone knows that if you are going to properly format your manuscript for print or e-book you need to insert chapter headers. But as a writer, I am here to inform you there is another extremely valuable reason to insert chapter headers as soon as possible into your novel, even before you begin your proofreading and edits. When I edit, I tend to leave it open so I can jump between chapters with ease. With a massive series like BITTEN, I often will change something that changes continuity somewhere else in the novel. Instead of sitting around wasting time scrolling endlessly as I search for the right chapter to make changes in, with headers inputted all I have to do is hit Ctrl F and open up the navigation pane and then click on the necessary chapter or section of the book and I'm off to the races. So how exactly do you create chapter headers in Microsoft Word? I've broken it down into 7 easy steps.
 Having chapter headers will allow you to use the very useful navigation pane. Now, what is a navigation pane? Well, the navigation pane allows you to use your chapter headers to navigate the content of your book -- as long as you have inputted chapter headers -- you can jump around and find any part of your book almost instantly. This is useful for editing, proof reading or for writers like me that continually tinker with the manuscript as they write. Inside the navigation pane there is a section for headings, pages, and manuscript search results. If you click on the headings tab within the navigation pane, all of your chapter headers will queue up in order. Additionally, having chapter headers inserted before you upload and publish your e-book is wise since these headings will convert directly into hyperlinks in both Mobi and Epub files. If you insert an automated table of contents later on, it will use your headings to build the table of contents along with all the hyperlinks. Again, headers are extremely useful and you should get comfortable doing it yourself since it will save you time and money in the long run, especially if you're an Indy author and/or DIY type person.  When I edit, I tend to leave it open so I can jump between chapters with ease. With a massive series like BITTEN, I often will change something that changes continuity somewhere else in the novel. Instead of sitting around wasting time scrolling endlessly as I search for the right chapter to make changes in, with headers inputted all I have to do is hit Ctrl F and open up the navigation pane and then click on the necessary chapter or section of the book and I'm off to the races.  Hopefully this tutorial will help you create useful chapter headers in your own manuscript and make it easier to navigate your book.
Good luck!  Click image to go to book's Amazon page My philosopher friend Jonathan M.S. Pearce aka Johnny P. just wrote his first Zombie book! It's called Survival of the Fitess: Metamorphosis.
I will leave my full review of it in a week (give or take) once my own writing schedule dies down and I have time to actually sit down and write the review. I'll be finishing up the book tonight or tomorrow. Thus far it's really good. It has a literary quality rare to the genre and is great at pulling back from shocking scenes and making you want to know what just happened off the page. So, check it out! You won't regret it.  Have you seen this analogy between books sales and coffee sales?
I think the analogy is sound. I know some might not, but I think the analogy is more than fair. Let me explain. If I buy a $15 bag of coffee beans from the Fair Trade store down the road, so I know my money is going directly to the workers, and that large bag lasts me two months on about an average of one cup a day... then my cup of coffee only costs me a approximately 26 cents. Now Starbucks is charging roughly 23% more per cup (averaging $5.20 per cup) for basically the same thing with a dash of milk and sugar. And Starbucks is selling way more than a cup a day. Let's guesstimate that on a good day a place in the city sells about 1K cups of coffee. That means that a single Starbucks store is making upwards near 2 million a year on overpriced bean water, selling what I can get for 26 cents per day, for roughly 94 bucks a year. That's insane. The thing is... they've convinced consumers that their brand is worth a 23% mark up on the cost of coffee. So they can get away with selling you a $6 cup of coffee. Now, I highly doubt most authors are charging enough for their books. If I were to charge 10 dollars (USD) per hour, and I write 8 hours a day, that's only a yearly income of $20,800. Hardly enough to get by on. But I know for a fact that writing a novel requires more technical skill and artistic integrity than it does to be a barista. That's not looking down on baristas, because in most cases their skill set is higher than a check out clerk or a typical waitress. I mean, work is work. But the way I calculate it, a Starbucks employee makes roughly $15-20 per hour full time. Now that's a steady living. This past year, on my books I barely raked in 7K (USD). And after initial sales there is inevitably a dip, because as with most art, after people buy it once there is no longer any supply and demand. So, technically, I would need to be charging about $230 per book to get fair pay. But really, who will pay that amount? Maybe for a nice print of a painting. But for a novel, which the same amount of time has gone into? Not so much. Which is a shame. This is why many writers tend to feel the pressure of writing for a more commercial audience. They sacrifice their art for just producing that which sells. Because it's the only way they can get by and still be a writer. Being a writer isn't easy. Writing isn't easy. And the people that do it do it because it's in their blood and it's their passion. So I find the analogy fitting, because it shows that people will pay a 23% mark up on bean flavored water, but they won't pay even a bare minimum on what it costs to produce a good book. Sad, but true. At any rate, it's something to think about the next time you see the price of a book and think that maybe it's too expensive. Chances are, it's not. It's probably just the right price to slap down a $10 dollar bill and have enough for some coffee afterward.  Most writers I know prefer to outline their stories by hand. This includes greats like J.K. Rowling, as the above image of her Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix outline attests to. I myself am a hybrid outliner. What this means is that I like to write a rough outline by hand, and I usually do the same for my timelines, but I prefer to write my character bios / descriptions and series bibles out using a word processor. Then I print out everything I need and just use staples, glue, and magic to bind it all together. Now, every author has their own unique way of doing things, so I can only explain what works for me personally. Feel free to try it my way, and if it works, great! If not, then by all means try something else until you find what works best for you. SIMPLE PLOTTING : Simple is Elegant I don't tend to get into too many details with my plots, as I like the freedom to write without too many constraints. My habit is to think of my beginning (A), middle (B), and end (C) of the story that I'm thinking of. Then I have my character bios sheet handy, with character motivations and important character events written down for each character. At this point, my goal is simply to start writing and try to get from point A to point B to point C. It's really that simple. Kurt Vonnegut once stated that there were two kinds of writers. Swoopers and Mashers. He said: “Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” When I first set out to be a "serious" writer, I tried the Basher method of being meticulous and writing everything according to an extremely detailed outline. It just didn't work for me personally. I found that I had more trouble with the rigid plotting when I decided to change something later on in the the story -- thus affecting overall continuity of events to the point where I had to do a lot of painstaking revising of the entire plot. It was more work than it was worth. After that, I moved to more of the Swooper school of writing. Nowadays I tend to feel that extremely detailed plot outlines bog me down too much. Other writers seem to like them. So just try to get a feel on what suits your needs as a writer and an artist. TIMELINES ARE MINI OUTLINES WITH DATES & TIMES Many of my novels play around with the sequence of events during the time frame the novel takes place. With my BITTEN series, for example, I have multiple stories happening simultaneously, but each is slightly askew from the other in terms of the overall timeline from when the Resurrection Virus starts to when it consumes the world and the aftermath of it all. So I needed to keep track of what happens when and where for the overall series. I deliberately keep my series timeline simple -- and use it as a cheat sheet just to make sure my dates are lining up. I like to create a box with an arrow pointing to a timeline of dates to know what order the event occurs in the overall story. Within these boxes are a series of events, but the extremely stripped down version -- no more than a sentence or two. Below is my series timeline for my BITTEN books. Just a fair warning, it contains minor spoilers for those that might not want to know what happens. Of course, I've deleted the big tent-pole events and left only basic plot points (obviously).  Warning: Minor series spoilers! A Series Bible with Character Bios!
In television, a "series bible" explains everything the show runner aka series creator wants to include in their universe. It can include all sorts of notes, made up languages, to terminology specific to their genre, to potential names for characters, to plot points, character descriptions and bios, and everything in between. I wrote a short world bible for my Bitten series explaining that I wanted the Resurrection virus to be rooted in real science. It includes my research on viral strains and diseases and what the Resurrection virus would be exactly. My series bible includes a character biography section which has the character, their name, their height, build, eye color, hobbies, job, and quirks listed. After this is the characters goal or motivation in the story. I close the bio out describing what key events the character will take part in and how they will die -- if they are one of the ones I am planning to kill off. Of course, sometimes I deviate from the series bible (as with the plot outline) when a better idea comes along. So, now you know the rest of the story! Or, at least you know one author's preference in how to go about crafting an original plot outline. I hope this inside scoop helps you take the crucial step in creating your own original plot outline. Best of luck! |
Tristan VickBy day I am an educator and a cultural ambassador. By night I entertain notions of being a literary master. In reality I am just a family man and ordinary guy who works hard and loves writing just about as much as I love my family. Just about. AVAILABLE NOW
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