Jeff Ayers - Author
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Beware of spilling ink!
Skate is a thief, trained and owned by the local crime syndicate, the Ink. When she tries to burgle a shut-in’s home, she gets caught by the owner—a powerful undead wizard. He makes a deal with her: “borrow” books from other wizards in return for a place to stay.

Caught between her growing fondness for the wizard and her past with the crime syndicate, Skate doesn’t know where her loyalties lie. But she’d better figure it out, because there’s a new player in town, one whose magical hypnotism puts them all at risk.
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On the run!
Her mentor is dead, but he doesn’t have to stay that way. He’s left Skate a clue to bringing him back, and she and her friends are determined to follow it.

No sooner do they set out for unknown lands, however, than things get dangerous. Hot on their tail is the wizard Ossertine, furious over Skate’s part in her friend’s death and thirsty for revenge. Worse still are the attacks that come at night: dark, mysterious, and palpably evil.
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In this race against time, magic, and implacable foes, Skate must rely on her wits and her friends to save not just her mentor’s life, but also her own.
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You don't know the power...

9/7/2019

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“Rainbow in the Dark” has got a whole chapter under its belt, silly thing that it is. I’ll be looking back at the manuscript I plan to shop around before the next blog post.

There’s an adage in writing circles that is always worth remembering: show, don’t tell. It’s an axiom that reminds writers that we shouldn’t use the narrator to just tell everything to the reader. If you want the reader to understand what a character is like, show the reader. Imagine if, when Darth Vader first shows up onscreen, a narration crawl shows up to tell the audience how bad of a dude he is. Totally ineffective! Instead, the movie shows us how nasty he is, from his appearance to his actions. Everything about him reveals how cruel and dangerous he is, and nobody has to tell us that. Characterization should be the same in good novel writing.

Having said that, it’s hard to do. Whenever I’ve got a character in mind, the person is a short list of landmarks. He’s got a bad leg. She’s out for revenge. He can’t make friends and it makes him lonely. She has trust issues. So the challenge for me as a writer is to take these characteristics and turn them into events, which is turn reveal the character for who they are. It’s a complex series of steps, and it takes up a bulk of the creative labor during both the drafting and editing stages. If plot were simply a matter of “Thing A happens, then thing B happens, then …” and so on, anybody could write well without much effort. To make a story good, though, a writer has to work to make his characters feel real. To make characters feel real, you have to show them to be real. Telling won’t cut it.
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Write your story!
-J. E. Ayers
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    Jeff Ayers writes books that are pretty good.

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