Glenn Ashton Author Blog: Your Adams & Eves: Of Villains & Villas

Friday, July 29, 2011

Your Adams & Eves: Of Villains & Villas

James Bond

Do you have a worthy villain? Is your Bad Guy bad enough?

How do you measure his 'badness'?

It's no good just to people your novel with good heroes; you also need villains of substance.

Blake Snyder puts it well in Save the Cat! – he has a title Make the Bad Guy Badder.

He writes that we don't want to see nobodies onscreen, we want to see heroes.

And he argues persuasively that there is a win-win correlation between your Hero and your Bad Guy:

And making the bad guy badder automatically makes the hero bigger. It's one of the Immutable Laws of Screenwwriting. Think about James Bond. What makes him James Bond is Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Dr. No... He needs someone bigger to play with to make his own heroism bigger. He needs an antagonist whose powers match his own ... The point is that the hero and the bad guy are a matched set and should be of equal skill and strength, with the bad guy being just slightly more powerful than the hero because he is willing to go to any lengths to win... So if your hero and your bad guy are not of equal strength, make them so, but give the edge to the bad guy.

For our novel Obelisk Seven, we ended up with three themes (global warming, the obelisk quest, and the Tough Bug); we also ended up with two sets of Bad Guys, one for the Tough Bug theme, and one for the other two themes.

One of the Bad Guys we located in a palace on the Grand Canal of Venice.

The Bad Guy family we modelled on a real family that had been a powerful force in Venice for many generations: the Cornaro family. For centuries this wealthy family dominated the city state of Venice, commissioning palaces, theaters and other buildings, and contributing members to the political elite.

We saw many palaces as our gondolier sculled us past them, and one in particular popped up when we needed a place for some climactic skullduggery – a five storey building with a curving exterior staircase.


The 'Gitti' Palace in Venice

This gave us our setting: a dark night during the famous Carnival of Venice, a gondola moving soundlessly through the waters of a canal, and the voices of late-night revellers drifting over the lapping water ...

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Silent Lips

People inside and outside New York race against time to save the city from a genetically engineered virus created by mistake.

With a quarantine of the city enforced by the Army, doctors in the ParkLab set up in Central Park try everything they can think of to cure people, and the U.S. President makes the most agonizing decision any president has ever made.

This book is dedicated to all who have visited or lived in the wonderfully vibrant city of New York, the premier city of our world.

During one of my visits to the city I was walking in Central Park when the thought struck me: What if something happened and this huge, bustling, energetic city was forced to shut its borders, to keep people inside and stop people entering? That thought stayed with me for several visits until one day I sat down, pen in hand, and sketched out the story of Silent Lips.

It is a story of New York struck by a mysterious disease which forces the President to blockade the city. Nothing can leave; nothing can enter.

What is this disease? Where did it come from? Who made it? Can it be stopped?

Inside the quarantined city, I thought of men and women fighting to find the answer to the mysterious sickness that raged in the streets and hotels and homes, while still more men and women came from all over the world to the city to help it fight for its survival. This is the story of the people inside the city, its sky blackened by the fires of its funeral pyres, and of those outside who watch with anguish the mounting crisis.

I hope you enjoy Silent Lips.

WANT SOMETHING FOR NOTHING?

By clicking the Download button below and filling in your email, you will get the following gifts to help you as a writer:

A Save the Cat! worksheet for you to plan your novel’s plotline, including all the Beats of Screenwriter Blake Snyder, plus notes on his method, along with space for you to draft your own plot notes.

A Template (in Microsoft Word) of the Small Steps Plan for drafting your very own Book Promotion Plan, based on my Small Steps to Bigger Book Sales Chapter 25.

The same Template as an Excel program, allowing you to enter your own Small Steps Plan events for the next 12 months.

A Weekly Checklist for monitoring your progress in carrying out your very own Small Steps Plan for promoting your books, with 120 items for you to consider including in your weekly marketing program.

AMAZON 5-STAR REVIEW!

MOVE OVER, TOM CLANCY’S RAINBOW SIX!

The Euros grab the headlines and the reader!

By BOBA on March 1 2015

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Like many of Glenn Ashton's other books, this one grabs you right away and doesn't let up until the very end.

The "Euros" will satisfy anyone who is a fan of the Rainbow Six and Private para-military groups fighting off the bad guys. However, they are a bit classier and less super-human, therefore much more believable.

In this case the bad guys are taken from the current headlines and set in both Notre Dame Cathedral and the sewers in Paris. The location is finely crafted and shows an obvious flair for detailed research.

This is a highly enjoyable read but don't expect to just read a bit and then put it down. That won't happen!

The Euros: Notre Dame Point Zero

What is my latest book - The Euros: Notre Dame Point Zero – about?

How would you rescue women and children held hostage in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris by a band of faceless, nameless and ruthless men, who have attached bombs to each hostage, and threaten to blow up the cathedral if their demands are not met?

That is the problem that The Euros face in this, the first book of the series about them.

The Euros is the name for the Euro Protection Bureau, the highly skilled, well trained super cops unit formed to protect the European Union from threats to its integrity.

With five headquarters – the Puzzle House in London, the Grooming House in Paris, the Toy House in Berlin, the Garage in Rome and the Story House in Prague - the PuzzleMaker and Headmaster, directors of the London and Paris HQs, have a limited time to find a way to make themselves invisible so that they may enter the cathedral, rescue the hostages, save the cathedral, and capture the Bad Guys.

Small Steps to Bigger Book Sales

Your 20 Tasks:

You will be guided to do 20 Tasks, over 9 months, as part of your very own Small Steps Plan to market your books.

Your Book Promotion Plan:

You easily-prepared book promotion plan will set out methodical, small steps every week to market your books where they stand the best chance of being bought by readers.

What you will learn:

You will learn how to:

1. create your Team of advisors to help you every step of the way;
2. define your Target Readers, so that you can persuade them to buy your books;
3. find and use many of top social network forums, where readers and writers mix, so that you can build your Clan, or team of supporters;
4. get reviews of your books;
5. use other social networks tools easily and effectively; and do all this at your own speed and in the free time you have.

How to start:

Your whole marketing plan is already prepared for you. Chapter 25 has a detailed template for your own Small Steps Plan, of 200 small steps in 20 tasks. All you have to do is add the target starting dates for your many small steps on your road to success. You can easily make any tweaks to it that you and your Team want to.

How to make it work:

The easy way for you and your Team to carry out your plan is also provided. Chapter 26 has a very detailed 120-item Weekly Engagement Checklist. Each week you simply do those things that need to be done that week, confident that the Checklist will keep you on course.