My husband and I decided to talk book for the first time in so long that I wasn't even sure how to do it productively. It was a great three hour conversation that made me want to get back into my novels so bad, but I'm holding off for a little bit longer as I finish my second trimester and my training at my new job and settle into an actual schedule.

Thanks to Nathan Bradford and Nicole Palmby, as well as my own beloved husband Nathan, I have undertaken a crazy task that will hopefully make me a better writer and make you, the reader, happier.

I'm guilty of this, so I'm sure you are too. Have you ever read something and as you're reading it, you think to yourself "I don't need to know this much"? It happens to me all the time, even with my own stuff.

Before, I've said that you need to remember the details. I'm not changing my mind, I'm clarifying myself. You do need to remember the details. Just not every single one.

Recently, I was standing in the library, scanning a new novel that I was thinking about taking home with me, and I found myself bogged down in the minute details of the room the characters were in. Right down to the pattern of the wallpaper and the thickness of the carpet. It was very annoying, distracting, and hard to keep track of later.

Here's what I learned that I wanted to pass along to you: There's information and then there's too much information. Don't give it all away.

By putting too much detail in your scene, your reader no longer has the ability to imagine it for themselves. Color of the paint on the wall and the furnishings of the room is great. The exact pattern of the wallpaper or the size of the print on the window of the coffeeshop is not really necessary unless it furthers the plot. Is the print on the window part of a murder mystery? Then put it in. If your lovers are realizing that they want to get married while sitting in front of that window, we don't need the detail.

Another way to think of it is when someone is talking to you, and they tell you more about something than you want to know. I don't care what caused the funny smell in your bodily excrement, that's too much information (this happens to me more often than you think, I'm sorry to say). If the detail isn't important, cut it later on.

Imagine this: You walk into a place you frequent often, whether that's a coffee house or the library or a bar, it's not a big deal. Put yourself there and think about what's going on around you. Do you see it? There's one thing I'm sure you're forgetting and it's not your fault that you don't notice it. More often than not, you aren't supposed to notice it.

I'm talking about the background noise. The music playing in the coffee house or the sound of people typing on computers in the library. If you're in a bar, well that changes from night to night and hopefully you aren't too drunk to notice it. Why don't you notice it? Because it's there to influence your mood.

When writing a scene like this in a novel, you have to remember that background noise is there and use it to your advantage. I put a couple bar and club scenes in Prophecy and I actually name the song I'm thinking of playing in the background. When Seven walks into the bar the first time he sees Rhoswen, he enters to Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole". All of a sudden, you get a picture of what is really going on. When Seven and Rhoswen go out for their first date, I describe the song playing on the dance floor of the club (because it's in Japanese and I honestly didn't have the title with me, but you understand where I'm coming from here).

This adds realism to your writing. No one walks around in a bubble of silence. We all have our favorite bands and we all sing along in the car (well, most of us). If you have a character driving around without music playing in the background, he's probably talking to the other character sitting right next to him or reflecting on the aliens that just abducted his dog.

Make sure you remember what should be there and take the opportunity to show off some of your own personality if you want to. Lincoln listens to Linkin Park in Forbidden because it's A: Funny (you'll get it in a minute. If you don't, leave a comment and I'll explain), B: A personal favorite of mine, and C: He's an angry teenage boy. But if he's driving around listening to the sounds of silence (that isn't really a band is it?), then it's no longer believable.

Have you ever been in the middle of a good book and find it completely destroyed by a horrible villain? Or the opposite happens and you can hardly stand reading the book but the villain is wonderful? That doesn't happen very often.

There are two big mistakes that most people make when writing a villain. The first is that he's completely impotent. He's not a bad guy, he's an angry character that doesn't do anything. You know those horrible movie villains? It's like that only worse. "I'll get you Austin Powers. But first I'm going to hide over here and plot until the writer finds something better for me to do." It's so disappointing to see it happen.

The second is that the bad guy is so bad it's impossible to believe. You'll see a villain that's a sexual deviant and a psychopath and at the same time shoots lightning bolts out of his butt. He's a genius and yet he blends in with the background so the hero somehow doesn't notice that the bad guy is going to kill him in the end. Please spare us. A sexually deviant villain isn't believable and may offend some of your target audience. Just because the villain has a fancy for chains and a ball gag, that doesn't make him a bad guy. If he's a psychopath, give a reason for him to be like that. If he has special powers, make it possible (or as possible as you can with supernatural characters).

I will admit that I made the sexual deviant mistake. But I was called out on it so many times that I had to change it (NP, you'll be happy about that. Prophecy doesn't have a sexually deviant villain in the published version). Now I have a villain that's insane, but he's insane and bent on revenge. That doesn't even really do him justice.

I guess the point you need to remember is that a villain is a character, just like your hero. Map him or her out and make him or her believable. Give them purpose and make people either hate them or fear them or whatever you feel like doing. But for the sake of anyone who will read your novel, remember to make the villain believable. And please stay away from lightning bolts coming from his butt.

I don't know about you, but I hate novels that have anticlimatic fight scenes. My husband says it's like having the foreplay but no climax. For example, did anyone else hate the fight scene at the end of Twilight (the novel, not the movie) when she doesn't give any details about the fight? It really bothered me.

For lack of a better example (because I have only one example published) I'm going back to Prophecy. Sorry if this bothers anyone else, but when Forbidden and Legacy are published, I'll have more to go from without giving stuff away. In Prophecy, my hero and my villain meet up twice. I wanted big blowup fight scenes for both with the second being the biggest of the two. To make this more believable, I got out wooden spoons and a fly swatter (I'm not kidding either. Just picture it in your mind) and I played both sides of the fight. I wanted to see what the body would actually look like in battle. It was so much fun.

It was like choreographing a dance. Every movement had to be planned out, each counter movement slid into place alongside it. I wanted to know how the body looked when a wrist was bent with a sword (spoon, fly swatter, whatever) or how someone would stand when counterattacking. By making my body move like that (or as close to that as I could manage) I could describe it accurately.

What would you do to make a fight scene believable? How would you prepare for it? Would you just write it out and then edit later? Or would you choreograph it to make sure it all fit together?