The New Book

(Oops! I wrote this yesterday, got busy and forgot to post it.)

The book I've been writing for the last few months is almost finished! I completed a fourth draft, or pass proof, a few days ago and I've been going through it looking for any last-minute changes. So far I've spotted a couple more spelling errors and, more importantly, fixed a minor inconsistency (one character talks to another about an event that she could not possibly know about at that point in time).

I've also come up with a title. It's quite possibly not final but at this point I think it's the best I can come up with. Unless I think of something better between now and Sunday night, it's probably going to stand.

Why Sunday? Because on Monday Harper Voyager (Harper Collins' science fiction imprint) is doing something very interesting - for two weeks they'll be taking manuscript submissions direct from writers. It seems that they want to move more into the eBook market and in addition to moving many of their existing titles over they want to add in new titles by new authors.

If I was superstitious I'd have to say that this would be some kind of omen; that they happen to be doing this at precisely the time that my manuscript is going to be ready seems like incredibly good luck.

My plan is therefore to submit the 'script to them first thing Monday then wait for a bit. If they accept it there are some pretty huge benefits, so keep your fingers crossed for me, gentle reader.

After Monday, though, I'm planning on stepping back from the writing for a while. I have some writing ideas that I want to think about, but I'm not intending to put much effort into that right away. I have some other things that I want to focus on for a bit; in particular Kate bought me teach-yourself-piano kit consisting of an electronic piano and lessons in the form of software (by teachers at Juilliard, no less). It's brilliant and I was working my way through the lessons a while ago before the book started taking all my free time. I definitely want to get through the entire course (something like 300 lessons if I remember right) before I come back to writing. I'd like to be able to say "I can play piano" before too much longer.

By this time next week the book should be at Harpers and I should be back to piano lessons. But you know what they say about plans...

More reviewing, revising, editing

I'm happy to report that since last week's post I've made a hell of a lot of progress on the current Work In Progress. Despite my fears I was actually able to finish the first editing pass so that I had a completed second draft. I took that and converted it to an ePub format file and sideloaded it onto my Nook, where I could read it through again, carefully, and use the Nook's highlighting/notes feature to mark up more errors as I found them.

I completed that pass Wednesday evening and then spent yesterday lunchtime editing the manuscript from those notes (hence no regular blog post yesterday) - so right now I have a third draft, again rendered as an ePub and sitting on my Nook for another pass.

For this pass I'm looking for some problems that are more general and apply in many places. For one thing I have a tendency to use too many commas and semicolons and even though I tried to be careful I'm sure there are some I've missed, so I need to mark up places where those need fixing. I've got some "cliches" in there - characters doing and saying certain things, mannerisms if you like, a little bit excessively. A couple of minor bits of foreshadowing that need to be there so that certain events later in the book don't come across as dei ex machina.

Once that pass is done I think the 'script will be about ready to be published, which is great news from my perspective because it means that (assuming that I can get it done over the next week) I'll meet my self-imposed deadline of October 1.

The only things left are the final title (I think I have it but I don't want to make a snap decision then regret it later), and the cover artwork. I did the cover for Pavonis myself, it was a bit rushed, and I know I could have done a better job. This time I'm going to try to come up with a handful of ideas and see which I like best, and then take a little more time to make the thing look as professional as I can manage. In fact I'm reasonably happy to push back publication until I'm certain that the cover looks the way I want it to.

On the subject of Pavonis, things haven't moved much. Sales have flat-lined a bit (I was told that things often go that way so I'm not terribly surprised or disappointed); every review and rating has been great (there are about six, mostly five-star, on various sites) but there haven't been any new ones for a couple of weeks now. That's the problem with self-publishing; marketing is something that you have to do yourself, and I guess I'm just not that good at it. (So here's a plug: check it out here).

Reviewing, revising, editing

Yes, the title says its all; I'm going through my manuscript looking for spelling/grammar/punctuation errors, changing a few things to fix some problems with the timeline that I didn't spot when I was storyboarding, adding a handful of new scenes that I think will help the pacing and the flow as well as clarifying some background details, and so on. Some people call this reviewing, some call it revising, some call it editing. You say tom-AY-to, I say tom-AH-to.

It's been a learning process, too; I've found that most of the problems I've come across could have been avoided altogether if I'd reviewed the storyboard after I'd finished it but before actually starting to bash the keyboard. So this has now been noted as an official part of my 'process' - for all future writing projects there will be a review step after storyboarding. I've scratched a handful of notes to point out things to look for during that step.

So far I've gone through about fifteen scenes and the whole book has about ninety, so I'm about a sixth of the way done. That's not so good; at this rate I'm not going to have a second draft for at least a month, and that's too long for my liking.

The problem is that work - the job I'm paid to do, that is, not the work I do with my Writer hat on - has been pretty heavy for the last couple of weeks and that's meant in turn that by the time I get home and we've had dinner it's been too late, and I've been too tired, to concentrate on the manuscript.Talking of a Writer hat, I think what I really need is one of these:

However the panic and rush on that side of the house is now over so for a couple of weeks at least things shouldn't be so heavy. (At this moment the stuff I've been working on is being tested, and there's not much I can do until/unless they come across a problem, which is how I came to have time to fling together a blog post.) Hopefully by the time I write next week's epistle I'll have got a lot further with the editing. I'd really like to have a second draft done before this month's out.

The Day That Became Steampunk

We just had the weirdest day.

We'd set off from home intending to visit Shambhala Mountain, a Buddhist place up near Red Feather Lakes. We never got that far. First, Google Maps gave us a route that was definitely not the most direct. Still, I followed the directions and we were at least heading the right general direction.

As we came to a tiny place called Masonville, Kate started to feel a bit queasy (she sometimes gets motion sickness in the car) so I pulled over so that we could take a break. We looked around this little outdoor museum kind of thing for a few minutes then decided to check out the general store across the street. There's a picture of the place here. And inside we found a wonder. Right there in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, in a place that looks like it has a two-digit population and that doesn't even have mobile phone service, the general store sells STEAMPUNK STUFF. Well, not just that; they also have Victorian period style replica clothes and a bunch of other things - but hell, Steampunk things in such an out-of-the-way place?

Clothes. Jewellery. Hats. Goggles. Monocles. Even bridal wear. The place is way bigger inside than you'd guess from a look at the front.

(This hat here? I'm ordering one in my size.)

So I took some pictures - which I couldn't tweet because of aforementioned lack of phone service - and I bought some stuff. (I'm only sorry now that I didn't take more pics. However we're planning on going back and I'll make a point of taking a bunch more.)

And the lady that runs the place mentioned that quite a few people go there for this stuff, and asked us whether we were planning to go to the Steampunk Convention in Denver that we'd never heard of and is happening in just a few weeks. (I did a search and the only thing I can see for about the right date is MileHiCon; if anyone reading this has better information I'd like to hear it.)

So it's all very strange in hindsight. If Google had given me the most direct route, or if Kate hadn't started feeling odd when she did, or if we hadn't decided to go and take a look in the store, we might never have known about this place. Weird.

What I Did On My Holidays

The BIG NEWS is that I was able to complete the first draft of the current writing project over the weekend:

Working Title: The Arrows of Artemis
Word Count: about 68,000 words

That means that I was ahead of my self-imposed deadline by a couple of weeks (good) but as you can see, that word count is low (bad). I was originally estimating a word count up around 90-100K so this is short by quite a bit.

Well, it's not as bad as it might sound, it turns out. As I've been reading though each scene I've noticed that there's something missing. Not one specific thing; it's more general than that.

This time around (as opposed to when I was writing Pavonis) I have a review checklist that I'm applying to each scene as I review; this helps me make sure that each scene is polished to a high shine. It has things to check for each scene: Is there enough description? Does the scene start too early or late? What about the end? And so on. There are eight or nine things I check for each and every scene, and so far each and every scene has needed some editing to make things right.

For example, so far I've reviewed perhaps 10% of the book and I've found quite a few places where the text could definitely use more description - of people, clothes, buildings and so on. Adding that in will make the book more readable, do a better job of getting across the atmosphere of the setting and so on.

More importantly, though, I noticed that the story would definitely benefit from some more scenes. I have one character who just sort of disappears for a long stretch in the first third of the book, and I really need to add a couple of scenes focussing on her to fill in the gap in her side of the story. I have another character whose story simply fizzles out, and we see nothing from him after that point (which was originally intentional, but reading it back I now think it's a mistake). Some more scenes showing his perspective on what's happening in the City would give more depth as well as not leaving his tale as a kind of loose end. There's a (missing) funeral scene that really should have been in the original storyboard, which would give me a chance to explain some things about the workings of the City's government (which might sound dry but it becomes important later, when a conflict erupts between the City's factions).

Altogether I've identified seven new scenes that are absolutely essential; they'll improve the continuity and the flow as well as add depth and richness to the story. I also realised that I could use about three more scenes close to the end to tie off the storylines of some characters that are not exactly major but still significant. Not doing so would, I think, leave the reader with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling, wondering whatever happened to these people.

At the moment, with a little guesswork and a bit of thumbnail calculation, it's looking like adding those scenes and also some more description and so on, should get that word count up around the 80,000 mark while at the same time making the book better and without any deliberate padding.

I have to say that this book has been an absolute joy to work on. I think I've learned something here; some scenes in Pavonis were very hard to write, and I think that had a negative effect on those parts of the book. There's been nothing like that with this one - the writing itself has just flowed, and I'm really, really pleased with the way it's coming along. I have a good feeling about this one - I think people are going to like it a lot.