Silence is good, for once

It means I am working =)
Its been a while since I finished Book 2, but trust me, I have not been idle. Weighing in at nearly 350,000 words, The Keepers of the Fire, is no pamphlet, and giving it a genuine, thorough and constructive editing has been extremely time consuming.

So far, since I finally declared it complete, I have produced 3 pretty different drafts. Large sections were rewritten, new chapters were added, old ones were binned and a whole new ending to the book was crafted. After that, the whole thing needed to be read through to sense check it, then read through again at a much higher scrutiny level to pull out all the typos and check for grammar. By this point, however, I had hit my wall. After more than a few years of writing, followed by nearly half a year of editing, I was completely word blind, unable to find any more errors or do any more useful editing, and so it has been handed off to another.
As has been (every so slightly) ranted about by me before, there is simply no way I can get this professionally proofread, as it would cost well in excess of £10,000, so I am afraid there is no way this process could be sped up. That being said, though, the end is now officially in sight. A few more weeks of final editing are in order, and then it will take me a few days to apply all the marked changes and finalise the book, but after that, I am declaring it done, no matter what. There is simply nothing more I can do, so I shall just have to hope it is in a good enough state that you all don’t tear me apart! =)
I will keep you posted, but I would place money on this being out sometime in mid September.

Missing Post Two

And here is the second “missing post”.  This was something that was troubling me enormously as I was finishing the book and now, as I prepare to release it, it is frankly troubling me a great deal more…

Typos are becoming the bane of my existence and I fear that they are about to overshadow the release of a work I am really rather proud of, but the reason they will become such an issue is more bothersome than the actual errors themselves.

Let’s be clear, while I am not the world’s greatest wordsmith, I know my grammar and punctuation and I know how to smack the English language around sufficiently well enough to enable me to tell the tale I want to tell, but after the release of the first book, I got a frankly bewildering number of reviews on Amazon that banged on about spelling errors and grammatical mistakes rather than giving me feedback on my work.

I just do not bloody understand that.

Anyone who has read any of my work can see I am at least vaguely competent, you know?  I don’t do anything too awful, I don’t throw apostrophes and commas around like confetti and my narrative capabilities are, while still in development, a decent way above the thronging masses of the average eBook: indeed, having read a lot of the more recent and highly successful book series currently available, my opinion of my own writing actually went up!

My point here is that it is not a matter of me being too stupid to edit my own book, it is just a simple fact that typos and grammatical errors will happen in any work of any real length.  I could reach for any book from the shelf next to me, open to a random page and probably find something wrong there.  Hell, I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings that is the most recent edition and even it has errors in it, and that book has been through the hands of dozens of professional proofreaders.

“Well, why don’t you just get your book proofread?” the Amazon reviews cry: this annoys me even more!  I am selling a book for less than a bag of crisps and you are so incensed by me typing ‘form’ instead of ‘from’ that you are unable to continue?  I have to ask, with all due respect, what kind of nutter are you?  The Keepers of the Key is nearly 200,000 words long!  That is longer than The Deathly Hallows, for reference.  It is not a short book.  I have edited it dozens of times, but after a few reads, you go utterly word-blind to your own work and can only read what should be there, not what is there.  As to getting a professional proofreader to give it the once over, I think people are wildly deluded as to how simple that is, so let me offer some numbers.

A proofreader can proofread approximately 1000 words per hour (and that is proofread, not edit) at an average cost of somewhere between £20 and £30 per hour.  That means that The KotK would have cost me up to £5000 to be proofread and the KotF would cost me just shy of ten grand.  The absolute cheapest price I can find for the service is a “final polish” read-through that will only point out the most obvious of errors, and that would still cost nearly £2000.

I sold book one for 99 cents (69p) per copy and got 20% commission:  you do the math.

My point is this:  my first book had errors in.  My second book, I assure you, will have errors too, though none of them will disrupt your reading.  They are both big books.  They are both, in my humble opinion, worth both your time and the money I am asking for them.  Can we not just cut me a little slack, read on when you spot an error and enjoy the story?

Update about missing updates

So.  Yeah.  The WordPress Android app apparently let me down and did not in fact post the last two updates I wrote. Also, I cannot recall what they were actually about.

Helpful.

So, anyway… My next book, The Keepers of the Fire, is complete and is just going through some editing and proofreading.  I have 2 more small inserts to write and 2 chapters to rewrite (as they are, frankly, icky), but with that done, the book will be complete, and it will simply be a matter of giving it a last read through to make sure the worst of the typos are taken care of!

With any luck, Book 2 will be out to buy on Amazon within the next 4 – 6 weeks!  Huzzah!

The Trilogy Effect

Writing is turning out to be a never ending learning process it seems, and the fun fact for today is: Trilogies are damn hard!

It has been a little while since I finished the rewrite/second-edition of The Keepers of the Key and so I have set-to with working on its sequel.  After finishing writing Book 1, I thought that Book 2 would be an easier, more carefully thought out process and that I would not fall foul of all the pitfalls that I did first time.

Wrong.

Ever since I settled the plot for Book 1, many years ago now, I have had the “grand plot” reasonably straight in my head.  I knew what would happen in the next 2 books, what the over-arching themes would be and which of the characters would return where and for what purpose.  With all that in mind I finally got about 50% of the way through writing Book 2 when, thanks to the input of my unpaid, unofficial (though much loved!) editor, I realised that I was going nowhere.  My plots were riddled with holes and failings of logic, certain characters lacked any depth or real function within my world and were being tagged along simply out of habit and, generally, I was on a hiding to nowhere.

So, before Book 2 is even anywhere near complete, I am starting a rewrite.  About 50% of what I have so far written is being scrapped and I am now pitching at a very different set of themes with a  tweaked cast and rather different end-game.  How I came to be quite so lost in the wilderness is genuinely beyond me.  The notes I have made for this book are 5 times larger than those of Book 1 and while Book 2’s plot is far more complex, I really though I had a handle on it and would be able to just push through, but all that I had thought to be cut, dry and set in stone is rapidly coming undone once I get down to the actual writing.

I know Book 1’s legacy was going to leave me with work to do, as several of the “main” characters were under-formed due to there being simply not enough space to really give everyone their day in court, but I thought the familiarity of already known and liked characters would balance that out.  What it in fact has done is made everything ten times harder.  When brainstorming for Book 2, this familiarity has essentially bred laziness in me, leading me to conjure nebulous ideas that sound great in theory, but lack actual substance or depth when I came to write them.  It is as though I have written the trailer for a film without actually having any clue how the envisioned scenes link together.

To say that I am starting to see why so many writers bemoan series and complain about the difficulty of actually getting them done is a wild understatement.

Anyway, time to go and write chapter 10.  Again. =/

177,781 – Part 3

A further pause in activity due to a week away followed by a birthday, all woven through with a massive amount of editing and some writing.

The new draft of The Keepers of the Key is about 50% done and I will have it finalised come the end of this week.  It contains no changes to the writing, just a brush and polish of what was already there (commas – why must you torment me so?!).  I’ll get it uploaded to Amazon and to smashwords so if anyone is mid-read, grab the new copy.

With that done, I will be diving back into the task of attracting a  publisher.  New synopsis is written, sample chapters are ready: I just need to draw up a list of prospective agencies and have at it again and nag the living hell our of everyone that bought the book to get a review written for me to add more fuel to my fire.  So few people have actually rated the book or left a review it is slightly worrying.  I am, however, choosing to believe that they simply forget and will leap eagerly to the task once I remind them!  Yes…

ePubli…wait! Not yet.

So the next step was ePublishing.  The companies I should have been able to turn to, to market and promote my book were…otherwise engaged, so it was down to me to get my product out there.  Cue: Amazon.

But it is not that simple, is it?  While you may have worked hard – damned hard – on your manuscript, it will not yet have  received a good editing.  No one has sat down and crossed the T’s, dotted the I’s and pointed out that your spell-check is, in fact, quite, quite insane.

Trouble is, editing is job numero uno  for the publisher that takes you on.  They pay an army of little nitpickers to take your beloved work apart, word by word, sifting through each and every page with the mother of all red pens.

Problem is YOU are your publisher now, kiddo, so break out your own red pen.

So I did.  I bought a cheap laser printer and ran out a 2-pages-per-page copy of my book.  Sitting down, red pen in hand, I thought it would be quite nice to see my own work as a reader for once.  It would be enjoyable.  I’m pretty handy with a word processor and I’m already that guy who annoys his friends by correcting their grammar and telling them when they use commas incorrectly.  This will be a breeze!

First run through was a breeze.  I just looked out for the really obvious stuff: problems with speech-marks, extra spaces, duplicate words, capitalisation and so on.  No worries.  The red marks grew at an alarming rate but, well, that’s to be expected, right?  I may know how grammar works but I’m a lousy typist.  It’s all good, right?

Wrong.  To cut a very long story short, I was astonished – nay, appalled – by the sheer volume of errors I found. Mistakes related just to typing must have numbered close to 500 – and those were the ones I managed to find.  It was the other mistakes, the ones you only spotted by slowly and carefully reading and digesting every single word in every single sentence.  You have to grasp each tiny section of the story in its entirety and not only make sure that it makes sense, but that is also makes sense in relation to everything around it.

You see the thing is, as I learned very quickly, it is deeply, deeply difficult to edit your own work.  Not only are you snow-blind to the text as you have done nothing but stare at it for 18 months, but you know what it is supposed to say.  Your brain tricks you, filling in missed words, overlooking swapped words (I swear, form rather than from) and in fact Spackling merrily over huge holes in logic.  It wasn’t until the third full read-through of the book that I realised there were 3 glaring timeline errors buried in here, with characters either doing things impossibly fast or ludicrously slow and it wasn’t until the eighth read-through that I realised I was calling a character by 2 different names!  In the end I stopped, 12 read-throughs later, as I was really quite certain my eyes were going to explode and that I was on the verge of loathing my own characters.

Safe to say that my respect for those who proof-read professionally has gone up exponentially.  The sheer determination and unflinching focus it must take to read through so much text, pulling it apart and making sense of it, staggers my brain.  Even now, now the book has been on sale for some months, I still find errors!  I know that, as books go, mine is not short, but it is not War & Peace either.  How on earth one would go about editing a genuinely massive work (again, looking at you Neal Stephenson) is simply beyond me.

So: did I learn anything?  Hells yes.  The two most important things I have taken on-board as I write the sequel are:

1) Planning is paramount, especially when your plot gets complex or convoluted.  I planned a great deal for the first book but never with enough detail to stop me running fowl of my own attention span.

2) While writing, don’t walk away mid-section or at least, if you have to stop, make notes about where your thoughts are.  Having looked back through the book to see where the worst mistakes were (track changes – gotta love it), I notice that they seem to occur right in the middle of a chapter or a sequence.  My best guess is that I will have stalled or become frustrated and simply got up to do something else, possibly not returning to write for days at a time.  By then, of course, the buzzing cloud of plot ideas and character actions will have quietened and I will have gone on to finish the section differently than I originally planned.

Hopefully this will make a difference when I am at the point of editing the second book but, to be frank, given that this book is looking to be much longer, with more characters and a more complex plot, I cannot say I am that convinced.  I guess we shall see…