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?

Stylistic choices – The horror!

This is one of those times, one of those things, where being a writer utterly goes against my nature.  At my core, I am run through with the words “EVERYTHING SHOULD BE LOGICAL”, like a stick of cheap Brighton rock.  I am one of nature’s mathematicians, coders or scientists, fully aware that the universe around me is governed by unbreakable, definitive and logical laws, any of which I am free to look up at any time, simply to check that reality is ticking along as I expect.  I approach every task with a raging amount of common sense and basic logic, safe in the knowledge that, as long as I follow the rules, I will at least be competent at it.

Then I had the wise idea of being a writer.

Bloody hellfire, but this stuff is made up as writers go along!  While the English language has a plethora of rules and regulations as to what words mean, how they are used in conjunction with each other and what ordering provides what effect, there is nothing at all standardised about punctuation in the world of publishing – they are literally doing whatever they fancy!

Don’t believe me?  Fine: go to your bookshelf right now and grab five books.  Go on, I’ll wait.   Got them?  Right.  Open one to a random page and find some dialogue.  Look at how the author has formatted it.  What character have they used to surround the text?  How have they separated different lines of text?  How have they handled long pieces of speech?  How have they handled a single piece of speech split by narrative?  See they way all that is done?  Now open another one of the books and do the same.  Do any of the conventions of the first book match the second?  I bet they don’t, especially if you grabbed books from different genres and especially if you grabbed anything highly contemporary like Pratchett.

For those that have no clue what I am yammering about, allow me to illustrate.  I will type a small piece of dialogue below and then format in several different ways:

1. “Bob, you snivelling rodent,” she yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband “what the hell did you do that for?”
2. ‘Bob, you snivelling rodent,’ she yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband ‘What the hell did you do that for?’
3. “Bob, you snivelling rodent.” She yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband.  “What the hell did you do that for?”

See the differences?  Now: which one is correct?  The answer?  All of them, apparently, depending on which books you pick up.  For my money, I am sticking with version 1 but trying to ensure you stay true to a given format throughout an entire book is infuriatingly hard, especially when you get to the editing stage.

To add even more crazy to a bowl already filled with confusion, we then have the wonder that is the ePub encoding software.  While I have been trawling through my first book these past weeks, furiously highlighting every last typo and misplaced comma, it wasn’t until I came to edit the list of correction into the book that I realised something: a lot of the mistakes in The Keepers of the Key are not actually there!  My master document, from which the ePubbed versions are made, has far, far less typos and bad punctuation in it than the book that is actually on sale.  The software used to transform my word document into other forms is actually adding errors as it goes!

At this point I just want to smack the coders of said software upside the head.  If you step out side on any given day and heave a keyboard in a random direction, you will likely hit 5 coders in the head and yet when it comes time to get a piece of software written, everyone always seems to hire the guy that is not just terrible at his job, but really just does not care.