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?

Remembering the forgotten

The actual process of writing a book of fiction is, as has been said at length in many places, pretty damned hard but what is striking me more and more is not the difficulty of the task but the utter weirdness of it.  While planning out your opus can be tricky, ensuring that your plot unfolds in an interesting way can be tough and actually sitting your ass down and just doing the work can be outright difficult, all of these things can be overcome with simple, dogmatic determination.  Force yourself to sit at the keyboard long enough, set yourself goals and markers, reward yourself for your achievements and the words will come.

The bit you don’t know about from the outside, the bit that you simply cannot imagine before you begin work and the bit that I had entirely forgotten after writing book one, is the utterly baffling feeling you get when you actually write.  Let me see if I can explain this, though I am not certain I can.

You have a plot.  You have characters. You have scenes, ideas and an over-arching design for your story.  You  are good to go.  The thing is that no matter how anal-retentive you are about your planning, your note making and your designing, it is not until you come to actually write a given section that you give form and flesh to your ideas.

This may sound obvious, that you have not written it until you have written it, but it is far more than that.  Your charters are alive, in very, very real terms.  Many is the time I have sat down to write a chapter, absolutely comfortable in the knowledge of how it will play out, only to find that, upon writing it, something else takes over.  Your characters simply refuse to do as you tell them and instead, happily amble off in a  somewhat different direction, apparently making their own damn decisions.

For example:  The other day I was writing a chapter for The Keepers of the Fire in which Julie and J from book one were working with a Denier (a “class” of demon from the first book whose purpose was not explained therein) to, essentially, save a man from dying.  I created the idea of Deniers years ago, had planned out how they looked, how they “worked” and what exactly it was they did.  When I came to write the chapter, a chapter that gives the reader their first insight into these creatures, my whole construct went out the window and a new back-story, demeanour and role suddenly emerged from nowhere and casually wrote itself across my screen.

I honestly had to stop and sit there, blinking in utter confusion, and read back what I had just written as I had no bloody clue what was going on at all.  I even tried to rewrite it, forcible jamming my characters back into my original plot but no matter how hard I tried, it simply would not go.

The feeling of disassociation this induced was incredible.   And it is not the only place I feel it.  Clearly, as I said at the top of this post, I have forgotten a lot of the process that created the first book as, when I reread The Keepers of the Key (as I do quite often) I am struck over and over by one question: who the hell wrote this?  I recognise my characters and my plot but in many, many places, it feels as though someone else took my ideas and ran with them.

It really is like having a ghost writer that simply steps in and inhabits my body at times, merrily doing as he sees fit with the insides of my head.  Clearly whoever this other chap is knows what he is doing but it would be nice to get a little warning before the bugger decides he is gonna rewrite entire story-lines!