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.

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. =/

The Second Edition!

You may have come here from my redirect on Amazon.  If so, welcome.  Pull up a chair, grab a beer and make yourself at home.  Hopefully you have all now received your new, shiny, second edition copies of my book but I bet you have some questions right?  Right.  So then; why the second edition?  This is why:

A new version of an existing book might sound a little controversial, and I suppose it is, but there are a lot of factors at play here and many reasons why I think this new version is needed.  For starters, and most simply, this was my first book and I was, certainly at the beginning, a little out of my depth.  The book was written in two main stages, several years apart, and the work that comprises the first 40% or so of the book is in fact much older than the rest.  As a result, my lack of experience shows through far more starkly there as the earlier chapters meander around and are littered with slow, uninteresting sections that drag down the whole pace of the work.  This alone was enough for a new version, but it might have yielded less changes overall.

What has in fact changed in this new daft is as follows:

The book that Jonathan finds is gone.  The book, as a plot device, was never my first choice.  In my earliest drafts of this story, Tel had found a device, left in this world by Ashna, that led him to the first part of the Sword, thus triggering the story.  For reasons I do not fully remember, I could never get this mechanic to work however, so I abandoned it and came up with the idea of a Templar codebook, thus giving J and Dowd something physical and tangible to interact with and giving them something to do in the early chapters.  Unfortunately, this slowed the book down enormously and led to some very long, tedious chapters were they both waded through the encryption.  Moreover, the encryption was just tosh and would never have worked (and my use of the Mousehole in the picture bugged the hell out of me – mouse holes are a product of Tom and Jerry cartoons from the turn of the last century.  An 11^th century priest would never have heard of such a concept!)

Dowd and J both are developed more as characters.  Dowd is painted in a very, very bad light in the first edition.  He is miserably, reactionary and distant, constantly sniping and barking at everyone and this is not what I intended at all and it certainly is glaringly different to the kindly, gentle professor I paint him as in his flashback.  Dowd and J are now old friends from the start, speeding up all their conversations and giving them both a bit more time to shine.  J has stayed much the same but is just given more chance to show his talents.  As a friend said to me, there is no way someone as rich, handsome, successful and determined as J would spend a lot of time alone in bed!

The final change is regarding Alexander.  At the start of the book, Alexander is preaching to his companions about how they all must stay out of the way, not interfere and not tip the scales but not two minutes later, he is knocking on Dowd’s door and handing out cryptic clues and vague hints. Total nonsense.  With the code book gone, Alexander remains in the shadows, only appearing as our heroes exit Mousehole before whisking them off to Italy to tell them just what the hell is actually going on.

So, big changes but changes for the better.  The new plot device that replaces the book is fun and leads to some good comedy and solid interaction and has also allowed me to add back in some cut work, giving Larry a far bigger moment in the spotlight and letting the comic relationship between him and his flunky, Travis, shine through.  All in all, the book moves faster, is more engaging and, thanks to the device, ties better into what I had already written for the sequel, the Keepers of the Fire, which features Ashna’s work quite heavily.  I hope that those who have read the book will forgive me these changes and embrace the fact that they are genuine improvements that do not dramatically alter the structure or events of the book and that you will enjoy the coming two sequels as much as I am enjoying writing them.

Oh – a quick note for those who have found this blog from Amazon:  There appears to be some confusion regarding the process of getting your book onto the Kindle market.  A few people have pointed out that there a fair number of typos in this book, and rightly so.  Let me assure you that I am a more voracious grammar Nazi that any ten people I know and every single one of those errors a) annoys me more than it annoys you and b) is an actual error, not a confusion on my part.  Amazon offers no help whatsoever in the formatting and editing of your book, it is all down to you.  I am far from being a good typist and so, between fat fingers and an overly enthusiastic spellchecker, there were errors galore in the first, complete draft of this book.  I have done my best to correct them all but, at the end of the day, this book is nearly 200,000 words long and I am not a professional copy editor.  There comes a point where you are simply snow blind to your own work, so I would ask that you cut me and all the other hard working, amateur authors out there some slack.  I own books half the size of mine that have been republished 20+ times that still have errors in them, so that there are so few (comparative to its size) in mine is a miracle.

All that said, I hope you guys enjoy the new version.  With that done, I can get around to writing the second part and hopefully get it published before you all stop caring.  Speak to you all soon!

A worrying yet pleasing development

When, as you write along one fine day, you suddenly clatter to a stop and squint at your latest page of text while uttering the words “wait: isn’t that character dead at this point in my history?”, you know you are probably in trouble.

Realising that you are in danger of making a hash of your own mythology and then having to sit yourself down to write out timelines and lists of “historical” events within the universe you created is an odd and yet somewhat pleasing sensation but nothing compared to the realisation that perhaps you should have written all this supporting material long ago.

That said, the fact that I have a mythology is a fairly amusing thing.  Having now written out a first draft of my mythology’s timeline, I am…well flatly, I am bloody impressed.  Seeing such a big picture – a picture I carry about in my head each and every waking moment – written up in a succinct, definitive form is oddly pleasing.  I am the kind of person who takes enormous pleasure in flicking to the back of great tomes like The Lord of the Rings and idling away the hours reading the genealogical tables and timelines so having my own version of such things makes the nerd within squee more than a little!

To carry this thought forward, it now also occurs to me that I have a legitimate reason to have appendices of my very own!  If I am getting a touch lost in the 8000+ years of history in which I wade, I have no doubt that others will do the same, so a few appendices to aid the reader would definitely be in order.  Is it particularly sad that I also find this to be rather pleasing?

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.

Giving the game away

This blog is stalling badly but not for want of things to write.  Every day, with every chapter I write of the new book, I have 5 things I want to blog about but every last one of them would involve talking about the plot of said book and giving away far too much before I release the damned thing!

The process really is fascinating to watch from the drivers seat as you feel totally out of control.  Constantly I am having characters say things I never planned or making decisions I never envisaged, as I discussed last post, but it is utterly startling each and ever time it happens.  It is a wonderful thing to see something you wrote be so immediately unfamiliar and to know that when you stop stressing over the writign and just let it happen, it really does happen.

The book itself is chugging along though it seems to get more complex by the day.  So far their are 8 distinct threads in play, all following very disparate paths and all to be brought together later in the book.  One thing I am very glad of is the removal of considerations or worries about the length of the book.  As I said earlier, KotK kept getting trimmed in an attempt to get it down to a more “publisher friendly” length but as this book will go straight to electronic publishing, I have no such concerns.  Probably a lucky thing too given that all I have written so far is a large chunk of introductions (for the 8 threads) and a few sections of back story and it is heading for half as long as KotK!

In the meantime I am really enjoying writing The Keepers of the Fire.  It is good to be back to these familiar characters and it is good to be expanding those who got rather short shrift in the first book but above all, its just good to be writing!  It is still the most dazzling experience I have ever had and I only can hope it remains as such.

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!

 

A return

Well this blog has been silent for 2 months.  I was away for a reasonable chunk of it and ill for another part but mostly I had run out of things to say.  My writing was not going well (not going at all most days) and I was getting more than a little bent out of shape about it.

Writing a second book is tougher than I thought.  In some ways you are afforded a few liberties as you are freed from the confines of defining your characters but other things have had me tied up in knots.  The Keepers of the Key was heavy in both story and characters, with Jonathan and Dowd scrabbling their way through increasing weird and wonderful scenarios.  With The Keepers of the Fire I have even more characters but a plot that is far more emotional and personal (to the characters, not me) while still retaining the scale of the first book but it far less a journey of discovery and takes place in an even tighter time-frame.  Weaving the individual stories together and changing styles between fantasy (ok – not really, but this is the closest description I can think of for one of the threads), crime-thriller and the style of the first book (whatever that was – I am still unclear) is turning out to be quite a challenge.

For the longest time I was stumped, convinced I didn’t have enough actual plot, convinced that more needed to happen within each of the narrative threads.  The realisation that simply returning a reader to familiar characters can be an entertaining thing in and of itself helped and I have begun to write more freely, letting myself be immersed in the characters and just enjoying their interaction.

I just hope now that I can maintain the momentum I have found as I push forward into the real meat of the plot.

Making it up?

Continuing my theme of “things that drive writers quietly insane”, it seems I have grown bored of the usual pitfalls and foibles and begun making up a whole new pantheon of insanities to keep myself distracted:

While writing away the other day, happily banging out a few more pages of the next book, I noticed an upcoming problem with what I was working on.  A decision I had made in the planning stages, months before, had now, now that I had actually come to write the story and let it unfold as it needed, turned out to be inappropriate.  What I had planned for this particular moment simply didn’t make any sense when I finally arrived at it.  I needed to rethink my plan.

Sensible idea no?  Your plan needs altering, so you alter it?  But no.  My brain go completely stuck, like a gearbox with a chainsaw through it.  I could not find anything that worked.  Every idea I had was rejected before it had even fully formed, thrown aside with sneer of contempt for daring to infringe upon my consciousness.  I worked and worked, making notes, performing all the usual menial chores that jog my creative centres, but after a week I was no further along.  I could not find an amendment to my plot that I could accept.

And then I saw it.  I caught it out of the corner of my eye and slowly tracked it around to the front of my vision.  I stared at it open mouthed, unwilling to believe it existed. But it did.  My problem was not that I could not come up with any good ideas but rather that I could not accept the thought of any changes!  I was mentally blocking myself from, and I actually caught my mouth about to frame these exact words while talking to my partner, “making stuff up”.

I was so committed to the plot I have, so entrenched in it, I forgot that I had, at the beginning of it all, made it up.  In one form or another, The Keepers Trilogy has been with me for nearly 20 years.  Its characters are constant companions, its world comfortable and familiar – so comfortable in fact, that I had almost forgotten they were imaginary.

Within ten minutes of realising this, of working out what was  really preventing me from moving on, I had solved my plot problem (with very minor changes as it turned out) and was merrily writing again.

Writers have enough things working against us.  Could our minds at least  pretend they are on our side?