Year: 2018

Categories
Book news

Email interviews coming soon

If you want to know the answer to who do we think should play Nika and Josune in a movie or television adaption of our latest book, we answer the question in an upcoming interview.

Tuesday is book release day.  It’s coming fast.

We spent the last week answering interview questions. We’ll let you know where to find the interviews (if you’re interested, that is), once we know the links.

To date, they’ve mostly been email interviews. That is, the interviewer sends us a list of questions and we answer them.  This type of interview suits us, because of the time difference between Australia and the US.  We can answer in our own time.  It’s especially handy when you both work full-time.

I once had a job once where I was the English-speaking liaison for a software product, so when someone from the US wanted to know about that product they’d call me.  Or I’d call them.  Only we’re GMT+10, and New York is GMT-4, so office hours in the US are night time for us.  I can tell you, it wasn’t fun.  So I really like the luxury of being able to email our answers back.

As we worked through the last interview, I realised that we work on them exactly the way we work on stories.

We start with the idea.  In this case, the interview questions.  We talk about our answers.  One of us goes away and writes down, roughly, what we said.  She sends it to the other one, who edits the answers and adds extra bits.  We discuss it again, to see if we have answered the questions.  One of us fine-tunes the words.  We read the answers aloud.  Finally, back it goes to Alexis, in the Publicity department at the Publisher’s.

Which is pretty much how we write our books nowadays, too.

Categories
On writing Writing process

Deleted scenes

Sometimes, the scenes we delete are simply that, scenes. Other times we rub out a whole character.

We don’t know about other writers, but when we write novels, we delete as much as we write. Sometimes we delete more.

The problem is, some of these deleted scenes are great. We like them, anyway.

Some of them aren’t so great, either. Back when we first started writing Linesman we deleted a lot of Rossi scenes. Looking at those scenes now, they had to go. They were boring, and didn’t add to the story at all.

But there are other scenes we delete because the story turns in a direction different to that in which it was going.  Or you write yourself into a hole, realise something can’t happen. Or you write a scene that happened way too early for the book.  Those sorts of things.

We do keep deleted scenes. We have massive OneNote file with pages and pages of deleted scenes in there.

We like some of these scenes. Sometimes we were sorry we couldn’t do anything with them.

Earlier this year we started a newsletter.  Newsletters are good for letting readers know what we’re doing without them having to look for that information, but what’s the point in a newsletter if it doesn’t give you something you can’t get elsewhere?

We considered writing short stories about the characters in our books, but neither of us are great short story writers. And having to write four a year.  Nope.

If we can write any short stories we might still put them into the newsletter.  Meantime, what a perfect place to put up our deleted scenes.

They’re not great, because most of them are little more than a first draft, but they are a look into our writing life. Particularly if we can continue to show the deleted scenes of characters we really like. You never know, they might turn up in a later book in a different guise.

Categories
On writing

Speech tags and other stuff

Today’s blog comes to you a little late, as we were traveling this weekend. We used to travel a lot, but since Mum died, not so much. As a result, we find we’re no longer in the habit of it.  It’s more exhausting, and we can’t to do a 500km (300mile) round-trip in one day now.

Especially not this weekend, where it took us six hours to go one way, because of roadworks. The car gives a ‘take a break’ warning when you’re been driving for two hours without stopping.  We hadn’t even made it a hundred kilometres from home by the time the warning light came on.

We’re out of the habit of traveling.  Took our bags into the motel, settled down to wash and freshen up.  “Where are the toothbrushes?”

“Ah.  Forgot them.”  It was my job to pack the travel toiletries.

“Okay.  We’ll sort that out later.  Where’d you put the hairbrush?”

“Ah.  Forgot that, too.”

And that was just the start, which culminated in the realization, as I got ready for bed last night, that I had also omitted to pack any nightwear.

I was so totally disorganized.

But, I digress.

What I really planned to talk about today was speech tags.  “She said, he mumbled, Jacob yelled.”

Over the years there’s been a real trend away from using any attribution other than said.

But that wasn’t always the case. Charles Dickens, for example, used a lot of saids, but he also used a lot of other attributions as well.  Take A Christmas Carol.

 

“A merry Christmas, uncle, may God save you,” cried a cheerful voice …

… “If I could work my will,” said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew,” returned his uncle, sternly …

… “What else can I be?” returned the uncle …

… “Because you fell in love,” growled Scrooge.

From A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

 

Dickens wrote such beautiful, evocative language, and he described how people said things. Uttered, growled, observed, returned, replied as well as said. He also used adverbs a lot—sternly, gaily—which are less popular nowadays, as they’re considered ‘telling’ rather than showing

Nowadays the commonly accepted attribution is ‘said’. If you use anything else, you’re likely to have a reviewer come back and say, “Do you need to use this word? Why don’t you just say ‘said’, it doesn’t jump out as much.  That same reviewer might also say, “You have a lot of ‘ly’ words, are they all necessary?”

There was an interesting thread on twitter the other night about the use of said, which summed it up well, I thought. Scott Pack (@meandybigmouth) said:

“Most of the time, just putting ‘she said’ after some speech will do the job.  When you are constantly mixing it up—she murmured, she argued, she added—it stands out, and not in a good way.”

Scott Pack, 27 July 2018.

Interestingly, a later tweet in the same thread by John Scalzi (@scalzi), pointed out that reading is not the same as listening, and that ‘he said’ stands out in audiobook narration. That while for a reader ‘he said’ blends into the background, it stands out when hearing the story narrated.

I agree.

That’s why it’s so helpful to read your novel aloud before you send it to the editor. It’s amazing how some things that are fine as read, really jar when read aloud.

As a general trend, though, as the audiobook audience grows as a percentage of total audience, I think we’ll see even less ‘he/she saids’ in stories and more working the dialogue around what else is happening in that paragraph, and the unique voice of that particular character.

Which can only be a good thing. Isn’t that what most writers aspire to? A story with characters so unique that you know immediately who is speaking just by how they say it.

Categories
Fun stuff

A musical interlude

I love Pachelbel’s Canon. We even have a CD at home, called Pachelbel’s Greatest Hit: Canon in D, which we play on occasion.  Although I do admit, while I can listen to soundtracks over and over again, the Canon album is usually a one-listen. Enough is enough.

Some of my favourite Canon pieces, though, are those where comedians get to do a take on it. I believe it can be quite boring if you are a cellist.

Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel rant was back in 2006, but I’ve always enjoyed it.

 

 

Or the Piano Guys ‘Rockelbel’s Canon’ (around 2013). You will need to click through to YouTube to see this one.

 

https://youtu.be/xV1mZ1BjKa8

 

And now we also Pachelbel’s Chicken.

 

 

The chickens are by an Australian classical duo known as Two Set Violins — Brett Yang and Eddy Chen—a classical comedy duo whose aim is (and I quote from their web site):

“Making Classical music relevant to the modern generation through fun, humor and simplicity.”

 

 

All these images are originally from YouTube.

Categories
Book news

Read chapter one of Stars Uncharted

Only four weeks until Stars Uncharted is published.  Eek. It feels like only yesterday that we tentatively sent off three sample novels to our agent to say, “Which one do you think we should work with?”

Her answer, “Well, that was easy.”

And that’s how Stars Uncharted came about.  If you’re interested, you can read the first chapter now on our website.

Categories
Progress report Writing process

A ragtag band of explorers …

My kind of spaceship. Not too many windows to space. Windows make a ship more vulnerable, and a lot more expensive to heat.
This is the sort of ship a ragtag band of explorers like Hammond Roystan and his crew might use. Image: Miguel Aguirre

Status today:  Ow.

I’ve had a lazy week, reading lots of books.  I’m a fast reader, I tend to open a book and read through to the end, stopping only for work, dinner and bed.  Maybe bed, if the book’s too good I’ll read through the night to finish. Bad me.  (The only day I ever took off work for reading happened because I stayed up till 6:00am reading Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Fate. I thought I’d snatch an hour’s sleep. Ahem.  By the time I woke up it was way, way past getting-to-work time.)

Anyway, I read three books yesterday, straight through, stopping only for lunch and dinner.  (I’m not going to name them, because the first book was so good I went and bought the second two, and by the end of book two I was going, ‘Huh’, and book three I just skimmed. In my skimming I thought I missed something important because the end I felt as the author had left a major plot-hole. I spent a couple of hours rereading book three, trying to work out if they had, or if in my skimming I couldn’t find where they covered it.  I still couldn’t find it.)

I sat in the same place all day. I’m getting old. My body can’t take that sort of punishment any more. Today I am sore.

 

 

There’s one month to go for the release of Stars Uncharted.  Release date is Tuesday, 14 August.

It’s funny how when you write a book you think it’s so unique, but it turns out that it’s not.

We’ve learned that a ‘ragtag’ crew is a thing. There are lots of books about people who join up as a team (a little bit of the found family we talked about last week), but I wasn’t aware that there was a word to describe them. It doesn’t feel that common in Australia—maybe it is, maybe we never noticed it—but since it was used in the blurb on Stars Uncharted we’ve noticed it everywhere.

Categories
Writing process

What are some things you like in stories?

A couple of days ago, on Twitter, Isabel Yap (@visyap) started a thread that asked,

“What are some things you like in stories (not tropes, necessarily), that you are always down for?”

I read all the comments, agree with a lot of them, and came up with my own list of things I particularly enjoy.

Deep platonic friendships

Friends who are there for each other. People enjoy each other’s company, can be honest to each other, tell them their thoughts and hopes and dreams. And of course, in the stories we like to read and write, can also trust that their friend will save them if they get into trouble, and knows that they will do likewise if their friend gets into trouble.

Found families

My family life was practically idyllic, so far as I can tell. Loved Mum and Dad, still get on well with my siblings.  I have no idea why I love found families so much, but I do. This is where a group of disparate people—usually lonely, often without family of their own—come together in a family group.  In fact, right now we’re toying with a story just like that.  An alien, a human down on his luck, and a kid whose own father was violent, so he ran away from home.

People have mentioned Stars Uncharted is a found family, too.

Happy endings

When I finish a book I like to finish feeling satisfied. That usually means a happy ending.

Bad guys who aren’t pure evil

I hate it when the bad guys are purely evil, with no redeeming features at all. The thugs are just thugs, the evil company is evil all the way through, and so on.

It’s easy to make people and organisations purely bad. The enemy in Stars Uncharted is a lot more simplistic than the enemies in the Linesman books.

Banter

Love the quick back and forth repartee between characters. It makes a story fun, shows that they’re friends (usually), and demonstrates character.  When we were younger, Ivan Southall’s Simon Black series was our favorite duo who talked back to each other.  (They’re kids’ SF books, love them still, but they haven’t aged well, except the first one, which wasn’t science fictional at all, but about World War II.)

I have, however, read books—which shall remain unnamed—where the banter didn’t work, so it’s not as easy to write as it looks.

Strong sentiment, lots of emotion

Laugh out loud moments, moments that make you cry, no matter whether you’re in public or not, even those lovely little bits of romance that thrill (not the sex, just the pieces where you go, ‘ooh’ and go back and reread all the time).

Happy endings

The world is depressing enough sometimes, particularly if you listen to the news, nowadays.  Of course there are good bits, but it’s nice to know when you escape to a book that you’re going to feel good at the end of it.

Strong women

I don’t need kick-ass women all the time, but I really don’t want women who have no control over their own lives.

Then again, I don’t like books where men have no control over their own lives, either, and I’ve read a few of them lately. There’s one author I love, but I refuse to read any more of her books because she’s done that to her main character (male) in two series now.

No, characters have to have some control over what they do and how they live their lives.

Science fiction and fantasy with gender and race equality

Which leads on to the next thing, which drives me crazy, particularly in fantasy. Books where the author has built an amazing world, plus an awesome magic system, and then they base a woman’s role on a quasi-medieval western Europe role, and a non-white person’s role on the same.  Women are chattels, owned by their husbands or fathers, colored people are slaves, or semi-human.

You’ve built a whole world, and you stop right there. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Non-perfect characters

Given that we wrote about Ean, who is a classic ‘special person’, you can see that we have no objection to a story about a chosen one, or a (technical or strategic) genius, or any of the—can I call them—tropes that are used in science fiction and fantasy. No, the real issue is when they’re perfect people with it.

They have to have some failings.  Because no one is perfect, and perfect people are difficult to like.

Stories with big ideas

Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice with a ship, the ancillaries and a single person all as one entity. Vernor Vinge—how to murder someone by leaving them to die in real time in Marooned in Real Time, or how not to pay call centre staff, in The Cookie Monster. Big ideas, science fiction that makes you think.

Fantasy, too. You can’t go past the bridge builders in Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of the Kings, or even the magic in Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son series. (Miserable books, those, but the last story ended on a high note. I reread the end quite a few times.)

Not-so-alpha males

I like to know how my male characters feel, and what they think, not just what they do. In many stories, that makes them less-than-alpha. So be it.  They’re the best.

And let’s face it, in real life, a true alpha male is not generally a really nice person. They tend to be arrogant, take-charge, think they know everything and refuse to listen to anyone else.

Strong family relationships

I know I said earlier that I like found families, but I do like books where people who are part of a blood family actually get on with each other, and love each other, and have contact with each other. So many characters in fantasy and science fiction seem to have no families at all.

Children’s books are often the same. Parents and siblings are totally out of the picture. Yet for some reason, when we get to young adult, the family is around all the time, causing the main character grief. (And isn’t it nice when you find a young-adult novel where the hero or heroine has a good relationship with both parents?)

Fun in a story

I love stories with a dash of humor. They don’t have to be laugh-out-loud funny, just make me smile.

So that’s my list. What’s yours?

 

(p.s. Today’s blog is a total mix of US and UK spelling, not even one or the other. Sorry. I just went with what worked for me, today.)

Categories
On writing

The same old themes crop up again and again — even when you don’t plan on it

I find that many of our favorite writers have themes, or story ideas, which they carry across from series to series.  I don’t know if themes are conscious or not.

For example, the female protagonists written by one author are always in formerly abusive relationships.

Our stories?  Well, we didn’t think they were alike, but then we thought about Alliance, where people are trying to kidnap Ean, and Confluence, where—even though it happens late in the book—Yu’s people sort of try to kidnap Ean too.

Or even with Stars Uncharted, which most of you haven’t read yet, where hopefully we’re not giving too much away by saying that one of our protagonists is on the run and that some of our antagonists want her to do something for them.  It gets even worse in Stars Beyond, the book we’ve just handed in to the editor, where they really are after her.  (A bit cryptic, but I’m trying not to give plotlines away.)

Hmm.  Pot calling kettle black?  Definitely.

At the moment we’re tossing up over which stories to send to our agent next.

There’s Acquard, of course, but series books aren’t flavour-of-the-month right now and while Acquard’s not an Ean Lambert story, everyone’s favorite(?) other linesman, Jordan Rossi, does get gig, so that may be a hard sell.  (There’s no guarantee she’ll like Acquard anyway, but we’ll see). We’re considering what else we can send her as well.

She wants space opera. So do we.  And we do write ahead a little.  Not much, but enough that we know whether it’s a story we can write or not.  Which means we need to have written ten or twenty thousand words, minimum, and know how the story is going to finish.  Enough to send samples and a synopsis.

“What about Arrax?” I suggest.  “It needs a major rewrite, but it’ll be a good space opera, and the science behind the story is neat.”

Except … as we propose it, Arrax starts off with someone being captured, and fairly early in the book someone else gets kidnapped.

Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it.

Not only that, the basic story is about some people going to a planet to look for some MacGuffin. Well, it’s not really a MacGuffin, but people will call it that.  A chase—in space and on planet—looking for some kind of treasure, fighting bad guys to get their prize, and so on.  Lots of fun.

Sound familiar?

Maybe not, but let me reproduce the Goodreads blurb for Stars Uncharted.  (My emphasis on the last paragraph.)

Three people who are not who they claim to be:

Nika Rik Terri, body modder extraordinaire, has devoted her life to redesigning people’s bodies right down to the molecular level. Give her a living body and a genemod machine, and she will turn out a work of art.

Josune Arriola is crew on the famous explorer ship the Hassim, whose memory banks contain records of unexplored worlds worth a fortune. But Josune and the rest of the crew are united in their single-minded pursuit of the most famous lost planet of all.

Hammond Roystan, the captain of the rival explorer ship, The Road, has many secrets. Some believe one of them is the key to finding the lost world.

Josune’s captain sends her to infiltrate Roystan’s ship, promising to follow. But when the Hassim exits nullspace close to Roystan’s ship, it’s out of control, the crew are dead, and unknown Company operatives are trying to take over. Narrowly escaping and wounded, Roystan and Josune come to Nika for treatment–and with problems of her own, she flees with them after the next Company attack.

Now they’re in a race to find the lost world…and stay alive long enough to claim the biggest prize in the galaxy.

Now does it sound familiar?

Yes, well.  Time for a rethink.  Let’s bring out another book we have on the back-burner.  Fergus Burns, with the best bad guy (girl) we’ve written to date.  Alis Mack Carroll.

Meantime, back to the drawing board to rethink why we have so much kidnapping and chasing people in our own stories.

Categories
Writing process

How do you write ‘good’ characters versus ‘bad’ characters?

One thing writers try to do is ‘show’ a character by his or her actions. That is, rather than say,

Bob Jenkins was a bad man.

You show it by

Bob Jenkins pulled into the petrol station one midnight, just after Granny Stevens had closed up, and demanded she unlock one of the bowsers so he could fill up. Granny refused, so he punched her in the face, knocked her to the ground, and drove off. Granny spent three months in hospital, recovering.

It’s not so common now, but simple way authors were taught to show a protagonist’s character was to show how he treated animals.

Does he kick the dog, or does he pat it?  Does he, like Jack Holloway in John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation, allow his dog to detonate explosives. (This works better than it sounds here, Jack’s relationship with his dog saves him, in my opinion.)  Or does he, like Riggs in Lethal Weapon, rescue a dog that’s being tortured by some low-lifes?

That last may or may not be true, but I’m sure I’ve seen the start of Lethal Weapon where some people are sitting around a fire in a drum, and they’re torturing a dog. Riggs is uber crazy, out of his mind with grief and depression, probably blind drunk, and he goes in and tears these people apart.  (Not literally, but he roughs them up.)  It sets the scene for the whole movie.  People I’ve spoken to can’t remember the scene, so I don’t know if I imagined it or not.  But to me, it’s part of the Lethal Weapon canon, and it shows Riggs’ character perfectly. He’ll go in to prevent injustice, but he’s badass with it.

Like I say, they don’t use animals as much to show character now, although it’s still around.

Another common technique was to show how the character treated children.

Nowadays, good guys can be a lot more ambiguous, but they have to have morals. Morals that we agree with.

Even if they’re half-way bad, our ‘good guy’ has a good reason for doing something.  Something that we as a reader think is a good thing.  For example, our protagonist may be determined to destroy a pharmaceutical company, and does unpleasant things to achieve it, but it always turns out that the company he (or she) is trying to destroy is worse. For example, they covered up the test results of a drug they sell, and even though they know the drug causes people to die screaming in agony they still sell it, because it makes them money.  Enough money to buy and sell governments.

I love bad guys who aren’t truly bad, just doing what they feel is right, and that’s different to what the protagonist wants.  They’re the best type of ‘bad’ characters to read about.

Even so, my gut feel is that with the world in the turmoil it is today, many writers will start making their antagonists a little more obviously bad in the future.  It’s a way of coping.

Categories
On writing

An exercise in editing—from first draft to second

Please, bear with us. The first example is bad. It’s meant to be. The second isn’t much better. This is designed to show the drafting process. Two drafts is never enough. At least, not for us.

Email, me to Sherylyn:  What do you think? Unlikeable?

 

Eliud Frank was building a stark arrangement of human bones when Alaric finally got to his office.

“You’re late.”

He’d got the message at lunch time.  It had taken three hours—two public buses and a maglev ride—to get here.  “No one gave me a time.”

Eliud placed a bone carefully at cross angles to another, stepped back to view the result.

“It’s off-centre,” Alaric said.

“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.”

Alaric shrugged, and watched in silence as his boss’s boss’s boss finished the arrangement.  The pieces had the creamy-white porous brittleness of real bone.  He thought they might be real.

Eliud placed the final piece.  “What do you think?”

It was still off-centre, but Alaric shrugged.  “Can’t say I’d like a bunch of bones in my office.”

“You don’t have an office.”

“Rub it in.” Not that he wanted an office, and he shouldn’t be talking to his boss’s boss’s boss like this anyway, given it was the first time they’d met, but there was something about the man that felt as if Eliud was deliberately provoking him.  Alaric was contrary enough to poke right back.

Where was Tina, anyway?  You didn’t meet with superiors this high up the tree without your own boss in attendance.

She’d probably gone back to their branch office, disgusted with him for being so late.  If that was the case, she should have offered him a lift.

“Survive or fail,” his grandmother had told him, “But don’t think that I’m going to interfere for you.”

So far, he’d been just treading water.

Eliud cracked a smile.  His teeth were the same colour as the bones.  “Hurts a bit, does it.”

No, it didn’t.  What hurt more was being plucked out of a life he’d enjoyed and forced to take a shite job like this because his grandmother had ordered it.

“Konrad Deens,” Eliud said.

That little shite.  “What about him?  I hear he took over his uncle’s business.  Been quite successful.”

“Somewhat of an understatement.  While you’ve been saving the worlds and making music, he’s become the de-facto ruler of three worlds.”

That sounded like Deens.  He’d always been ambitious.

“You went to school with him.”

“He was a bully.  We clashed.”

“Nevertheless, you went to school with him.”

 

Note by the question I ask in the email I’m pretty sure Sherylyn won’t like him.  Sherylyn has final say on characters. If she doesn’t like them they’re either out, or we work on them until she does.

Email reply, Sherylyn to me: Very confusing.

Another email reply, Sherylyn to me: And maybe not so likeable.

 

So we discuss this little piece over dinner.

“I like the bones,” Sherylyn says.  “Otherwise, there’s too many people, I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t even like the swearing.  Who’s Tina? What’s his grandmother got to do with it? He didn’t have an office.”

“I know he didn’t have an office.”

“Well you make it sound like he did.  In the first paragraph.  Also, would he call him Eliud or Frank?”

 

Okay. It needs a lot of work. Sometimes Sherylyn does the edits. But not this time. Partly because it’s only the first page, and partly because she doesn’t have any feel for Alaric yet.

What does she like?

The bones.

So, our next draft becomes:

 

Eliud Frank was building a stark arrangement of human bones when Alaric finally arrived at Frank’s office.

“You’re late.”  The Chief Superintendant placed a bone carefully at cross angles to another, stepped back to view the result.

“It’s off-centre,” came out before Alaric could stop it.

“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.”

Alaric watched in silence as Frank finished the arrangement.  The pieces had the creamy-white porous brittleness of real bone.  He didn’t know why he’d been called here, and that fact that his own boss—Tina—wasn’t here, worried him.  You didn’t see someone three ranks removed on a social call.

Frank placed the final piece.  “What do you think?”

It was still off-centre, but Alaric shrugged.  “Can’t say I’d like a bunch of bones in my office.”

“Konrad Deens,” Frank said.

“I hear he took over his uncle’s business.  Been quite successful.”

“Somewhat of an understatement.  While you’ve been saving the worlds and getting your face in the tabloids, he’s become the de-facto ruler of three worlds.”

That sounded like Deens.  He’d always been ambitious.

“You went to school with him.”

“He was a bully.  We clashed.”

“Nevertheless, you went to school with him.”

 

Email, me to Sherylyn: What do you think?

Email reply, Sherylyn to me: Better. Still needs more work. Good to see you fixed the office. I like the bones, but are they important? Or are they symbolic? What happened to the maglev?

 

Ready for round three.