Month: August 2018

Categories
Writing process

There’s always one error left

Book news first

We have one more interview online for Stars Uncharted, if you’re interested. It’s over at PaulSemel.com.  In the interview we talk about who we’d like to play Nika and Josune if they ever made a movie out of Stars Uncharted, and we talk about how the show Firefly didn’t influence the writing of the book. No, we go way back further than that, to Star Trek, Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven.

Now, back to the main post

I did a presentation at work the other day, myself and two others. It was a good presentation. At the end we did a demo.  After the demo we answered questions for around fifteen minutes. 

Up on screen, the final page was left up while we talked. And all I could see was the typo I should have fixed.

“What we dont’ …”

All in big, dark letters because it was a sub-heading.

The first thing I did when I got back to my desk was fix it.

The fact is, when you’re writing, you make a lot of typos. Errors you don’t pick up, even when you read a piece of writing again and again. One of the advantages of co-writing is that another person is reading your work all the time.  They pick up things you don’t see.

I know that when I’m writing, I’ll often change a sentence, but not go back and delete words that made sense in the context of the original text, but don’t any more. And the funny thing is, even when I reread the sentence, I don’t pick up all the errors.

No matter how often you read your own work, you miss things.

Right at the end of a story we like to read our novels aloud. This is after more than twenty rounds of edits on the book. Even so, it’s amazing how much we change in that last round.

And we still miss things.  There are the typos which mostly get picked up by the editor and the copy editor, thank goodness.  (Although, there were five thousand copy editor corrections on Linesman. Admittedly half those were serial comma issues, and many of the rest were Australian/US spelling, but that still left a lot of basic typos.)

Less often, there are basic logic errors.  For example, as one of our readers pointed out in Stars Uncharted (Thanks, Ian) that a measurement is tiny.

Alejandro’s meddling had taught her early that she had to build in safeties. Especially after they had started using the exchanger and she’d come back to her own body once to find that while he’d been in her body he’d redesigned it to add twenty millimetres to her bust and to remove the same from her waist.

Yes, well. Twenty millimetres.  That’s 0.8 of an inch.  Just a bit over three quarters of an inch. Not quite what we had had in mind.

We originally had it two inches. (For those of you who have read the book, Alejandro would have tried a small amount first, to see how far he could go, which is why we chose two inches.) Everything else in the book was in SI units (metric), so we changed it.  Except, two inches is 51 millimetres, not twenty. We should have made it fifty.

Ouch.

Categories
Book news Writing process

We survived pub day

Amazing nature

Let no one tell you that the internet is a waste of time.  You learn things on the internet. The other day on Twitter @rainbow1973 posted an image of a rainbow eucalyptus tree.

Rainbow eucalyptus?  Australia is the land of the eucalypt, but I had never heard of them.

It turns out that they’re not native to Australia. Here’s me thinking all eucalypts originated here.  I was wrong.

Rainbow eucalyptus, also known as Mindanao gum or the rainbow gum (I wonder where they got that name) grow in warm, tropical climates and can be found in places like New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines.  They’re the only eucalyptus that grows natively in the northern hemisphere. The image above is of a tree in Hawaii.

Stars Uncharted is finally out

Publication day has come and gone. It seemed to go well, and we had wonderful marketing for it. Things are quieting down now. We hope those of you who bought the book enjoy it. This has been the most nerve-wracking release since Linesman, in a way, because it’s not a Linesman book.

As promised, we said we’d put interviews up for you. Here are the first few.

Over at SyFy Wire we talk about writing together, world building, and media that influenced us when writing Stars Uncharted.

On Jean Book Nerd we talk about inspirations for developing Nika and Josune, and some influences/turning points in our lives.

One thing I did notice, my IT background crossed over and I didn’t even realise.  Before ‘publication’ day I kept calling it release day, and I have trained Sherylyn to say ‘release’ as well.  I have learned.  Next time I’ll do better.

Categories
Writing process

Release day – Stars Uncharted

Stars Uncharted is now officially available.

Our thanks to the team who helped us create it. Our beta readers, our agent, our editor, the artists and designers, the copy-editors, marketing, all the assistants and everyone else along the way who was part of it. Thank you. We didn’t do this alone.

Enjoy.

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.