Only one month to the day Stars Beyond is published.
We’re starting to get nervous.
For those of you who have book money to spend after Christmas, we can recommend a good book. Lots of fun, adventure in space. Great characters. Why not give it a try.
Flew into Sydney this morning to start our cruise. The sky
was still hazy, but nowhere near as bad as it was a week ago. Last week the harbour bridge was obscured
with thick, black smoke. This week you
can see the bridge, even though the sky still looks smoggy.
As a result, the setting sun was a beautiful
orange-yellow. Photos never do it
justice, but here’s what it looked like.
Sitting up so high on the ship, you can see how beautiful
some of the older architecture in Sydney is.
If you read this blog you’ll know that both Sherylyn and I
enjoy cruising. There’s something about being on the water that is magic. Not
having to cook or clean is nice, too.
I love New Zealand. We cruised there last year, and we’re
going back mid-year to WorldCon. We weren’t planning on going there again at
Christmas, we planned to cruise the Aegean, or reposition from Southampton or
Seattle to Sydney.
But the New Zealand cruise was cheap, and the time was good,
and we’re both really looking forward to it.
Last trip we did everything Lord of the Rings. This year
we‘re doing nature. Particularly nature of a volcanic origin, because here in
Australia our land is geologically stable, relatively speaking, and has been
for a long time. New Zealand, however, is on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Show me
some geysers and hot springs, please.
Anyway, we picked out a tour that’s going to take us into
the area we want. It has a three kilometre ‘moderate’ walk.
“I don’t think you realise how unfit I am,” I said to
Sherlyn, who goes to Zumba twice a week.
“You’re not that bad,” she said. “We used to walk a lot.”
That was a long time ago now, and I haven’t done any real
exercise for twelve months. Life right now is work, home, dinner, sleep, and
get up the next day and do it all over again. I don’t even take the stairs at
work any more as I have a dodgy knee.
Around the same time, my work had one of those get fit
initiatives where you join a team and count the number of steps you do each
day.
“I’m in,” I said. It was perfect timing to get fit for the
cruise.
I struggled. Not because I had to walk—although that was
hard—but because my dodgy knee decided to play up. It was agony.
It still is.
Sherylyn has ordered some walker’s sticks for me. If I take
some weight off the knee it helps (it would help even more if I lost some
weight) but I’m still not as fit or as fast as I’d like to be.
Hence I have decided to walk to New Zealand.
Not all the way, of course, because there’s so much to do on
board, but those of you who have been on ships might know that two prime
forward viewing areas of the ship are taken up by the beauty salon and the gym.
One thing I do enjoy on a ship is the treadmill. There’s the
ocean in front of you, and not much else. It’s a perfect place to dream.
All I want by the end of it is to be able to walk three
kilometres in reasonable time.
As for the knee, we’ll see how that is on the day.
Another GenreCon has been and gone. It was a lot of fun, with some stand-out sessions.
The conference was two weeks after Sherylyn and I ran an
editing session down here in Melbourne, and some sessions particularly made an
impact because I was still thinking about the course.
The Shreader
One session I want to talk about is the Shreader, where ten
brave souls submitted the first two pages of their manuscript to an author, an
agent and an editor, and they decided whether they’d read more or pass (shred).
It takes courage to put yourself out in public like that,
even when you’re a published author with an editor and an agent behind you. For
newbies, who don’t even have that experience behind them, it can be a raw
experience. It’s one I’d recommend,
however, if you think you can take it.
As newbie writers we put our work out there and want praise.
What we need, however, is constructive feedback. We also need the
ability to listen to that feedback, the thick skin that comes from experience
of being critiqued. It allows us to dissociate ourselves from the work being considered—mostly,
anyway.
The Shreader is a harsh way to get this feedback, but it’s real
life, and if you can face something like the Shreader and get value out of it,
you’re levelling up as a writer. Good on you.
My two cents
The writing was good in all samples, but only four made it past
the shredder.
You got a hint of how different stories appeal to different people, with those on the stage who liked fantasy showing more interest in the fantasy offerings, and—I think it was the agent, who specialised in children’s and young adult fiction—showing more interest in a story that was likely to be young adult. I found this myself, as I listened. Whilst the samples were all well-written there was only that caught my interest enough to want to read more.
It’s like picking up books in a library. I borrow roughly one in ten of those I read the blurb on.
I would say that for me many of stories felt as if they started
too early. They also contained a lot of backstory. One of the things we touched
on in the course we ran two weeks earlier was infodumps, so I was still very
aware of how much backstory slows down the narrative, particularly in the first
few pages, where you’re trying to capture the reader’s attention.
Resonating with Theme
The other session was Rob Porteous’ Resonating with Theme.
In this session, Rob talked about his years of judging the
Aurealis awards. I’m working from memory here, because I didn’t write it down,
but Rob said that the stories he judged were mostly well written, and 80% of
them started off with a great idea. However, few of them carried through on the
promise of the story.
It came immediately after The Shreader, and the two sessions
seemed to cover a theme. Not Rob’s theme, which was about putting a theme into
your story, but a thread of how you can write well, and have great ideas but
still not be quite there.
When it is there, however, that’s when the magic happens.
I went to see the ophthalmologist today, got another injection in my eye. It sounds worse than it is. Modern medicine is wonderful. Except for a few hours discomfort while the pupil dilation goes down (from the tests they run prior) and a slightly aching eyeball for a day, it’s quite painless, really.
The results, however, can be spectacular. Sometimes the eye gets very, very, bloodshot.
It’s not the injection that causes this, but that sometimes the needle breaks a blood vessel on the surface of the eye and it bleeds. Your eyeball is red for up to two weeks afterwards.
Other times you can’t even tell an injection has been done.
The thing is, I can’t see it. Other people can. They’ll be talking to you,
look you in the eye, and say things like, “Are you all right?” or “Oh my god,
what happened to your eye?”
I’m going to have to change my appointments, however.
Here in Australia we never used to celebrate Halloween, but lately it’s become a thing, and some houses go all out. I’m missing an opportunity .
Imagine if I get my eye done just before Halloween. My eye is red. Maybe I’ll put a patch over the other eye, then tie a torch to a magnifying glass, and hold it up to my face when I answer the door. Is that scary enough?
Yesterday we ran a workshop at Vic Writers on editing.
Today I am sore.
Standing up for six hours is more than I’m used to. I’ve always had sympathies for anyone who worked in retail, and nurses, and people like that, but now I’m extending that sympathy to teachers, too.
How do they do it?
Physical limitations notwithstanding, the participants were a good bunch of writers. We hope they got something out of the day. We certainly got lots from them.
Our October newsletter scraped it into October by a bat’s
wing (had to use a Halloween reference here) on 31 October. For we Australians it was 12:30am on All Hallows
Eve. Maybe we should have waited till later
in the day, for there’s a mistake in it.
Three mistakes actually and they’re all the same.
The problem with a newsletter is that once you press send,
it’s gone. It’s not like a blog, where you can go back in and make corrections.
We mentioned a book in there. Three times. And we got the name wrong every time.
Michael Mammay’s first book wasn’t Planetfall, it was
Planetside.
We knew that.
Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader for pointing that out. For anyone else who’s interested in the book, it’s Planetside, no matter what our newsletter says.
Okay. 😊
p.s. It’s a good book, no matter what we called it.
There’s a lot written about how traditionally published authors don’t have control over their book covers. We have never disliked one of our covers, so we wouldn’t know but we are realistic enough to know that design of the cover is mostly out of our control, and that the designers who work on the covers do know what they’re doing.
We have generally been asked for input on our covers, and
certainly asked if we like them.
As one editor I read once said, and I’m paraphrasing here,
because I don’t remember the actual words or who said it, “What’s the point in
putting out a book cover the author doesn’t like? If they don’t like it,
they’ll bag the book.”
We love our all our covers, including the one for Stars
Beyond, which is released in January next year.
Here’s a brief history of our input on book covers—possibly
not accurate, as I’m writing from memory here, especially for the first two
books, where all our records are archived.
Linesman
Our editor asked us quite early if we had any thoughts about
the cover. At the time, every US sci-fi
cover we looked at seemed to be orange or red, and always had people on the
cover.
We were both, Sherylyn especially, convinced Linesman
was more of a blue book than a red or yellow book, so we mentioned that we’d
prefer a blue cover if we could get it.
We also said we didn’t necessarily want people on the cover.
If I recall, we were asked if we had any ideas for the cover,
plus some key scenes that might make an interesting cover image.
One of the scenes we included was the briefing where Captain
Helmo described the Eleven, not that they knew it was the Eleven
at that time. A perfect sphere, the surface a deep blue-black (reflective, but that
didn’t make it onto the cover).
We sent descriptions of the main characters, the various
ships, and the first 50-100 pages of the story.
We also said it would be good if the artist could include something that
represented the lines.
Here’s the result.
Bruce Jensen, the artist nailed it.
Alliance
The first book sticks in your memory. Second book, not so much. It’s all a bit of a daze, and again we don’t
have the records to back it up. (We do,
but they’re archived, and an effort to get out of archive.)
We think we sent the same sort of information. The first 50-100 pages, descriptions of
characters and of ships, plus some scenes we feel might have made
Here we have the Kari Wang, being attacked. I say it’s the Kari Wang, for this one of the scenes we sent in. You might think it’s the Eleven.
Here’s the result.
Same artist, Bruce Jensen, and he nailed it again.
Confluence
Now we’re starting to get into a time we still have records.
The publishers already had idea of what they wanted for
Confluence to keep in with the other two books.
For example, putting at least one spaceship on the cover.
Anne asked for elements particularly important to the story,
any scenes that might work for a cover picture, and any suggestions to the
artist on as to backgrounds or what the spaceships should look like.
We sent three suggested scenes here.
A freighter attacking Confluence station
The Eleven against five enemy battle
cruises
The battle where the Eleven arrives to
help out when enemy ships are attacking a world.
Looks like Bruce chose number one.
They’re all amazing covers. We’re super happy with them.
Stars Uncharted
Onto the next series now.
Same process. Anne asked
for an outline, the first few chapters of the book, and ideas for cover art.
We thought this one was more character-based than the Linesman
series, if that makes sense, because both books are all about the
character, but this is about people, and body modding, and action.
We sent back keywords.
Space opera, character-based, action, spaceships, space stations, body
modding.
In this one we were less concerned that they might put
people on the cover, so we sent back a lot of information about the two point-of-view
characters, Nika and Josune. We also
talked a lot about the genemod machines.
Given that DNA was important to the story, we wanted something relating
to DNA. We also talked about fights with
people in business wear.
The three scenes we sent back were all fights. The first on the Hassim, with Josune
and Roystan against Benedict’s people. The second at the space station where the
crew of Another Road are collecting a genemod machine (for the
calibrator). The third, the escape from
Atalante station.
We rather expected people on the front of this novel—I mean,
how many times can you buck the trend—but the trend seemed to have shifted away
from people on the cover at all.
The cover was nothing like we expected, but we loved it anyway.
Artist on this one is John Harris.
Stars Beyond
Now we come to Stars Beyond.
This time, because of the rewrite, the editor didn’t ask for
pages. She had a chapter-by-chapter
breakdown. We gave a quick rundown of
the story, and some image ideas. These
included the vortex, Alistair’s eyesight, and the ability to seen into
ultraviolet or infrared, genetics and gene modding.
We also said we loved the cover of Stars Uncharted,
and that it would have been perfect for Stars Beyond as well.
We can’t tell you much more, for the book isn’t out yet, be
we think the artist, Fred Gambino, has done a beautiful job.
If you’re still interested in cover design
Chip Kidd talks about some of his book covers for Alfred A.
Knopf and why he designed them the way he did in a 2012 TED talk called What
do stories look like? It’s worth
a look.
I can chat quite happily to someone in the tearoom, or while waiting for the lift, over months. Then, suddenly find I’m working on a project with him or her, and know them, but have no idea what their name is. Or associate the wrong name with the wrong face and call them by the wrong name until someone gently points it that James isn’t James, he’s Zachary.
Sunday morning Sherylyn and I went to a lovely café for
breakfast. The waiter came to take our order.
“Hello, Karen,” he said.
“It is Karen, isn’t it?”
I recognised him. He
worked in our IT department. We used to
chat. He and his wife had welcomed their
first baby (a girl), just before he left the company.
Name? Blank. I couldn’t remember his name.
We chatted about his work here at the café, about what had changed at my work. About other things.
His name was Mark, but I had to ask.
So if you and I ever meet at a conference, or anywhere, and I ask your name even if we have met before, bear with me. Just because I ask your name doesn’t mean I don’t know who you are. It just means I can’t remember your name.