Category: Book news

The copy edits for ALLIANCE arrived yesterday.

Oh, my.

We said we’d do better than we did with LINESMAN, and we did, but not by much.

At least the issues aren’t quite the same.

We knew we had to change our Australian spelling to US spelling at the end, but did we? No.

Realise, rumour and defence became realize, rumor and defense. Words like travelled and councillor became traveled and councilor.

There were still a few of the dreaded serial commas. That is, a comma before the ‘and’ in a list (aka the ‘Oxford comma’). But we were better this time.

In fact, we need to work on commas in general. And on our capitalisation. (Or should that be capitalization?)

Trust me, you think you have a good grasp of grammar, but when you see a good copy editor go through your manuscript you realise (realize) that what you think is a lot different to what you know.

We have a goal to get down to minimal copy edits on a 100,000 word novel. Under a hundred edits would be nice.

We saw the final artwork for the cover of Alliance today.

It’s awesome.

The artist is Bruce Jensen again. He did the Linesman cover too, and the two covers look great side-by-side.

This week, it’s all about editing. We’re busy working on Alliance.

We have also done some guest posts for Linesman in the last month, so rather than leave you with nothing to read—if you missed any of our guest posts—here is an update.

Firstly though we would like to say a big thank you to John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Mary Robinette Kowal for providing great support, not just to us, but to all writers. And a huge thank you to Sally, at The Qwillery, for her support for both us and all other debut authors, especially in our genre. Thank you all.

Without further ado, in order of posting:

July 2, 2015: John Scalzi posted our Big Idea for Linesman. Here we talk about where the idea for Linesman came from.

July 3, 2015: Interview with The Qwillery about writing in general, and about and Linesman.

July 9, 2015: Five things we learned writing Linesman, on Chuck Wendig’s site.

July 14, 2015: Mary Robinette Kowal posted Our Favorite Bit of Linesman on her site.

July 17, 2015: The Qwillery very generously allow us a guest post spot. This time we are talking about how we co-write.

And if you are still looking for something to read, there is always the book itself. You can read the first chapter by clicking on the link from the front page of our blog. (This is the ARC version, so it may have some typos.) Or you can read a longer extract on the Penguin Random House site, on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Enjoy

Need we say more?

We’ve added  a sample chapter of LINESMAN.  It’s here, if you want to read it.

This chapter comes from the advanced reader copy (ARC), which is the uncorrected proof.  If you’re familiar with ARCs you’ll know there may be typos, or even some bad grammar. Hopefully we’ll have caught it by this stage, but you never know.

ARCs for LINESMAN

Early this week we got advanced reader copies (ARCs) for LINESMAN.

ARCs are the typeset versions of the book before the final proofing. The cover is plain—you can see that by the photo—and it still has some typos in it, but it looks like a book.

We haven’t worked out what to do with all them yet, but we’ll get there.

ALLIANCE delivered

Our second book, tentatively titled ALLIANCE, has been sent to our editor.

From here we sit back and wait* until she comes back with changes for us to make.

We honestly don’t know what she’ll make of book two. We’re still in that newbie stage where we can’t truly judge our own writing.

The story’s probably okay, but does it work as a second book in a series? Have we delivered what the editor was expecting? Is it a book that readers of LINESMAN will like? We’re over our word count, could we have tidied the book up more?

* We don’t wait really. We write. We’re deep into the first draft of book three, which is coming along well.

Book three

According to our writing plan, we should be half-way through the first draft of book three by now. We’re not that far yet, but we’re happy with how it’s going. The writing is first-draft awful, but the story works.

Got the proofs back for LINESMAN today.

It’s pretty cool, seeing your typeset pages for the first time.  It looks like a real book.

In other book news:

• We’re finishing the last draft of book two before we send it to our editor. That’s s due by 1st May
• After the 1st May—or before, if we can make it—it’s back to draft one of book three.