Category: On writing

I don’t know why it is, but I do my most productive writing on the train on the morning commute, and in coffee shops.

Food courts and McDonald’s restaurants are my offices-away-home.

I have stopped doing my most creative writing at home.

When it comes to editing, however, the opposite applies.  I do that best at my desk, with the full size keyboard and two monitors, where I can easily switch between my notes and the work-in-progress.

In an ideal world, one would be able to write anywhere, any time.  And sometimes I can. When I’m on a writing roll the only thing that stops me are work deadlines.

(Work deadlines are a real writing strangler.  As in—I really don’t want to get off this train because I’ve already done 500 words on my commute, and I know if I could keep writing I would rack up another 500 in the same amount of time, but I have to go to work. So why don’t I sneak into this café for a quick coffee and do some more writing—But the guilt sets in. How do I explain being so late? And I now have to work the extra time at the end of the day.  (Lucky my hours are flexible.)  Oh, coffee is finished and I’ve only done 50 more words.  Sigh.  I should have gone straight to work.)

Part of the reason I can write so well on the commute and in cafes is because I’ve trained myself to do it. Years of pulling out the laptop as soon as I sit down on the train, or immediately after I’ve ordered coffee. My brain knows these are the signals to start writing.

Back when I was a newbie writer, before I officially partnered up with Sherylyn and we started writing together, I’d foist my stories on anyone who’d read them.  Friends and family had novels thrust into their hands as soon as they said, “That sounds interesting.”

Back then they were paper copies too, and printers only printed on one side of the paper, so potential readers left holding a ream of paper that they didn’t really want to read, trying to look enthusiastic about something they weren’t.

And of course, you’re the writer, so you expect them to be as enthusiastic as you are. To go home and read it immediately.  And then come back to you the next day and tell you how wonderful it was.

Of course, they never did.

I was handing out first drafts. Raw, unedited fiction.

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist.” Jane Smiley

Even back then, some of my ideas were good. But my characters, oh my goodness. They were awful.

As Sherylyn used to say, “I can’t stand Scott (or whoever this novel’s hero was).  He’s a wimp. He’s full of himself.  He’s unpleasant. I don’t like him, I don’t want to read about him.”

She said it book after book.

She was the only one who gave me honest feedback. Other readers, when they did read my stories, said things like, “It was okay.”

After I teamed up with Sherylyn, the characters improved a lot.

I do wonder what it says about me as a person, though, when I write (wrote) such awful people.

I won’t read books by other authors whose characters are a turn-off, no matter how great the book is. So why do I write them?

For example, I have a lot of sympathy for Jordan Rossi, even though if I met him in real life I wouldn’t stand him.  Luckily for those of you reading the book, Sherylyn wasn’t as enamoured, and made us cut a lot of his scenes.  Nor, later on, were Caitlin and Anne—agent and editor, respectively—who made us take out even more Rossi.

Thank goodness for the drafting process.

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” Terry Pratchett

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As you can see from the title, we’re in the middle of renovating our kitchen.  We’re also in the middle of writing a novel.  The process has similarities.

What a great idea

You go in with nothing but your imagination.  You have this great idea, and because nothing is real yet, you know this is going to be the best book/kitchen ever.

The reality of the synopsis

Because we’re writing to contract now, the synopsis comes before the book.  It sells the book.

Likewise, the design sells the kitchen.

Even so, what’s on the page is only an outline of what’s to come.

Signing the contract

We’ve agreed to this. It’s real. Have we done the right thing?

Day one

The first chapter.  It’s basic. It’s rough, but it’s done.  The novel shows promise.

Day one of a kitchen renovation is demolition. The bones of the kitchen look old and grotty, but it’s going to look better.  You know it will.

The first draft

The cabinets go in. It looks … ordinary. Not much different from what you had before. You wonder if you did the right thing.

The first draft of your novel is rough. It’s the bare outline.  It’s a mess in places. You wonder how you’ll be able to pull it together.

Subsequent drafts

In the kitchen the doors of the cabinets go on. The stove goes in. The sink.  A plumber arrives and you have a sink and a working dishwasher. An electrician arrives and you have lights that work. A plasterer comes and adds architraves. A painter comes.

It’s starting to show promise.

Each draft of the novel improves it. You submit your novel.  Your editor and agent get help you to improve it.

The wow factor

The novel is edited. It gets a cover. It turns into a book.  Wow.

Our kitchen hasn’t got its wow factor yet, but we already know it will be the splashback.  (Either that or it will be an epic fail.)

It’s like a book. We won’t know the end product until we get there.

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This week went so fast I forgot to write a blog.

So this blog is a teeny bit late, but it’s not even a full day. Let’s call it fashionably late.

Work has been busy.  Writing has been busy.  And right in the middle of it one of our readers posted a reply to an earlier blog and mentioned the Elantra series by Michelle Sagara. (Thank you, Paula. Appreciate the recommendation.)

There are twelve books in the series.  I binge read the first three.

There’s a saying, often seen on t-shirts at science fiction conventions, that reads, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.”
(Marlene, from the Bookpushers, in E and Marlene’s review of Cast in Flight, book 12 of Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra)

There’s something about binge reading.  Me, I can only do it so long before I get tired of the story. I read the first three books and started on the fourth. And for some reason the protagonist, Kaylin, was really annoying me. I have no idea why. I think it was just the long read, because I certainly liked the books enough to buy them.

I only bought book four because I adore Severn and I wanted to know what happens to him.

I took a few days’ break, and only went back to the books because the tram I was waiting for took forever to come. I’m reading them much more slowly now, but I’m enjoying them again.  I’ve just purchased book six.

Binge reading indeed.

Incidentally, Severn—one of the secondary characters—is a book maker for me.  I have no idea why characters appeal to readers like that, but he’s one of mine. It doesn’t matter what Sagara does to Kaylin; it’s what she does with Severn that will determine whether I continue to read the series.

It’s magic when you get characters like that.

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Sherylyn is currently reading Becky Chambers’ The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet (now there’s a title to love).

I read this months ago.  We discuss it occasionally. It’s funny, but the things I remember about the book aren’t the things I liked best about it when reading it.

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Yesterday was a beautiful spring day here in Melbourne, Australia.  After a week of heavy rain leading to one of the wettest Septembers on record, the day was glorious. The sun was out, the clouds were white(ish) and there were flowers in every garden.

It’s spring. The weather is getting warmer, the days are getting longer.  And it’s light outside when we leave for work.  Not yet light when we leave work for home, but that will come.  We’ll finally be able to see our garden—which we only see on the weekends in daylight right now.  (Thank you, Helen, for making it look so immaculate.)

Like I say, the days are getting longer.

Longer days in summer happen because of the way the Earth tilts toward the sun.  The day itself is the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis.  A year is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun.

Each planet has its own day and year. It may or may not tilt (although tilt is good if you want seasons).

In a spaceship, days, seasons and years are less relevant. When you’re travelling around the galaxy, you don’t care how long the local day or year is.  When you move on, the next world will have a different day and year.

So how do you keep time in space?

Human beings have a diurnal rhythm of around twenty-four hours.  That’s basically because we are used to Earth’s twenty-four rotation, with its period of light and dark. We tend to wake up in the day, and sleep at night.

In the book we’re currently writing, we use twenty-four hours.  It’s an easy time period for readers to imagine.  We imagine that ships would have a ‘day’ period of around fourteen hours where the lights were daylight brightness, and a night period of eight hours, where the lights are low.

But is it really a logical period to use?

Probably not.

Years won’t make any sense because each world will have its own year.  You’re more likely to have a centralised date, based on multiples of some lesser time periods, and that will be the standard across the whole galaxy.

Think Star Trek star dates.

But what are the lesser multiples that will make up the years?

One thing is likely. Given the human numbering system, it will probably be some variation on a multiple of ten.

Probably the best date system I have ever come across is Vernor Vinge’s seconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds, from his Zones of Thought books. A second is a second. A kilosecond is a thousand seconds.  Given there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, this comes out to roughly a quarter of an hour.

Thus a megasecond is 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds, which is roughly of the order of a week. A kilosecond is 16 minutes, 40 seconds, or the length of a short break. A gigasecond 31.7 years, so typical human lifespans are 2 to 3 gigaseconds.

Wikipedia Second

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Dear Author

I love your books.  You are a great writer, and you have a book coming out soon. It’s part of a series I love.

Except … I’m not going to read it.

I know. I know.  But you kill off too many of my favourite characters.

You even admit that you do it to wring emotion out of your readers.

But I’m over it. The last three books of yours I haven’t enjoyed. Instead of reading the story, I’ve been waiting for someone to die. Last book, I read the end first, to find out who you killed off this time. If the two characters you killed had been favourites of mine, I wouldn’t have read the book.

I know people die in real life, but books aren’t real life, and I read to escape, not get dragged through the emotional wringer every single time.

I know we’ve killed characters in our own books. But mostly we kill them early, and you don’t get to love them for a hundred thousand words—or in your case, over several hundred thousand words—before we bump them off.

Besides, I don’t mind the occasional death. Well, I do, but I accept that’s fictional life. And I cry buckets when it happens. But you create big books with ensemble casts, who I grow to love over the series (those who survive the first couple of books, anyway). Then you kill them off, one (or more) in each book.  If you didn’t keep adding new people, you’d have run out of characters by now.

So I wish you all the best for the new release. But I’ll be over here in the other corner, reading a book that takes me away from the crazy world we live in for a while. Something that makes me feel better after I’ve finished. Not worse.

Regards

 

p.s. Did you know there’s a WikiHow article on getting over the death of a fictional character?

Putting Kari Wang first

Linesman, Alliance and Confluence are Ean Lambert’s story. Yet we didn’t start book two, Alliance, with Ean’s point-of-view. We started it with the secondary point-of-view character, Selma Kari Wang.

We were worried how readers would react. In some ways it felt as if we were breaking a promise. We’d promised Ean’s story. Instead, they open the book and find Kari Wang. Only for the first chapter, mind, but how many pages does it take for a reader to decide they don’t want to read the book?

Half a page.

So why did we do it?

Chronologically, Kari Wang came first.

We had three ways to write the story. We could have written the scene as a flashback. But doing that took away a lot of the impact of the scene. It made Kari Wang distant, and less sympathetic.

We could have written it as a prologue. They’re not that common in sci-fi, but we do have them.

Hands up if you’re a reader who skips prologues. Sherylyn is. But there are other reasons we wouldn’t make it a prologue. To us, a prologue should be about something that happened a long time prior to the story starting. Timewise, the incident that opens the book happened at the end of Linesman. Add to that, the person it happened to is a point-of-view character.

The only other option was to write the story chronologically, which is what we ended up doing.

We think it works best, even if the poor reader does have to stop and wonder if they’ve opened the right story.

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In other news

It’s been a busy week.

Alliance was released on Tuesday. So far, it’s been well-received, with some positive comments from people who’ve read it.

We’ve had a couple of guest posts. We’re linking to those as they come in.

There have also been lots of giveaways, both of Alliance and of Linesman. So many, in fact, that the our blog and twitter feeds are filled with ‘giveaway’ posts. There are two open at the moment. SF Signal for Linesman, and The Qwillery for both Linesman and Alliance.

Crazy things have been happening to our website this week. Things keep disappearing. Last week’s blog, included. Unfortunately, I only had an early version, so I’ve cobbled this together from the early version (and pre-dated it back to Sunday, so you’ll know it’s not new).

Fingers crossed, everything has settled now.

I wanted to do another quiz. After all, we haven’t had anything light-hearted for a while. But unfortunately, I got a bit smart with the quiz program. I downloaded a WordPress plugin, and set up my quiz on there. Then I logged out.

Next time I tried to log on, I couldn’t. The login page was blank.

My friend, Google, (Google is always your friend) told me how to fix it. Which I did, except when I logged in next time, all our other customisations on the site had disappeared. It was a fun couple off hours putting them back in. I think it’s all back to normal, but if you see anything missing off the site, drop us a line and we’ll fix it.

So no quiz. Instead, let’s talk about the next project.

Since we sent off CONFLUENCE we’ve taken time to read other people’s books. This is always nice. Finally got to read Fool’s Quest, by Robin Hobb. This is book two of Fitz and the Fool. Hanging out for book three now.

We’re not sure yet what we’ll be working on next. That will depend on our agent and editor. But after we’d read a few books were ready to write again.

We dragged out the draft of a story we had started writing back before we got the contract for LINESMAN. It’s another book set in the Linesman universe (the first of three), but with a different protagonist. We’d written two drafts already, even done a read-through. It was, or so we remembered, pretty good.

We re-read it.

It needs a lot of re-writing.