Category: Writing process

There’s a part in the new Star Wars movie (The Force Awakens) where the good guys are approaching the death star at close to light speed to avoid detection.

Just for a minute I flipped out of the movie, because in one second light can travel around the Earth seven and a half times. I had visions of the ship going round and round the planet in a loop, trying to slow down (undetected, of course), because you can’t stop in a second, no matter how hard you try. Not to mention, when the ship hits something (like trees or rocks), it’s going to hit hard.

The ship comes to a stop (just before a cliff) and I remembered that this is a Star Wars movie, and settled back to enjoy myself again.

Everyone has their own limits as to where they will suspend disbelief in science fiction. But when you hit that limit it can jolt you out of the story. Sometimes you can get back in, sometimes it ruins the story for you.

Take our novel, LINESMAN, in which humans discovered an alien spaceship five hundred years before the story starts. The ship has ‘lines’, bands of energy that allow the ship to jump into the void and come out somewhere else in the galaxy. Humans learned how to clone the lines, and have placed them on every human ship, giving them faster than light (FTL) travel.

Ship lines are maintained by ‘linesmen’, humans who have a special ability to sense the lines and can repair them.

No-one objects to the FTL component. Nowadays most readers of science fiction accept that to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time we’ll need some form of hyperspace or warp drive. They don’t even object to some of our rather fast transfer times between shuttles and ships in space.

No, the sticking point for some people is that if it takes such specialist skills just to repair the lines, how is it possible that humans can build factories to clone them? We’ve had someone who couldn’t finish the story because they just couldn’t buy the way the lines were cloned.

Luckily for us, how the lines are reproduced isn’t an issue for most people.

It’s interesting how often what we deem less important facts take the reader out of the story, while the major story plot lines, no matter how improbable, don’t.

Nineteen days to Christmas.  That came up fast.

Christmas in Australia is hot, as you can see by the photo we’ve put at the top of the blog. Except, you’d never see a beach that quiet at Christmas.

A lot of families sit down to roast turkey, ham and roast vegetables. Just as many sit around a barbeque out the back. Each family brings their own plate—salad, cold chicken, seafood or dessert—and puts it onto the table.  Our family has always been a byo plate type. (But without the seafood, as half of them are allergic to seafood. Sherylyn’s one of them.)

The kids run around the back yard while the parents talk.  Everyone plays cricket if the yard is big enough. Some retire after that for a snooze, or to curl up with a good book.

The following day it’s the Boxing Day sales, blockbuster movies and test cricket.

If you want the chance to curl up with a good book, we’re giving away one ARC* of Alliance, the second book in the Linesman series.  Add a comment here, below this blog post, or post a reply on Twitter to our tweet about the giveaway, or comment on the Facebook post.

Note, you need to reply or comment to the specific post that mentions the giveaway. The one with the green image, with the red writing on top. Comments on other posts/tweets won’t be included.

It’s open to anywhere in the world.  Winner will be randomly selected.   Entries close midnight Thursday 10th December Australian Eastern Summer time.  (That’s 8am Thursday in New York and 1pm in London.

* The ARC is an Advanced Reader’s Copy. It’s typeset, but hasn’t had the final proofread yet.  There are still typos. Not many, but a few.

I said to Sherylyn the other day, “One thing I haven’t backed up in a while are our emails. I’ll do it on the weekend.”

Saturday morning, I turn on my computer and nothing works. Well, actually, everything works except that the computer isn’t coming on. The red light is flashing, the fan is whirring, but it’s not registering on the home network and nothing is coming up on the screen.

The computer is seven or eight years old, which is ancient for a computer. I’d planned on replacing it this year, anyway. Suddenly, that moved up on the list of importance.

Got the new computer. We backup regularly, so I didn’t lose many writing files, but I did lose my mails. Luckily we both keep our agent and editor emails, so Sherylyn can give me copies of those. We also both had copies of the email from a relative who’s also a writer (YA fantasy) which I was going to answer this weekend.

Not so bad.

The only thing I couldn’t get back was the tax invoices, which Sherylyn has been asking for all week.

And our tickets to GenreCon, which is on next weekend.

Tax invoices, hmmm.

For GenreCon—I’ll send an email the people at Queensland Writers’ Centre and ask for copies, but I imagine they will be very busy this week.

I hope they let us in without our tickets.

I enjoy GenreCon. I’ve blogged about it before. It’s great to get together with a group of other writers and talk writing (among other things). And they’re all genre writers, so you get a mix of romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery/crime, thriller and other writers.

You also get a mix of writers just starting out, people part-way along the road to being published, and published writers. It’s a good mix to talk to.

Not, I confess, that I’m good at talking to people. I’m a typical writer in that way. So if you see me at GenreCon and I’m a little awkward, just keep talking. If I see you at GenreCon and you’re the same, I’ll keep talking too. Because meeting other people who want to write, or are in writing industry, is what’s it’s all about.

We’re really getting into book three now. These are the main story points for the novel.

The words have been deliberately blurred, because, spoilers.

The orange ‘R’s’ mean rewrite this section totally, the blue dots mean okay, but needs some work, and the blue ticks, which you can’t see because they’re all at the top, mean this section is okay, just needs cleaning up.

Conflux 2015

Conflux, the science fiction convention held in Canberra, always has an interesting program. This year is no different.

Unfortunately, for us, it also usually coincides with the culmination of a large project for me, and in the busiest work period of the year for Sherylyn.

This year my project finishes on 30 September, two days before the Conflux weekend, which is the 2-5 of October. And then, the government of Victorian turned Friday the 2nd into a public holiday.*

Maybe we could manage it this year. Or even just one day. Particularly the Saturday, which has such neat things as:

Panel: SF and the Speed of Light

It’s the elephant in the room. We don’t know how to do it, but it’s essential technology for just about any story set in space. This panel looks at how sci fi handles FTL tech: the good, the bad and the downright ridiculous.

We’ve had a range of responses to the faster-than-light travel in Linesman. Everything from “the FTL travel is believable” to “I just can’t buy the lines as FTL”. I know, myself, if I don’t believe the the way FTL works, it does spoil a story for me.

Guest presentation: “Tax stuff for authors” by Robert Douglass

It’s a strange thing to get excited about, but it’s difficult to get tax information specific to authors. I don’t know what Robert plans to talk about but I think this is a vital topic for any author.

(And Robert, if you’re ever doing the same session in Melbourne, please drop us a line, because we’d love to come.)

In the end we decided not to go

It came down to cost versus time, and because we’d left it so late that one day at Conflux was going to cost us over a thousand dollars. Just for a day.

In the end we decided not to go.

If anyone does go and wants to tell us about it, we’d love to hear about it. (If you’re interested, we’ll even offer a guest post on our blog.)

* The public holiday is grand final eve, which is the day before the football final (big news here in Australia, but especially in the southern states of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia). If you think it strange, don’t forget, we’re also the state that gives a public holiday for a horse race. If you think that strange, then you should really visit Melbourne during grand final week and stay on for the Spring racing carnival. It’s magic.

I watched the live stream of the Hugo Awards ceremony and was really pleased with everyone involved. You handled a potentially awkward situation with grace.

Well done.

Special kudos to David Gerrold and Tananarive Due. You did a great job.

None of my picks won. Oh well, next year.

My favourite quote for the night:

George R. R. Martin is no longer on Twitter. He killed off all 140 characters.

On Wednesday night we did a talk at Balwyn library.  The talk was part of their “New and Emerging Author” series, where they support and introduce readers to debut authors.

It was a really great night.

We had a small group, which made it comfortable and non-intimidating and the audience was great with their comments and questions—both during the talk itself and afterwards over tea and cakes.

The moderator, librarian Fiona Malcolm, was excellent.  Everything you want a good moderator to be.  She read the book beforehand—she reads every book-talk author’s book—which was nice, because she doesn’t normally read science fiction.

Fiona asked questions, and we answered them.  Because she had read the book, she asked good questions—related to the book, related to co-writing, related to the writer’s journey to publication.

This was our first public appearance as authors and the good moderator, combined with the small but receptive audience, made for a non-stressful evening. It was a good introduction to being public about our book.

Thank you Fiona. Thank you Balwyn Library. And thank you to everyone who came along.

Pirate moments

I remember the first time I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl. We hadn’t seen any shorts, we had no idea what to expect.

We came out of that movie laughing, feeling good.

We enjoyed the movie so much saw it six times more in the theatre and we’ve seen it on TV countless times since, but that first time was absolute magic.

The same week we saw Pirates of the Caribbean we also saw Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. It was the ten/twenty year revival of a stage show that had run first in the mid-1980s, and again in the 1990s. It had Jon English as the Pirate King, and Simon Gallaher as Frederick. We loved it so much we had already seen it a number of times in each of the two earlier incarnations, so we knew roughly what to expect.

We still came out of that show laughing and feeling good.

Ever since then we’ve used the term ‘pirate moment’ to describe an experience which makes you euphoric, on a high.

Our book comes out on Tuesday

There are a lot of pirate moments on the way to becoming an author.

They’re not always the moments you expect.

Getting an agent was a pirate moment. The first feedback you get from an editor—even if they’re saying no—is a pirate moment.

Selling the book—not so much. That took two years, and was more a relief than anything. But once the book has been sold, the first time you hear from your editor is a pirate moment.

When your agent, unexpectedly, emails you and says we have an offer for audio rights. That’s a pirate moment.

Getting a box of ARCs (advanced reader copies) was a pirate moment. We weren’t expecting them, and suddenly, here on the doorstep is a box of books with green covers. It’s a book! A real book.

We were expecting the final books when they arrived a month later.

Not that we’re unhappy about publishing contracts or seeing final copies of our book, because we love it. But the euphoric pirate moments come from the things you’re not expecting.

A five star rating of Linesman on Goodreads. A tiny mention in an article saying that your book is one this person looks forward to reading. An email from your local library asking if you want to do a book talk as part of their Emerging Writers series.

Happy book birthday to us

Our book comes out on Tuesday June 30. Happy book birthday to us

So far it’s not shaping up to be a pirate moment. Of course, you can’t tell until the actual day, but it’s one of those things you’ve been anticipating for so long that when you get to it, it’s almost anticlimactic.

It sounds ungrateful. It’s not. And there will be plenty more pirate moments to come. But right now neither of is really sure how we feel about Tuesday.

There’s plenty to keep us occupied in the meantime, anyway. We got the edits for book two (Alliance) back from Anne the other day, and we’re still not done on the first draft of book three.

I’ve always said there are … two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up. I think all writers are partly architects and partly gardeners, but they tend to one side or another, and I am definitely more of a gardener.
A conversation with Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin. SMH, 2011

When you’re writing as a team talking to each other is part of the process. You talk about the story before you start writing, you talk about it while you’re writing, and once you’re done you talk about it again, looking for problems and ways to improve it.

We’re a long way into book three of LINESMAN now, and we’ve done a lot of talking so far. But we’re pantsers, too. Or, if you prefer, more gardeners than architects.

We can talk ourselves out, to the detriment of the story.

That is, we over-talk what happens.

The spontaneity that makes the story enjoyable to write dies. The writing stops. We have to backtrack and pick our way around what we know is going to happen. Sometimes we just unravel the boring bits a strand at a time and hope that by the end of the many drafts we have written, the lack of fire will have been covered.

Sometimes we have to ditch that section altogether and write a new scene.

We had dinner with one of our beta readers last night. They’d just read Linesman book two (ALLIANCE), and were giving feedback.

Naturally, conversation revolved around ‘the book’.

Most readers, not counting professional editors, can’t tell you what’s wrong with a story. They can only tell you how they felt about it. I’m the same. For example, I can tell you that I don’t like a character, but sometimes it’s hard to put a finger on what I don’t like.

Our beta reader liked the characters, and was generally positive about the book . He didn’t pick out any specific issues, so it was up to us to pick out what needed fixing.

You can do this, you just have to listen.

He said, quite early on, that he:

“… couldn’t remember the names of the characters from book one for a while. It wasn’t until about chapter six that I started to remember who was who.”

Us: “So what do you think was wrong?”

“Nothing. It was fine once I worked out who was who.”

He mentioned those same chapters a few times during the night, even though he said different things every time.

It’s obvious we have a problem there. Whether it’s people soup, or too much happening without letting the reader pause to reflect, or something else altogether, there’s something wrong with the start of the book.

All we need to do now is work out what it is, and fix it.