Category: Writing process

I went to a local craft market today. One stall was selling home-made jams. Blackberry jam, and it looked lovely.

When we were kids, we lived in the country. We’d go blackberrying down by the creek and come home with old ice-cream containers of luscious, ripe berries warmed by the sun. Of course, we’d eat most of them before we got home.

I can’t remember if Mum made blackberry jam. I do remember blackberries and cream. With sugar. In those days everyone put sugar in their cream. We’d never do that now, the fruit is sweet enough.

In Australia, the blackberry is a weed. In fact, it’s one of our most noxious weeds. It’s invasive. Once it takes hold it’s hard to get rid of, and it grows almost anywhere. I don’t remember how they got rid of blackberries when we were young. I remember some patches being burned, and some being bulldozed. As we got older the farmers and the local councils started spraying them. As an adult I remember that we didn’t eat wild blackberries any more, because of the spray.

Even as kids—they were weeds. Sure, they tasted great, and we loved to eat them. But I’ve never been able to buy any.

I turned away to the next stall. The stall-holder there was selling home-made nougat. Salt and chocolate.

Yum.

We’re getting toward the end of the draft on LINESMAN book 2. I’m rewriting an action scene, Sherylyn’s finding and deleting unnecessary words. Right now, she’s checking ‘too’ and ‘but’.

When I look at the word count, the manuscript is four hundred words less than it was when we started. And I’m adding words.

That’s four hundred unnecessary toos and buts in a 100,000 word manuscript. (125,000 words actually, but let’s not go there. The novel should be shorter.)

I’ve said before that our writing doesn’t gradually improve over time. It improves slowly for a while, then levels out, or even goes down—sometimes quite a long way down—and then works its way back up to its old skill level.

We’re too close to say if our writing has improved over the last twelve months, but the way we write together certainly has changed. That’s due to two things.

Contract deadlines

The first thing that has changed for us is contract deadlines.

We no longer have the luxury of writing when we want, how we want. We have to deliver on an agreed date. We know we need multiple drafts of our work. We work back from there.

We can no longer wait for one of us to finish something before the other looks at it.

The cloud

The second thing that has changed is that we subscribed to Microsoft’s Office 365, which came with a subscription to Microsoft’s One Drive. Nowadays, rather than one of us work on their hard drive, then hand the completed file over to the other to put onto their hard drive, and so on, we both work on the same file in the cloud. Usually at the same time.

This has led to some fraught times. Microsoft hasn’t got their syncing perfect yet—especially not when you’re running four PCs, two of which are plugged into the cloud while you’re using them, but the other two of which are only connected at night, when you get home from work. Which is why you’ll occasionally find an anguished blog about Microsoft’s latest ‘feature’. But it works well enough that it’s how we edit now.

So how do you work now?

First up we do a lot more planning and talking about the story outside of writing it.

We’re still pantsers, but we often talk upcoming plot points through just before we write them. We don’t do this too far in advance mind. It’s on the day of writing, or the day before. It cuts time when you’re stuck, or when you know a character wouldn’t do a particular thing that you want them to do and you want your co-writer to agree with you that they can do it. (Co-writer usually says, “Nope, not going to happen,” but you work through it and come up with a better solution.)

And of course, characters still don’t always do what you’ve planned for them.

Next up, we don’t wait for one writer to be finished before the other starts editing. If, say, I’ve finished a chapter and am working on the next scene, Sherylyn moves in behind me picking up the logic flaws, updating the scene I’ve just finished, picking up the typos she can see and making comments.

We do this in the same document.

A lot of things haven’t changed. We still write an ordinary first draft we’d be horrified to show to anyone. Second and third drafts are still major rewrites. We still read the document aloud to clean it up.

But we’re working faster than we used to. And we’re working better as a team.

Answers to last week’s mini-quiz are:

I adopt a kitten this Christmas and name her Penwiper?

An oldie, but a goodie. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.

And yes, the name does come from Jerome K. Jerome’s, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).”

I set up an automated fireworks show (I know, permits) and let my dog press the button to start the show?

Fuzzy Nation, by John Scalzi.

I describe my new boss as, “younger than me, with hair blonder than mine, but her close-cut beard is black”?

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

While driving, my mother hits a man wearing a rabbit suit; but there’s no law against hitting rabbits, is there?

Hard Eight, by Janet Evanovich

My parents get upset with me when I turn into a snake?

Blue Dragon, by Kylie Chan. Or I’ll accept Kylie’s Red Phoenix instead if you had it.

Mangoes and Australian cherries have arrived in the supermarkets in quantity. They’re dropping in price and rising in quality. You can buy trays of avocados and mangoes, big punnets of strawberries, reasonably priced peaches and nectarines. And, of course, big tins of chocolates and lollies.

Christmas food in Australia.

It is less than three weeks to Christmas. Friends, family, holidays. Food. And more food. Work slows down (for some of us, at least). The papers and the internet are filled with guides to presents, and holiday quizzes.

I’m starting early, doing my own pre-Christmas mini-quiz.

Mini quiz

What book am I reading if:

1. I adopt a kitten this Christmas and name her Penwiper?
2. I set up an automated fireworks show (I know, permits) and let my dog press the button to start the show?
3. I describe my new boss as, “younger than me, with hair blonder than mine, but her close-cut beard is black”?
4. While driving, my mother hits a man wearing a rabbit suit; but there’s no law against hitting rabbits, is there?
5. My parents get upset with me when I turn into a snake?

Answers next week.

The domain name renewal for www.skdunstall.com* arrived the other day, reminding me that it’s been twelve months since our agent started shopping the revised version of Linesman, the one that finally sold. It didn’t sell straight away, mind. It took some months more of to’ing and fro’ing, but it’s a good time to reflect on the emotional ups and downs of selling a book.

When the “Good news … ” letter from Caitlin arrived we read it, and re-read it and finally absorbed it.

“How do you feel?” Sherylyn asked.

How did I feel? Numb, shaky, nervous even. But the overall emotion?

“Relieved,” I said, and I still felt relieved, days later.

There was none of that instant euphoria that had come when Caitlin had finally agreed to be our agent. No frantic high like those that had come as we’d had to scramble to create synopses for future books.

Just relief.

I think we had both been trying to convince ourselves that no matter how much we loved Linesman, we were unlikely to sell it.

We’d started a new book outside the Linesman universe. Self-doubt was beginning to creep in. The new book we were writing—would Caitlin even like it, let alone want to sell it? Would it be good enough for her to sell? Were we trying too hard to be funny/world build/give depth to our characters?

We still get those book highs, and sometimes they’re over the weirdest things. Like the time our agent said she needed a copy of the revisions we were making, because once it gets into PW or Locus the agency may get foreign rights enquiries and she needs the latest copy for that. The first time you see your book cover. When someone gives you a quote for your book. The first time you google your author’s name and find, high on the search list, a link to a page on penguin.com.

It’s been a while now, and we’re deep into book two, so it’s become part of life. But for both of us, those first few days after learning the book(s) had sold, the predominant feeling was relief.

* Why did we wait so long to purchase the domain name? It should be the first thing an author does. And we had, except that we planned on using a pseudonym. It was only after discussions with our agent, and the editor who finally bought the book, that we decided to use our own name.

fyi. We’re going through our old blog posts now, checking for broken links (or links we’re about to break). Once we’ve fixed these, we’ll move the whole A Novel Idea blog (infinitediversity.com.au) across to skdunstall.com.

The copy edits for LINESMAN came through and we’re currently working our way through them.

It’s official. We’re serial comma offenders.

The edited version was a sea of orange tracked changes. Our 400 page manuscript had 5,121 revisions. That’s right. 5,121.

Most of these are comma issues. In particular, no comma before the ‘and’ at the end of a list, and no comma before a ‘too’, especially at the end of a sentence. There were also some words we hyphenated that we shouldn’t, and some words we should have hyphenated but we didn’t. The other copy changes pale in significance to this.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, for the way the changes are tracked mean that if you add a comma (or remove one) the word is deleted and a new one added. So the actual number of changes is closer to 2,500 than to 5,000. That’s still a lot.

Our copy editor deserves a medal.

Memo to Australian writers trying to break into the US market. The Chicago Manual of Style and many other US style guides use serial commas. (Australian standard is to use them only for clarity.) If your publisher uses, say, the Chicago Manual of Style, there is an option you can turn on in Word grammar checking that allows you to check for a comma before a last list item. You’re going to find it useful.

There was a blood moon tonight. We watched the eclipse come in as we drove home. First it looked like a dirty black cloud obscuring the bottom corner of the moon. By the time we pulled into the driveway it was a big smudge a quarter of the way across the moon face.

We watched it on-and-off over the next hour, until there was a tiny sliver of light and the beginnings of a nice red moon.

Then the cloud cover moved in and that was the end of our moon watching.

Still, eclipses have always meant good things in our household.

Sure enough, when we turned on the computer what did we see in our twitter feed?

Our first ‘official’ mention of Linesman in our editor’s tweet.

It’s starting to feel real. This story is going to be published.

Getting back into a book you’ve left half completed is always interesting. Especially one we’ve left half-way through a draft, which we don’t normally do.

After we delivered the edits on book one we took a few days break and then it was back to book two. When we left it we were 104,000 words and 90% of the way through the story. The last thing we did before we stopped to work on book one was to outline what was going to happen at the end of book two.

Naturally, the first thing we did was read through it again.

It was bad. So very, very bad.

People say the second book is harder to write. I would agree. There’s a different sort of pressure, most of which you put on yourself. You want to deliver a book that’s as good as the first, so you’re trying to write a story like the first one instead of letting the second story fly alone. You have less time to write it in. We started writing Linesman in 2010. It is 2014 now. Linesman 2 has to be delivered in May 2015. That’s four years for the first book, one for the second. We are also trying to match the tone of book one—light-hearted—and it’s a tone you can’t force. Not only that, we provided a synopsis for book two which our editor accepted. We have to write to that basic story. That’s a constraint we’ve never had before.

Our reread showed that we struggled with all these things. The first half was literally a telling of what happened. It was so bad we were starting to think we’d have to rewrite the whole book. Especially those parts involving the main protagonist, which turned out to be one massive info dump after another.

Then, halfway through, the story picked up. It took half a book but we’d found the rhythm.

There were even moments when we went, “Oh, this is fun. I like this story.”

So we’re going to have to rewrite the first half of the book, but there’s a good story in there. One that we’re enjoying coming back to.

The first round of edits are back with our editor. Like most writers, there were periods of panic and calm.

Here’s a mini diary of the last month of writing.

Before the edits arrive

We’re seesawing between

• We hope she sends them soon, otherwise we won’t have time to do them
• We hope she doesn’t send them yet, the next book’s going well, we’re on a roll and don’t want to be interrupted.

When the edits arrive

As the days go by

• There are so many changes, we’ll never get through them in the time
• It’s not so bad, we can do it
• We’ll race through the inline edits in a week, which will give us plenty of time for the big picture stuff (do other writers do the big-picture stuff first?)
• Argh. Three weeks in and we’re only three quarters of the way through the inline edits. We’ll never make it
• That wasn’t so bad. Last chapter. Now to go back and see if we’ve covered everything off
• Nearly deadline, and all those yellow highlighted ‘to-do’s’ still to do
• I know, I know. We need to fix this but the editor hasn’t marked it, so do we have to?
• I can’t read this book any more. I am so over it
• You know, this book is much better than it was
• One last read-through
• I’m not going to look any more. If we find another typo I’ll scream.

At last, it’s away

• It’s done. That was hard work
• We really should go back to the next book
• Yes, but let’s go out and celebrate first.
• We go out to dinner and hardly talk all night, we’re so drained.

A few days later

One of us picks opens the story and flicks through it

• We didn’t fix the issue on page 47
• We’ll do in the next round of edits. Meantime, we’ve got a massive plot hole here in book two. How do we fix that?

Like a lot of writers, it’s important to get our main characters’ names right early in the story. The name becomes part of the character, and the longer the character has had that name, the harder it is to change it later on.

Case in point. We wanted to name a character ‘Clemence Gardinier’. Because we were on a military ship she’d be known by her surname. Gardinier suited who she was, and we liked the French tonings.

But we already have Gardiner as a major secondary character in another book. So we found another French surname, Favager. Favager means blacksmith, while Gardinier means gardener, so they’re both names based on occupations, and yet … neither of us can get used to Favager as a character. We’re going to have to rename her altogether.

We have a couple of baby name books around the house. I’m sure most writers do, but I have to admit that my favourite name site has been, for a long time Behind the Name, along with its associated Behind the Surname.

I like this site because when we name characters we’re often looking for ‘locality’ name. Maybe Irish names, or Scandinavian names or Eastern European names, so it’s easy to pick a starting point.

Once you have a name you can look up the meaning, because sometimes it’s not just the name, it’s what the name means.

There are other interesting things you can use too. We use the random name generator a lot for minor characters.

The name element page is great for world building, especially when you’re writing fantasy. For example, the Germanic ‘alf’ means a supernatural being, so if we were writing a fantasy we might add ‘alf’ to the start of all our supernatural beings.

Choosing names in science fiction is easier in some ways and harder in others. To me, science fiction is more an amalgam of names than anything else. If you have free movement between worlds you’ll end up with names like we have in our own time. A mixture of names from everywhere.

It’s much like when you stay behind after a movie to watch the credits, and there are names from seemingly every country in the world rolling up.