S. K. Dunstall

The Locus Poll and Survey opened on 1 February.  This allows you to nominate best science fiction, fantasy, horror, YA and debut novels, among other things. The results are presented at the Locus Awards in June.

The categories are a lot like the Hugos and the Nebulas, except that instead of just a single best novel of speculative fiction, they divide the best novel prize into separate science fiction, fantasy, horror and young adult categories.

When I was younger the awards didn’t seem as prominent as they are now. I don’t know if that’s just my perception, but the internet seems to have made them more dominant that they used to be.

I like the way they showcase the best novels in each major sub-genre of speculative fiction.

It’s the one poll I vote in.  (Normally, anyway. This year, for the first time, I became a supporting member of WorldCon, which means I can also vote for the Hugos.)

So I had my list of novels I wanted to vote for. Skipped the ones, like horror, that I don’t read, and went down the list.

For novels, I vote for stories that have the trifecta. Great characters, interesting stories, excellent world-building.

When I got to the shorter stories, however, I have different criteria.

I only need one or two of these to consider a shorter story nomination-worthy.

The story that I marked as my number one novelette choice had a tired plot, and while the main character was good, no one else stood out. But the world-building, and the idea behind it. Oh, wow.

Recently, Sherylyn was reading a book, where halfway through, the protagonist’s horse dies.

That’s fine—well, not fine really, but these things happen in stories—except that, some chapters on, the protagonist is back riding that same horse, and continues to ride it for the rest of the novel.

Books with errors like these take you out of the story.  We’ve both been known to stop reading when errors like this happen.  This time, Sherylyn just shrugged, and kept reading.

“Sure,” she said.  “The horse is supposed to be dead, but it’s easy to make a mistake like that. And I’m enjoying the story.”

Since we got published, we’re a lot more forgiving of continuity errors in books.

We’ve made a few of our own.  One particularly egregious one in Linesman—or it might have been Alliance—that nearly slipped through was where Ean and company were attacked by a ship that had been destroyed many pages earlier. That got picked up by the copy editor.

Thank goodness for copy editors, is all I can say.

The thing is, when you’re editing, especially when you’re editing to a deadline, you can make mistakes.  Unless you’re a really organised writer (sad to say, not us yet) you’ve read the book so many times you just can’t, possibly, read the whole thing through once more. Or if you do read it through, you’re reading what you expect to see, not what’s really on the page.

There’s one place for errors to creep in.

A beta read will pick them up, or your own reread after you have put the book aside for a while. If you have the time.  But what if you’re making edits as a result of the beta read?

Another place for errors to creep in is in the edits you do after you send your finished story away, and your editor letter comes back, with notes and recommendations for changes.  We have this mad scramble to make the changes in the time given.  We don’t know about other writers, but we move chunks of the book around at this time. And we often add scenes. Like maybe, an extra fight.  Which is how we ended up with Ean being chased by a spaceship that had been destroyed earlier.

You’re doing this to a deadline, too.  While you try your hardest to fix every single issue that your changes have introduced, you’re always rushed, you’re on a deadline, and you’re too close to the work.

That’s why we’re so grateful for those second and third editing eyes at the publisher.

And why we’re more tolerant nowadays of continuity errors that once would have thrown us out of a story.  Especially on a writer’s earlier books.  We don’t like them, and work hard to avoid them, but they are so easy to miss.

Site redesign

We’ve updated our website. The old site had been around a while, and didn’t scale super well on mobiles and tablets. So we’ve gone for a new look.

Over the next few weeks we’ll fine-tune it, but the basic design is there.

It has changed the way some images are presented.  We have gone back and updated the last few weeks’ posts, but we won’t do them all. As a result, you will see that a lot of the old blogs don’t appear to have images associated with them.  They do, but they’re not displayed until you actually view the post itself.

Newsletter

We have also introduced a newsletter.  If you want to receive a quarterly newsletter from us, why don’t you subscribe?

It’s hard to test newsletters.  Once you subscribe, that’s it. You can’t resend it to yourself, and short of signing up to multiple dummy emails (not something we want to do), we have to believe it’s okay.

If you do sign up, you should receive your first newsletter straight away. If you don’t get that newsletter, please let us know and we’ll see if we can find what the problem is.  This is new technology for us, and until we’ve used it a while we’re nervous about it.

Outside of that

We’re still working on the drafts of the book to be delivered after Stars Uncharted. We are both adding lots of words, and taking out just as much. Sherylyn’s really on a roll writing this week, which is good.

The story is starting to settle, and feel like a story we want to read/write.

This year has gone so fast.  It feels not all that long since we wrote last year’s Christmas blog.

It’s been a strange year.  The world’s political climate is unsettling, and that’s an understatement.

People seem to have been infected by some crazy ‘me’ virus, where it’s all about them, and everyone else be damned. Yet all through, there’s little pockets of decency that make you realize that humans, in general, are pretty decent folk.

The other day, for instance, an ice-addicted maniac drove his car through Christmas crowds near a major Melbourne metropolitan railway station, injuring 18 people.  We heard tales of people helping other people. Staying with the injured, comforting them. Of the off-duty policeman who tackled the driver.  Of others who helped him, even though they didn’t know at the time how dangerous the driver was. Even the sixteen brand-new police officers who rose to the occasion on the first day of their job.

I hope every one of you reading this had a good year.

For us, it’s been an up and down year, especially the last few months.  Mum passed away early in November, so November was a blur of getting over that, combined with lots of driving. We live in Melbourne, she lived in Wangaratta (250km away) and she wanted to be buried with Dad, in Birchip (350km the other way).  So a funeral first, and a week later a graveside ceremony on the other side of the state.

I’m really proud of my family, I have to say. We all pulled together to do exactly what Mum wanted, gave her a send-off that was perfect for her, and showed how much we loved her. (Mum would have enjoyed her funeral.)  Best of all, the whole family agreed that was what she would have liked. I think that shows we were all still close to her.

I once went to a funeral where the family was so out-of-touch that the deceased’s friends knew them better than their family did.  That was a horrible, unnerving funeral to be at. So, like I say, really happy that we were all close to Mum and knew her well.

Then, only a few days ago, our niece and her partner narrowly escaped when half their house burned down.  On Mum’s birthday, can you believe.

So feeling very mortal right now, and truly grateful for family and friends.

Wishing you all a happy holiday and best wishes for the festive season.