Leveling up in computer games is a process whereby a character gains enough points or experience to unlock a whole new level in the game.
Writers level up too. The first time they finish a book, the first time they learn to take critiques properly, when they learn that writing is not just writing, it’s rewriting.
Here’s a fun diagram of a writer leveling up. We’ve made some assumptions.
The writer is going the trad pub route, and they get an agent first, who then sells their book to an editor
Both editor and agent are legitimate and doing their best to sell/make the book as good as it can be. That is, the writer isn’t caught up by scammers.
A lot of these things loop. You can keep going around and around in circles, but we’re only doing it the once.
I wanted a picture of utopia to balance this blog. Interestingly, my stock images supplier had lots of pictures with the word ‘heaven’, but little else. Except pictures of Roman ruins kept cropping up as well. I googled, but couldn’t find any reason for it.
I started a book today.
It was well written, and had a characters I cared about, right from the start. World building was superb. And yet … I couldn’t keep going with it.
Too many bad things happened to the point-of-view character in the first two chapters. Nasty, horrible things. Beatings, starved, torture, being branded on the face with a hot iron. Worse, the world he lived in was the sort of place where that could happen to anyone except the truly rich (and sometimes even to them). Where the people in power treated those outside their circle as lesser beings, and did really nasty things to them.
I stopped at the start of chapter three.
I couldn’t read any further.
It’s starting to feel as if I live in that world already. I don’t want to read about it too.
I think it’s human nature to want to read positive stories when the world around us seems quite depressing. I certainly do, anyway.
I picked up another book, more light-hearted, and read that instead.
If you’ve read this blog in the past, you might know I’m a big fan of Jon English and David MacKay’s rock odyssey, Paris. It’s about the Trojan war.
A concept album came out in 1990, with John Parr (who sang Man in Motion, from St Elmo’s Fire) as Paris, and Sheila Parker as Helen of Troy. The album had some impressive talent on it—John Waters, Barry Humphries, Philip Quast, Doc Neeson, John Parr, Sheila Parker, Joe Fagin, Demis Roussos, David Atkins and Terence Donovan. It was backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Choir.
It’s one of the albums we listen to a lot when writing.
The show has been produced as an amateur musical since, but it has never been produced professionally.
Not until Music Theatre Melbourne (MTM) produced a four-show concert series.
Paris is a rock opera. I’d never even imagined it as concert. I mean, an orchestra in the back, a choir behind them, and the singers down the front.
It was great, and the singers were superb.
Afterwards, they all sang a Jon English song as a tribute. Fantastic.
“And then Mrs Wiggles the cat, and Martha the girl, went up the ramp, and the spaceship took off.”
(If you haven’t recognised it, the title of this post is a play on Naomi Kritzer’s Cat Pictures Please, which won the 2016 Hugo and 2016 Locus Award for best short story, and was also a Nebula nominee for the same. You can read it on Clarkesworld magazine.)
Sometimes, all you want is something beautiful, but the news is depressing and everywhere you look, people are doing horrible things to each other. So, today, I present to you … cat (and dog) pictures.
Sometimes our word counts feel like Sisyphus. Cut the words, add the words, cut some more.
Winter is not just coming, it’s here
We had the first real frost of winter today. Enough to ice up the car. It’s only the start of July. It feels like it’ll be a cold winter.
I’m almost glad we’ll be inside with the heater on, editing.
Although, I confess, our heater is great when it’s working, but the thermostat is placed in the one part of the house where it’s always warm. The passage. Individual rooms can be quite cold, but it’s always warm and cozy in the passage.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in the passage.
When it gets really cold, we take the remote—which is also the thermostat—bring it into the room where we’re working, and watch the temperature drop.
It’s become a running joke in the house. “Oh, the thermostat’s bored again. Wants a different view. Where will we put it today?”
Editing
Sherylyn has finished the first round of cuts on Stars Uncharted. She got the story down from 128,000 words to 112,000. Now I’m looking at what she cut, and doing my take on (Editor) Anne’s notes.
Sometimes the word count goes up.
I’m trying not to.
As you can see, I’m always reluctant to cut words we’ve written. Sometimes I flat-out refuse. Most times, we sort cuts out away from the computer. Over dinner, or over coffee. Or tea. We did that last night.
There was a section I didn’t want to cut. Sherylyn did. We spent half of dinner talking about it, and realised by the end that the real issue was that I wanted this particular scene to show how tense everyone was getting, waiting for the coming battle. Sherylyn wanted it gone because all they were doing was talking about food. The food talk wasn’t doing anything about the tenseness of the situation.
Final solution. Rewrite the scene.
Goodreads giveaway
Our Goodreads giveaway was going well … until I went in and corrected a typo. After the competition had started. Silly me. Now it’s back waiting to be approved. On a 4 July weekend. So if you want to enter to win a copy of the whole series – it will come back, I promise. We’re just not sure when.
Edits on Stars Uncharted. Sometimes we feel there’s no page we haven’t edited.
As mentioned in last week’s post, to celebrate we’re giving away a set of all three books. Linesman, published 30 June 2015. Alliance, published 23 February 2016. And Confluence, published 29 November 2016.
It’s a Goodreads giveaway, so enter over on the Goodreads site.
30 June is the end of the financial year in Australia. Tax time. (It’s not the day we need to have our taxes in, it’s the date the last financial year ends, so we can start getting our taxes together.)
Both Sherylyn and I work in industries where end-of-financial-year has a big impact. It’s a busy time of year for us.
30 June 2015 was also the day Linesman came out.
30 June is also Sherylyn’s birthday. Best birthday present ever. Your own book.
Two years already, and it’s gone so fast. Another two books, and two more on the way.
We’ve decided to celebrate by doing a Goodreads giveaway.
Starting on the 30 June, running till the end of July, you have a chance win all three books. If you’ve already got them, try a second copy. Or maybe give them away to someone you know who likes science fiction.
Crying over our edits. Most times I agree with the changes Sherylyn wants to make. She’s good at cutting out the unnecessary stuff. There’s only one edit I really cried about. It was in Linesman, it was around 20,000 words and it was a Jordan Rossi section. Sherylyn didn’t think it was necessary, and said so. I refused to cut it. One day, about six months into the editing process, I had a lightbulb moment and realised it had to go. That was so hard.
Stars Uncharted was due at the editor’s on 1 June. We sent it in, early actually, and settled back to concentrate on the next story.
Anne, our editor, got the book back to us on the 10th. She said some nice things, and then talked about the changes she wanted. The biggest one, the book is too long. At least 20,000 words too long.
We have to say, it wasn’t unexpected. After all, the contract calls for a novel of around 100,000 words. We delivered a little more than that. Like, closer to 130,000. Sometimes, when you’ve worked on a book for a long time, you think there is nothing you can possibly cut. A few months away from the book—or another eye, like the editor’s—will show that you can, but at the time, we couldn’t see it.
Anne suggested some areas we might cut.
“Let me at it,” Sherylyn said. “Don’t look. For a week.”
So I’m sitting at the computer, trying to continue with the next book, while she gives me a running countdown of how many words she’s cut each day.
“I’m down to 117,916 today.”
Arrgh.
Sherylyn is the editor in our writing team of two. She does most of the cuts. I do many of the adds. She can be ruthless. And sadly, she and Anne often agree on things. Sherylyn will argue for something to be cut, I’ll make a stand and we leave it in, then Anne comes back and says, “Perhaps this isn’t necessary.”
I’m coming round, gradually, but … in the meantime. Sherylyn’s cutting words, and I can’t argue about what’s she cut until tomorrow. I’m chewing my nails, literally.
Tomorrow, I finally get to see what she’s done.
You know what, I probably won’t even notice what’s gone.
This is the Queen’s Birthday holiday long weekend here in Melbourne, the second official week of winter and it’s cold. It’s also the start of the snow season. Lots of people head to the mountains. Brrr.
Some snippets first.
Coming soon—a Goodreads giveaway
30 June 2015 was the release date for Linesman. It’s hard to believe the first book came out two years ago already. We’re planning a Goodreads giveaway for the anniversary.
We’ll announce it on the blog closer to the date.
Book news
Our editor came back with feedback and requested changes on the new novel yesterday. Changes required by the end of July.
We have work to do.
Some questions from one of our readers that we would like to discuss.
Bruce, one of our readers, asked some questions about Linesman. We liked the questions, thought they would make a good blog. So, here are Bruce’s questions and our answers.
***Spoiler alert***
There is may be spoilers if you haven’t read the books, so you might want to stop reading now.
Bruce asks:
Who taught Lambert his strong sense of right and wrong? The alcoholic beggar at the store only said he’d get caught. Rigel cheats.
Cann kid gang: Will Wen Cann, the kid who was kind to Ean, resurface? They’re beating the bushes for Linesman.
Will Rossi or Hernandez ever headline a story, solve a crisis, or make a discovery? What are Rossi’s experiments?
Tinatin and the shuttles?
Who taught Lambert his strong sense of right and wrong?
Firstly, Ean has always had a strong sense of what’s right and what’s wrong when dealing with the lines.
He has always known—and been confident of—his own ability to work with the lines. Any inferiority he has comes from working with other people, not with the lines.
From an early age, he was focussed on becoming a linesman.
He had a name for the music now. Linesman. And once he asked, it wasn’t hard to find out more about lines and linesmen. He was determined to become one. (Linesman, p153)
Old Kairo tells Ean being a linesman wasn’t for the likes of them. The guilds didn’t take criminals, and they didn’t take slum kids. In Linesman, we mention that Kairo was a Lancastrian soldier once, dismissed from the military for being overweight. There is an implied history behind Kairo that we don’t go into in this story. Kairo may steal, but it is possible, probable even, that he helped Ean, that he taught Ean other traits, like the value of a human life.
Ean is, also, basically a decent person.
Cann kid gang: Will Wen Cann, the kid who was kind to Ean, resurface? They’re beating the bushes for linesmen?
This was the question we really wanted to answer, because it shows how much a story changes from what you plan to what is actually written.
When we start writing a story we have the beginning, and we know, roughly, how it ends. Occasionally we have one or two plot other things that we know will happen.
Wen Cann was one of these plot points.
He was to be one of the new trainee linesmen. He had a different name, different background and, of course, no prison sentence. Ean recognises his music, knows it’s Wen, and struggles with the knowledge. When they realise there might be a traitor amongst the trainees, he confronts Wen, who gives a plausible story as to why he’s there. Ean doesn’t report him. Normally, he’d talk it over with Radko, but she’s not there, and the traitor keeps betraying them.
If you’ve read Confluence you know how that turned out.
Of course this didn’t happen. As you know, he wasn’t in the book and instead we had Han.
Maybe he’ll turn up in another book, maybe not. But if he does, he’s unlikely to have a major part like the one he was going to play in Confluence. Or, he may have a totally different storyline altogether.
Will Rossi or Hernandez ever headline a story, solve a crisis, or make a discovery? What are Rossi’s experiments?
Ah, Rossi. He’s not the most pleasant of characters. Probably not pleasant enough to headline a story, but he’s certainly a great second point-of-view.
If Acquard’s War ever sees publication, Rossi is a secondary character there, and (we think) you get to feel more sympathetic toward him. You certainly understand him more. Hopefully without him changing his character.
Rossi’s line experiments? We can only point to Acquard again. Yes, you find out a bit more about what he’s doing with the lines there. But only a little, for it is Acquard’s story, not Jordan Rossi’s.
What about Hernandez?
At the moment we don’t have a story planned for her. If we did write one, it would likely be a novella, rather than a full-blown novel. But, never say never. (Hernandez gets a small part in Acquard’s War, too. :-))
Tinatin and the shuttles?
All we know about Tinatin and the shuttles at the moment is that eventually the whole ship will become involved. People and lines.
It’s in the back of our minds, something we think will happen in the books where we meet the aliens. But, it might be a single mention, and you find they’re already using the shuttles, or it might be subplot, or something else entirely (like Tinatin getting one of the aliens to show her how they work).
We hope you enjoyed the answers. If anyone else has questions or something they would like us to discuss on our blog, please let us know. If it doesn’t give out too many spoilers, and is not something we have answered before, we would be happy to consider it.
