It must be close to book release time. Tor.com are giving away both Alliance AND Linesman. Pop over to Tor.com and leave a comment for your chance to win.
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Still more giveaways
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Giving away copies of Alliance
Our publisher is giving away copies of Alliance over at Goodreads. Lots of copies.
This is your chance to win a copy. Head over to Goodreads now and enter.
US only for the moment, sorry. We’ll run a giveaway later for the rest of the world.
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Rattling the skeleton
Teeth are part of your skeleton. They’re the only part of your skeleton that you actually clean.
Sherylyn went to the dentist the other day and had her teeth cleaned. She said she could feel the vibration of it all the way through her body. It gave her a massive headache, so bad she went to bed for rest of the day in an effort to stave off a migraine.
If you’ve read LINESMAN, you’ll understand that the way she described it later made it sound like a cross between a pneumatic drill and that bit in LINESMAN where Michelle puts her head down and says, “My bones hurt.”
Next day, Sherylyn thought she was better, so off she went to work. But the headache, plus the glare from the computer screen and the concentrated heat/light coming in the window, all combined to bring the migraine on.
Splat, down she went.
Those of you who’ve had migraines, or know people who’ve had migraines, know just how bad that can be. She’s recovered now, but … all from the vibrations of having her teeth cleaned.
The human body is amazing.
In unrelated news
Watch out for more giveaways. After all, we have a new book coming out in nine days.
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We keep losing posts
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.
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Reminder, audio book giveaway
Just a reminder that there are three copies of the audio version of LINESMAN up for grabs over at Goodreads. The narrator is Brian Hutchison.
You have until the 10 February to put your name down.
Keep an eye out for more giveaways as we come close to the release date of ALLIANCE.
Today we mailed off the manuscript for CONFLUENCE to our editor.
It’s finished, but it’s nowhere near finished either.
Our editor will come back with suggestions, we’ll make changes based on those suggestions. She’ll come back with more, and the whole process will go around and around until we’re all satisfied.
This is the first time our agent, Caitlin, is seeing the story this late. We normally send it to her first, and she gives us feedback before we send it to Anne. With both the previous books we’ve done big rewrites after Caitlin’s feedback.
As you can imagine, we’re nervous.
We told the story we wanted to tell. We’re happy with how it turned out.
Even so, we’re way too close to it at the moment to know if it’s any good. In an ideal writing world, we’d put it away for a couple of months now, and come back to it after the break, when we have some distance from it. Given we don’t have the luxury of that time, we’re very grateful for the editor and agent feedback.
What next?
That was the final book we were contracted to write. We don’t know what comes next. We don’t have a book we must write. That will depend on what Caitlin can sell, which in turn, depends a lot on how well the Linesman series is received.
We have lots of stories to tell.
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World building. Literally.
We’re going through a building boom here in Melbourne, Australia. Particularly in our little corner of suburbia, where the building regulations were recently changed, only months after a council heritage listing was overturned.
Now, instead of being a post-World War 2 streetscape of single-story houses on quarter acre blocks, we can build up to three houses on the block, and in our particular street we can build up to three storeys high. On streets nearby that goes up to six storeys.
As you can imagine, there are cranes popping up everywhere. Every time you walk around the neighbourhood it seems another yellow planning permit notice has gone up.
In the City of Melbourne itself—especially around the docklands—high-rise office buildings and apartment housing are going up at the same rate. Or being pulled down. [No parks or open spaces, sadly. 🙁 ]
In a recession, building stops almost altogether for a while. But there’s usually some building going on. Or demolition.
Which begs the question. Why aren’t science fiction and fantasy worlds full of building sites?
When a world is wealthy, it builds. When a world is undergoing expansion, it builds.
In space, we have some massive cities, but no-one’s building them. They’re always there, fully formed.
The rich live in modern, state-of-the-art multi-storey towers. The poor live in buildings that are condemned. But there’s not a building site in sight, and rarely a mention of one.
Thus, in the interests of adding reality, we added building construction to the world we created in Alliance (book two of Linesman).
Haladea III—formerly an agrarian world—has become the capital of the newly-formed New Alliance of governments. Seventy governments and their support staff have set up there, along with a combined military fleet.
They’re building. Boy are they building. The infrastructure is stretched. The richest woman on world is Trenery “We dispose of your disposals” King, who’s raking in the credits managing waste. New buildings are going up daily, old ones being torn down. The planet is one massive building site.
So we wrote it all in, even integrating some of the construction into the story.
When we’d finished we sent it off to our agent, to get her feedback.
She came back with:
“Too many mentions of all the construction on New Haladea. Cut by 50% or more.”
So we cut, and you’ll find she was right, because there’s still a lot of construction in the novel.
More book news, and timely, too, for last week I wrote about our involvement in creation of the audio book.
Now you can win a copy of the Linesman audio book. (If you’re in the US, anyway.)
Head over to GoodReads and put your name down. There are three copies to give away.
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Look, it’s a book
Today we received an advance copy of Alliance.
The finished book. Did the page 99 test, opened it to a page, and started reading. (Except it wasn’t page 99, it was where the book opened naturally.)
It was good. Kept reading.
Very happy.
Paul, from Recorded Books, rang the other day, for the pronunciation list for the audio book version of Alliance.
23 February is coming up fast.
The creation of an audio book from the writer’s point-of-view
From our end, we have very little to do with creation of the audio book.
A month or two before the book is published, we get an email from Paul, with a list of words that they need to confirm pronunciation for. It’s mostly names.
- Ean—pronounced as Ian
- Galenos—Gall-en-os (short a, as in hat)
We agree on a time for him to call.
You might recall from earlier blogs that Sherylyn and I don’t always pronounce words the same way, so before that call we go through the list to agree how these particular words will be pronounced.
Paul calls us, and we talk through the list. It’s usually one of us on the phone, with the other close by.
I have to say, when you’re speaking directly to someone with a US accent, Australian pronunciation often comes across as broad and flat.
One day, when we have time, I’ll set up an audio file of the words we have to pronounce.
For Linesman, the audio came out on Audible when the book was published. The Recorded Books CD package came out in December 2015, so we are now the proud owner of a ten-CD set audible copy of Linesman as well. All 12 hours and 41 minutes of it.
The actor’s point-of-view
The Linesman books are narrated by actor Brian Hutchison, who has done a lot of stage work, as well as appeared on television shows. He’s also a photographer.
We don’t know how Brian works, but Wil Wheaton talks about the process of recording audio for books and games in the first section of “This is why I support a SAG-AFTRA strike authorization for video games — and it isn’t about money“. Wil’s article is more about reading for games than it is about reading for books, but he describes it using the example of reading from a book.
We read our own books aloud, and we can do around ten pages before our voice starts to go. If we do it every day we do start to lose our voice. Reading a complete book aloud is hard work.
Another interesting take on recording the audio for a book is Katie Hafner’s The Unexpected Agony of Recording Your Own Audiobook.
Linesman has been well received in audio
The addition of the narrator adds an extra dimension to the story.
Probably the biggest surprise for us is how many people listened to the audio book. It’s a larger proportion of total people who ‘read’ the book than we expected.
It has been well received, and review-wise, it’s rated well too.