S. K. Dunstall

I have spent time on the Authonomy site lately.

When I first heard about Authonomy I wasn’t sure it would work. I’m still not convinced it will work long term, once the initial momentum dies down, but for the moment at least it’s doing a reasonable job of picking the better stories—sort of.

I imagine it would be somewhat like your average slush pile.

Authonomy is a Harper Collins site that allows writers to post part (minimum 10,000 words) or all of their novel and have other users vote on it. If the story garners enough votes it makes it into the top five for the month and someone at Harper Collins will pick it up, read it and, if they think it’s good enough, purchase it. I haven’t seen any purchases yet.

From my observations:

• Networking obviously helps. If you provide feedback on one person’s book they will usually reciprocate by looking at yours, so the more active you are, the more likely you are to garner votes.
• In the stories I have read and commented on to date, there appears to be a reasonable level of responsible voting. That is, readers won’t vote for the book unless they feel it warrants attention. Harper Collins encourages this by ranking responsible voters higher. If you consistently pick good books (and better still, pick them early), your book gets to the top of the list faster.
• As you would expect, there is an enormous range of quality in the books placed on the site.
• There are some brilliant stories out there, but a lot of them really need another rewrite (or two) before one could say they were finished.
• The general level of writing is above beginner. These people (and I include myself in these people) are serious about writing, but they’re not quite there yet. Some of them are very close.
• There is some good writing out there—a small number of books are very close to publishable.

I have found in reading stories that the blurb is important. This would effectively be the pitch in a query letter and it does make a difference. And I usually also have a good idea by the third page whether or not I want to keep reading.

I was channel surfing last night when I chanced on Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction.

This is a movie about a man who starts hearing a woman’s voice inside his head. This woman appears to be his author, and he is the character in a novel she is writing. (I haven’t watched it. I must do after this.)

In the scene I stopped at, Ferrell —a tax collector—is talking to a woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who has paid only part of her tax bill. There is no sexual tension between the two at all, but suddenly the author’s voice comes in over the top and talks about how Ferrell’s character couldn’t help noticing what attractive legs the woman has, and the way her body fits snugly into her skirt—or thoughts similar to that.

Because I was channel surfing and hadn’t expected the voice, it came totally out of the blue.

I had to laugh because I have read a lot of books where the physical attraction between protagonists is just like that.

I’m not talking about those stories which build up to events which culminate in a sudden physical attraction between two characters. When that’s well done it works, and it’s good.

Nor am I talking about relationships where the protagonists have been friends for a long time and then something happens that triggers an awareness of each other in a sexual way.

And of course, I’m not talking about the story where the attraction starts when the characters meet, and just keeps growing in looks and actions all the way through.

What I am talking about are those books where the characters are getting along just fine, without a hint of attraction between them and then, for no logical reason whatsover related to the story, they start thinking about each other sexually. It feels like the author has decided—all of a sudden—that they must be lovers. Almost as if the author is stuck for ideas, or doesn’t really know their characters. Or they need to change the direction of the story.

So, out of the blue, both characters start noticing things about each other that they hitherto hadn’t.

And it feels like an act of God. One minute the characters are friends or acquaintances, the next—by authorial decree—they’re embarking on an affair.

Janet Reid recently posted a blog on book trailers, in particular the trailer for Micheal Connelly’s latest novel, The Brass Verdict. She asks, “Are book trailers effective in boosting sales?” and isn’t really sure of the answer. Then she goes on to talk about the market for book trailers and expects that it will increase in future years.

So what is a book trailer?

It’s like a movie trailer except that it’s for a book, rather than for a movie.

I did an informal survey of my own with guests from a dinner party last night. All of the guests were avid readers, two of them work in libraries.

Book trailers? They had never heard of them. Would they buy a book based on a trailer? Why? A book trailer is a movie-maker’s interpretation of the book, not the writer’s. They want to know what the writing is like, not someone else’s interpretation of it.

These mirrored my own opinions.

We discussed it some more, in particular the writing/film cross-over. We all agreed:

• That the film of a book is a totally different beast to the book itself. Just because you like a film doesn’t necessarily mean that you will like the book, and vice-versa. Ditto book trailers
• You cannot judge the quality of a book from the quality of the film. You have to read some of the text before you know for certain whether you are going to read the book. The same can be said of the trailers.
• Even if we see—and enjoy—a film based on a book, we seldom read the story the film was based on. We will do the opposite, however, and go and see a film based on a book we read and enjoyed. Likewise, we might view a book trailer —if we knew about it —because we wanted to see what they had done with ‘our’ characters.

If book trailers don’t do anything to make us read a book, why would anyone bother to create them?

It seems that the main reason you would do it is not so much a means to get new readers, as to remind readers of earlier books that the new one is out. Even Janet Reid said that she had read Connelly’s earlier book and would probably have read the latest one when she realised it was out —but she hadn’t realised at the time.

So it seems to be a form of publicity that targets existing readers, rather than new ones. And if the trend to more professional videos take off, it could be quite expensive marketing too.

It will be interesting to see if book trailers take off in this video age.

Meantime, if I can’t read a few pages of the book, there’s no way I’m going to buy it.

The novel I’m reading right now started off promisingly enough. I picked up the first page to see what it was like, and just kept reading.

By around a third way through though, I was starting to get a little antsy. I’m half-way through now, and not sure I’ll go any further. It’s a pity, because it started so well.

The problem? The characters are all one-dimensionally good or evil. There’s no grey here, it’s pure black and white.

We have:

• The naive young mage, neglected as a child, who discovers real powers and goes to the Academy to study
• The grizzled older soldier who loves her, and would follow her to the ends of the earth
• The soldier’s loyal 2IC, who respects her boss and would follow him to the ends of the earth
• The evil Archmage, who wants to take over the world. He hides his evil from the naive young mage, of course
• The twin brothers—one who is evil, one who is good. Naturally, the bad twin tries to bump off his better sibling
• The evil lady mage whose plans of succession are thwarted by the arrival of the naive young mage and plans to get rid of her rival
• The greedy, ambitious woman who marries her way into power.

There’s nothing wrong with these characters in a book, I might add. Half the fantasy world is populated with them. The problem I had with the ones in this book was that they were so starkly black and white. All the good guys were good, all the bad guys were evil. Truly evil. They had no redeeming features at all. And the good guys were just as bad.

Let’s take examples from the book so far.

Example 1.

Naive Young Mage (let’s call her Nym) has spent seven years at the academy, being tutored by Truly Bad Archmage (let’s call him Archie), groomed to be his heir. The Academy is bad. Nym and Archie and everyone at the Academy live the high life, with sumptuous food every night, while outside everyone in the city is starving. Young Nym goes out for a drink with Grizzled Older Soldier (Gos) and walks right into a food riot. Gos and Nym stop the riot —Nym with her superior mage powers, Gos with his superior sword power. (Did I say Gos was an excellent fighter, by the way, and a hero to boot?)

When she finds out that the riot was because the Academy was taking all the food, Nym says, “Oh, I didn’t know. We’ll share what we have with the city.”

She’s a hero, and Archie, of course, is forced to grin and pretend that he he’s happy about it, because this early in the book he’s still trying to be a father figure to Nym.

Example 2.

The twins are the only children of their generation. They’ve spent their whole life together with no other playmates, and they were inseparable. They got on well.

They’re in their twenties now. Around the same time as the riot, Evil Lady Mage (Elma) decides to turn one of them bad. In the space of a couple of months Bad Twin (let’s call him Batwin) turns bad. He disassociates himself from the good brother (Godwin) completely. At Elma’s urging, Batwin attempts to kill Godwin. There’s no remorse, no, “Hey, this is the guy I’ve been best friends with all my life, my brother. I can’t kill him.” No, it’s a simple, cold-blooded murder attempt with no angst or anything behind it.

Obviously, there’s a lot more stereotyping in the book than just the good/bad aspect. But it is really noticeable. The bad guys have no redeeming features whatsoever. They’re pure evil.

The good guys aren’t much better. They’re sickly sweet and so unreal I end up despising them.

How different are the names of characters in your novel?

Progress on Barrain has come to a standstill at present as I am concentrating on the novel for my critiquing group.

I gave Sherylyn the first 30,000 words to read last night.

It’s a difficult story to write in that I am trying to hide the true identity of one of the characters, to keep the reader guessing who it is until the end of the story.

“Well,” Sherylyn said at the end. “I know it’s not Vas.”

It wasn’t Vas, but I was trying not to give away who it was, so I asked, trying to sound surprised, “Why wouldn’t it be him?”

“Because of the name,” she said. “You would never name a hero Vas.”

She went on to remind me that we had a character named Vasst in Potion, a spineless group leader who turned traitor. We also have Vlad the Impaler in a story idea we have yet to write.

“Which leaves Hanna and Julan as the only two people it can be,” Sherylyn said. “And I don’t think it’s Julan because Julian was the bad guy in Shared Memories, so it must be Hanna.”

It was Hanna, in fact, but I had gone to a lot of effort to make Julan feisty and likeable, so that most readers would think it was her.

Flabbergasted is probably too strong a word to describe how I felt, but it did make me pause.

“Arrax is a hero, of course,” Sherylyn said. “Because his name starts with ‘A’. A lot of your heroes have ‘A’ names.”

Arrax is the hero. And yes, in prior books, both Alun and Aled have been heroes too.

I made a list of names and characters in our stories.

Good guys	Bad guys
Aidan Aled Alun Arrax Blade Caid Grenn Hamill Hanna Kalli Kym Mathers Melanda Rhetta Roland Scott Tegan	Callen Chaffen Julan Vanora Van Wallah Vas Vasst

 

Sherylyn did have a point.

There were other similarities. Lots of ‘n’ and ‘l’ sounds in the names. One or two syllable names, particularly for the good guys. And definitely a trend to bad guys with names starting with ‘V’.

I have to rethink some character names.

At the writing group I started attending this year it frustrates some of the other members that they don’t get a real sense of place in my story. They don’t get descriptions—of people, or of places. They want more.

For me, sometimes, when I read their stories, I want less. I want my readers to use their own imagination to flesh out the characters. I don’t need to know that the protagonist has long red hair that falls in ringlets to her waist; that she has green eyes that reflect the colour of the grass; that she has a tiny rosebud mouth just ripe for kissing, and skin that freckles easily in the sun, and on and on. I don’t need a photo-ID. Maybe all I need to know is that her red hair frizzes up when it rains.

Likewise, I don’t need to know down to every minute detail exactly what the house looks like.

In fact, when I read books with long descriptive passages I often skim them.

It can have interesting consequences. There are books I re-read frequently, and it’s only years later that I suddenly realise one character has red hair, for example, when all those years I have been imagining them with black hair. Or that someone has freckles, or ivory skin. In fact, I recall one book—I think it was Ursula le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness—where I never realised the main character, Genly Ai, was black, and I know she told us.

Science fiction and fantasy writers —and writers of historical fiction—often need to include more description about their worlds to enable the reader to see the place they are writing about.

Packing to go away seems so much harder than it used to be.

Once it was just throw some clothes into a bag and we’re ready. Anything we’d forgotten we bought along the way.

Nowadays the clothes are the least of my worries.

Have I got my mobile phone? Have I packed the phone charger?

Next it’s the work in progress. Have I copied the novel I am working on onto the laptop? What about my current research?

Then it’s the computer itself. Is the laptop packed? What about the accessories, especially the power cable. And the mouse for those days when the touchpad is just too much? What about the wireless card? And the phone-away number for the wireless card? Are we sure the place we have booked has wi-fi access? Do we have a flash drive, just in case?

There’s an extra bag for the PC and all its consumables. There’s an extra bag for all the paperwork we need to carry. The car boot is full, and we’re only driving to the airport.