Rescheduling

Hunting is now definitely bumped to a March release.

Hunting was the fifth book I wrote (after the various Talismans books and Lammersgach, which I have no intention of releasing because LOL).  It was the first book I put through a writing workshop, and I had lots of useful feedback and positive comments, and I'd also gone through to tighten the writing several times after its completion, so though there were some things I wanted to clarify with the worldbuilding, I figured four months was plenty to finalise it.

Hoo boy.

The plot's still solid, but two secondary characters and a sub-plot needed to go.  And a quarter of what was left needed complete rewriting.  [There's some particularly unconvincing dialogue.]  So, delays.

I've set the release date for 7 March 22 March 31 March 4 April.  I'll bump it again if I'm not satisfied, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Not doing it just to torture you guys, promise.  My schedule is a victim of my own evolution as a writer. ;)

Advance Warning on Price Rises and current Status

Just giving advance warning that after Christmas I'll be lifting my prices from $3.99 to $4.99 per book. I don't think I'm ever likely to price my books in the "upper regions" (ie. $6-$10), but there's this interesting 'perception of quality' issue with books below a certain price. Since my sales have been generally sluggish since KDP Select came in (with its preferential promotion of exclusive books), I have some freedom to experiment with the price I originally intended, but kept hesitating on going to.

I've been a complete slacker with the editing of "Hunting" (I'm only about a third of the way through) and will have to light a fire under my tail. I'm actually a little nervous about the book's reception, since it's the 'earliest' of the books which I'm putting out (I wrote it before "Medair", though after about five other books which will never see the light of day) and it does read to me as "young". More straightforward plot, less deconstruction of the fantasy genre. Still, I love Ash, who has no special powers but an entertaining amount of self-belief.

I really don't want to delay the current publication date just because I've been playing too many MMO's, though, so will try to settle down to work.

Some of the people some of the time...

I'm occasionally asked whether I would recommend self-publishing, and usually reel off a list of pros and cons, noting that it's not an either-or decision, but an option you can take without longing for the downfall of trade publishing.  I'll point out that it's fairly easy to get the books up from a technical perspective, that there's companies which will do it for you for a flat fee if you're not great with computers, and that there's no obligation to spend any time marketing (nor, indeed, any guarantee that spending any time marketing will impact your sales significantly).

Putting your work up to be either ignored or judged is a different sort of challenge, but not unique to self-publishing.

One thing which is almost guaranteed to come along with the decision to self-publish are two words: Needs Editing.

Rather too many self-publishers type their books out and throw them up raw.  Some self-edit.  Some crowd-source or trade editing with other writers.  Some hire editors, and make sure to list those editors up front and central in the book's metadata.  Sometimes those editors will be capable and talented people, and sometimes (as apparently was the case with Amanda Hocking's hired editors) not so much.

The copy-editing side of this process - eliminating typos and grammar errors and spotting continuity issues - is relatively straightforward (though even then you will find yourself coming up against grammar myths or "spelling errors" based on British/US/Australian English differences).  But it's fairly easy to say that a book has few spelling or grammar issues.*

Developmental editing - consistency of characterisation, issues with pace, recommending changing point of view, boosting the role of a character, gender-flipping the protagonist, or even altering how the book ends to produce a satisfying and powerful reading experience - all those are a little less definitive.

A developmental editor is a highly experienced reader who can push you into seeing how to make your book even better.  In their view.

Here are two reader views of the opening of Stray.

Love love loved the beginning survivalist part! And the worldbuilding was incredible, though I think some of the humor I liked so much, as well as the characterization, got a bit lost in the last half. - Wendy Darling

I really enjoyed this book. It was slow going to get into it but I'm glad I stuck it out. The story picks up momentum almost imperceptibly and after about 100 pages becomes 'unputdownable'. - Laura (Kyahgirl)

So which editor did I get?  The one who thought that beginning survivalist part was brilliant, and wanted more like it, or the one who thought that part was dull, and fell in love with the book later on?

No book is the same from one reader to the next.  No editor can polish your book to be "perfect".  Experience and personal taste will combine to produce advice which will please some of the people some of the time, and maybe even lots of people most of the time, but never ever all of the people all of the time.

This isn't a suggestion to not use editors.  Feedback on your writing is incredibly valuable, allowing you to see the book through different eyes.  But no matter how much editing your books have gone through, you will not please all of the people all of the time, and because you're self-published you will be told that your books Need Editing.

This will be un-fun at times, and possibly the person saying that is simply not one of "your readers", far more interested in action than character development, or vice versa, but it's also useful free feedback, giving you more things to look for when your next novel is going through the editing rounds.

I'll finish this off with two quotes from Diana Wynne Jones about editing.  First a positive one:

On the good side, there are enormously high standards.  None of the editors I have worked with would have accepted much in the way of clichés.  None of them have ever let me get away with any muddle in any plot, nor with any factual inaccuracy; and though some have queried things that struck them as peculiar, they have always been delighted by originality.  This naturally has put me on my mettle.  Knowing that everything I wrote was going to be subjected to extreme and shrewd scrutiny, I take pains to get the finished manuscript right, if I can.

Then a cautionary one:

I hate being edited, because my second draft is as careful as I can get it.  I try to get it absolutely mistake-free, and absolutely as I feel the book needs to be.  Then some editor comes along and says, 'Change Chapter Eight to Chapter Five, take a huge lump out of Chapter Nine, and let's cut Chapter One altogether.'  And you think, No, I'm going to hit the ceiling any moment.  Then I call for my agent before I get my hands round this person's throat.

Editors were very majestic in the days when I first started writing.  There was one who got hold of The Ogre Downstairs, and rewrote the ending entirely in her own purple prose, which was not in the least like mine, and I decided I was going to change publishers.  'No, no, no,' said my agent.  'You mustn't do that. Carry on and see if you can manage to persuade her.'  And of course I couldn't persuade her.  And then Charmed Life: I know by the time I'd done the second draft it was absolutely perfect, it really, really was, I mean just as it is at this moment, you know.  And this woman rang me up and wrote to me and told me exactly this sort of thing: 'You must take out this chunk and that chunk and rewrite this and alter that,' and I was furious.  And I thought surely we can do something about this.  And thank God it was the days before computers.  I said, 'Send me the typescript back and I'll see what I can do.'  So she did, and I cut out the bits she told me to alter, in irregular jagged shapes, then stuck them back in exactly the same place with Sellotape, only crooked, so it looked as if I'd taken pieces out and put new pieces in.  And then I sent it back to her, and she rang up and said, 'Oh, your alterations have made such a difference.'  And I thought, 'Right! Hereafter I will take no notice of anybody who tries to edit my books.' And I don't,  I make a frightful fuss if anybody tries to, now. - Reflections on the Magic of Writing.

An editor can be a very useful person to have on your side.  But they're not a magical guarantee of perfection, and they're not unique to trade publishing.  Always listen to, then weigh and evaluate any feedback on your writing.  And don't let the 'slings and arrows' get you down.  A small press editor once told me that it simply wasn't possible for a self-published book to be as good as a trade published book, but I've yet to hear a believable argument as to why this should be.

* I've never put a book out which didn't have a typo (still waiting for someone to spot one in And All the Stars, but it's sure to come), but I'm at around 99.5% correct and aiming for better.

Status Report - September

At current rate, Caszandra should be out by mid to end November.

Cass gets to be a good deal less action-y in this last volume - much to her frustration.  On the flip side, she gets to pull off a very cool stunt which makes me chortle because it's so...gratuitous.  She has a very flexible power set: the problem is the price she pays when using it - and, more important, how people can use her.

On a spoiler-ific note, it will be interesting to see how people take to the way the relationship which developed in Book 2 plays out in Book 3.  It's rare that I'm in the mood for unnecessary relationship angst, so I'm not generally inclined to manufacture some bizarre reason to split people up.  It's far more interesting to me to see how the characters cope with staying together.  With making little compromises for each other.  Avoiding arguments.  Dealing with things the other suddenly wants to do.  The huge decisions and the little things, and how you become different people because you're committed to each other.  [A theme I'm also working through in The Sleeping Life.]

I'm now getting "search terms leading to this site" of "When will Andrea Host finish Caszandra" which is certainly motivation to get my rear in gear!

After Caszandra is out, I'll be on to Hunting, which is a "girl vigilante" book I wrote ages ago (in a hissy fit after a problematic Georgette Heyer novel).  It's one of my "the gods are real" books, and I'll be underlining that a little more clearly in the edit.

Pyramids keeps trying to steal my attention.  The main character has two rather overwhelming nieces, one of whom wants to be a Lady Adventurer, and the other who has decided to marry Heliotropus' princess.  I suspect I'm going to have to consider a sequel to cover all that.

Status Report

Finally through the near-last edit of Voice!  That means (unless some great logical inconsistency is uncovered) it's likely to be out mid-September.  I'm currently working on the (rather spoilery!) map, and will be including a glossary (and adding one into Silence), since the titles and countries can be a bit difficult to remember.

Voice is very short!  The shortest thing I'm ever likely to release (though still novel length, closer to the average length for a mystery than a fantasy novel).  I debated adding a whole series of extra adventures, but this is the correct length, I think, for this part of the story.  It's practically a reversal of the traditional fantasy novel (which often build up to a huge battle), and is remarkably emotional at several points (tearing up at my own writing, tch).  I suspect, when the readers get to the last couple of chapters, they will be screaming at me, and sharpening the knives, heh.

Then it's on to finalising Caszandra.  This volume is 150,000 words long, so it's hard to predict how long this will take me to fine-edit.  I'm aiming for early December.

I also plan to 'relax' with writing more of Pyramids in there, but I've forbidden myself from working on that until I've finished all the tasks for Voice.

Sales were fairly bad this month (yet still actual pocket money).  August is apparently the absolute worst month for selling books, so I'm blaming it on that at the moment.  I did a giveaway at LibraryThing, and the general response has been good.  Diary format is still the main thing people dislike about Touchstone, though it bothers fewer people than I expected.

There's a few readers who seem to have gone through every book I've written and liked them all and that means a great deal to me.  :)

Thank You, Bliss Rowan

I don't think I've yet managed to put out a book which didn't have a typo.  The Silence of Medair had four, which I discovered to my horror when I re-read it after it was shortlisted for the Aurealis.  It probably still has a couple, hidden in plain sight.  I will stamp them out eventually.

I cringe at typos, and strive with each new book to improve the editing cycles the books go through to cut them out.  And I accept that I will always get affect/effect wrong, no matter how many people correct the drafts - I've reached the point that I think there is no right way to use affect/effect, and I've started to phrase certain sentences to use different words.

I also deliberately employ "not correct" grammar occasionally, though I don't use as many sentence fragments as I was once inclined to.  I will dangle prepositions, or leave out participles, whatever.  If a sentence sounds better to me that way, that's how it's going to be.  But that's a choice.

No-one likes to have errors pointed out to them (and sometimes I might disagree on what constitutes an error), but I always want to hear about them.  And they cut my esteem a little each time.  But today Bliss Rowan gave me a nice little comparative boost.

The last couple of months I've been reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels in chronological order.  I'm a little over halfway through.  Some I've read before, and some I haven't.  They were published from the 1930s to the 1970s, and a lot have been out of print.  A few years ago, ebooks were released of most of them, although there's a few still to come.  The copyright seems to be owned by different publishers, and the pricing is all over the place, but most are released by Bantam, and cost $9.99.

Bantam, it is clear, scanned these books, ran them through a spell-checker, but didn't bother to copy-edit them.  The last book I finished, If Death Ever Slept, was riddled with Mm for 'him' and Ms for 'his'.  And the next, And Four to Go, has introduced me to Bliss Rowan.

I've never encountered Bliss Rowan in a Nero Wolfe book before.  Miss Lily Rowan, of course, is a recurring character.  Today she has served the delightful purpose of making me feel a little better about those four errors in Medair.

Because Bantam is making my four, tiny, quickly fixed errors look damn good by comparison.  So thank you, Bliss Rowan.

Fresh Eyes

I started working on Voice again this week, re-reading and fine-tuning and underlining a reaction to an event which was missing in the previous draft.

This is a book which starts out action-heavy, and as it has been quite a few months since my last look at it, I managed to get something closer to "reader reaction" to the story.  You can never truly read your own writing as a reader would (even if every reader was the same), but you can step back from the details and get caught in the story.

And, damn, I'm AWFUL to my characters.

Physically Medair comes out of the story better than most of them (Cass is by far my most-injured), but I think she is the most brutalised 'spiritually'.  Part of this is the product of the person she once was, a child of unthinking privilege, and also because this story is probably the novel of mine with the 'largest' theme, but she grew up so idealistic and proud, and I keep kicking her in the face.

Live Rat

Triple phew!  Lab Rat One is now live on Smashwords, and in the approval queue at Amazon.

It's been a long haul - I swear I could spend my entire life editing any one of my novels, reading and re-reading and each time finding things to change.  It definitely improves the story each time, but sooner or later I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel, trundling along and never reaching the end.

For anyone who has been following along, curious about what happens next, for you I have an early bird coupon, good for the first week of release at Smashwords: just enter ZE64N in when purchasing to grab a discount price of $0.99.  [Expires 7 July.]

Next up will be catching my breath, then Voice of the Lost.

Not-Writing

I spent a lot of time not-writing this week.

My best writing time is on the train to and from work (50 minutes each way).  If I'm tired, writing doesn't happen (sometimes snoring almost happens, which is embarrassing on a train).  And, if it's rainy as it has been this week, I tend not to want to take my laptop with me on the 20 minute walk to the station.  So I've been reading and not-writing instead.

I'm almost always not-writing.  It's a valuable process, where I compose my books in thought instead of pixels, trying out ideas, settling what needs to be done.  It can be a trifle frustrating, because while not-writing I often come up with the perfect way to say something, and yet never can remember how it went when I get back in front of a keyboard.  [Sometimes I will jot in a notepad, if it's something I really don't want to forget.]

This week while not-writing, I:

- Truncated a cave-scene in Voice of the Lost.
- Turned over, yet again, the chapter which needs to be added where Medair meets people she hopes she'll never meet again.
- Amused myself with slight variations of a sex scene recently written.  [Or the pre-sex scene.  I'm one of those writers who always cuts away just as you get to the really juicy bit.  Except in the space naga smut book, because the technicalities of that sex scene was half the point.]
- Turned over things I really should do in Caszandra, to make sure Cass doesn't come across as a mere observer in all the big dramatic moments.
- Considered what I would do to Hunting (which is the first in a series of four books I wrote before Medair) and when I would get time to do it.  Refused to let myself go re-read it.
- Refused to let myself go re-read Wellspring.
- Thought of a conversation which should go in The Sleeping Life.

So, a productive week of not-writing!

I did do a little work on Voice of the Lost as well.  But just a little.  I'm in one of those modes where I re-read the first chapter over and over again obsessively changing one or two words each time.  Not productive at all.

Corrections

Today Daylight Savings ended, swapping Sydney back to 'real time' (which in effect means for a while it's light when I leave in the morning, but dark when I get home).  An extra hour to sleep in is definitely a useful sort of time travel.

I also made live a corrected version of Medair, which I had started re-reading because of the Aurealis listing, only to discover four separate typos, some weird characters, and one minor inconsistency.  Most embarrassing.  At least with ebooks and POD, I can correct with relative ease.

Still annoying, though.  Typos are the cockroaches of a writer's life...

Fools

"Lab Rat One" (Part 2 of "Touchstone") commences on 1 April, so after my week off to celebrate finishing "Stray", I intended to pick up and roll with the edits this morning in a nice example of good timing.

I wrote one sentence, then went back to reading a rather good murder mystery on my e-reader.  Rather good books are very distracting.

I am very caught up in "Touchstone", though, and even began re-reading bits of "Stray" _again_ over the past few days.  My head is firmly in the events at the end of "Lab Rat One", thinking through the relationship dynamic, and I find I'm glad I stuck with the diary format.  It will probably not work for everyone, but it makes the story very compelling for me to read.

But must resist too many rather good murder mysteries...

Time Sucks

I'm supposed to be finishing up the final edit of Stray.  And I HAVE been working steadily through it, but slowed down by a sudden rash of "this could be better" which means I'm editing almost every paragraph - and, well, Civilisation V.

I played the first Civilisation when it came out, enjoyed it mildly, but have never really gone back.  I'm not that into strategy games and while I find Civ fun, I can safely play it and know I'm not going to run through it more than a handful of times.  But a handful of times is quite a lot of hours.

MAJOR lack in Civ V though - in the original Civ when your citizens decided they loved you, they built you a bit of palace and you got to pick out what it looked like.  That was the best part!

Snip Snip SNIP

Editing can be a never-ending process.  No matter how many times I read and correct a piece, I will on a re-read spot an extraneous word, or think of a cleaner expression.  It makes re-reading any of my released books an occasionally teeth-grinding process.

"Stray" poses additional challenges, as I wrote the first draft in a casual mode quite different from my usual work.  I've already done two end-to-end edits, one focusing on consistency and the other to remove ten thousand examples of my writing tics.  This edit I'm focusing on pace - which usually means cutting entire sentences and paragraphs because I've been repetitive, or over-explained.  I keep putting myself in the reader's shoes and trying to spot when I would start skipping text or thinking "bored now".

Diary is an especially difficult format to maintain urgency or interest.  Inevitably most entries are "tell" not "show", and there is a lessened drama to any "they could die" situation if the reader knows that the person in danger is subsequently writing about the events in their diary.  The opening of Stray is even more challenging because Cass is alone, not bouncing off other personalities.

Obsessively revising and re-revising the first twenty pages of Stray means my publishing timeframe is beginning to slip, but I'm beginning to be satisfied with where it's at.

A Quarter Million To Go

The next thing on my to-do list is a final edit of "Touchstone".  It's a story I really love - practically a comfort read for me - but it is massively different to everything else I've written.  Character from this world.  Young adult.  Diary format.
The tone is very free-flowing, full of slang and Australian-isms, and I don't want to clean it up to the point I lose the voice which has emerged, but I do need to tune the lazier sentences, and strengthen the overarching theme.  Clocking in at more than 250,000 words, it's a daunting edit to embark upon.  Thankfully the decision to split it means I can work on it in two neat sections.

The story is such a significant departure from my other work it poses something of a marketing challenge.  Do I warn those who like my fantasy novels to look before they leap?  Will the diary format work against me?  In some respects this is the closest I will ever come to a "high concept" novel - tons of hot young men and women in tight black uniforms, the ghost of a love triangle and plenty of angsting from Cass.  But I can't see psychic space ninjas derailing the vampire/steampunk juggernauts.