FIRST! Because I almost forgot and This Is Important: Three Dances will be free to download from Amazon.com starting tomorrow and running through Sunday. If you enjoyed Soulwoven, drop on by and give it a read. It's short and interesting.
SECOND! The meat of this blog post:
Neil Clarke runs an award-winning online science fiction and fantasy magazine called Clarkesworld. The magazine itself is one of my favorites, and as I was thumbing through it last weekend (I get a print copy every month in return for backing them as a patron), I came across a note from him that had to do, in part, with leaving reviews.
You can read it here.
It felt highly relevant to me and to Soulwoven, and since he explains not only the usefulness of leaving a review for your favorite anything (books, yes, but also magazines, restaurants, blenders, dish soaps, and cat leashes), but his own hangups about leaving reviews and how he's going to make an effort to review things anyway, I wanted to share.
It also got me thinking, because I live in a world of publishing where everybody knows that customer reviews are massively important, so much so that we don't even talk about why, and I'm sometimes surprised when I talk to the overwhelming majority of the world that doesn't work in publishing and they don't share my assumptions.
So I'll put it like this:
In the world of Internet commerce, customer reviews are the currency of credibility.
You can thank me for the alliteration later. I took poetry classes in college for that (well, not really for that, but I do love alliteration).
When books come in paper and we go to stores to buy them, we as readers tend to rely on several things to establish their credibility (i.e. whether we think they'll be any good) before we even open them, above and beyond the obvious like whether we've read the author's books before:
1.) Placement in the store. If a store put a book out front, somebody at the store thought it was good enough to highlight.
2.) Who published it. When I pick up a book from a publishing imprint whose name and logo I recognize, I have faith that it will meet a certain editorial standard and contain content of a certain kind.
3.) Physical cues. How's the cover look? Is the paper nice? Does it have a good heft? Does it smell like a book is supposed to smell?
4.) Laudatory quotes from booksellers, review sources, etc.
Internet retailers have done their best to replicate some of those things, but by and large, customer reviews have taken the place of most of them. If 400 people have taken the time to review a book, and the average rating they gave it was 4 stars, we feel reasonably certain that, even if it doesn't end up being right for us, it's at least a decent book in general. If 40 people have done so, we think it's got a niche audience and hopefully it's all right. If four people have reviewed it, it's a bit risky. How do we know it's any good? Who were those four people? Also, who wants to read a book that they can only talk about with four other people? That's boring. I want a book I can talk about with 4,000 of my friends, like this one over here that has prominent placement in the online storefront.
And then the author of the four-review book, who's probably new, who may or may not have the backing of a publishing house (I've seen traditionally published books launch with only a handful of reviews as well), and who might have written something brilliant, never gets read, and everybody loses.
So if you like a book, leave a review for it online, even if that just means clicking the stars. Amazon is the best place to do so, but other retailer sites and Goodreads are great too. That way other people will read it too, and someday you'll have more than just those four other star-givers to talk to about it.
Besides, reviewing is fun. It makes you feel important, which is good, because you ARE important.
Cheers, and happy weekend,
Jeff
Showing posts with label Jeff the editor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff the editor. Show all posts
Friday, May 2, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
Stephen Deas on Dragons
You may have realized by this point that I spend a lot of time crawling over Fantasy Faction these days. It's a good website, if you're into fantasy.
And today I want to bring you, care of Fantasy Faction, some thoughts about dragons from Stephen Deas, who apparently has been sipping from my cup of tea despite the thousands of miles that separate us geographically.
In his article, Stephen takes the time to break down a few definitions of dragons and ends up with the following:
That sounds about right to me. He goes on to explain how when fantasists go too far in explaining where their dragons come from, when they humanize them too much, they take the power away from them. I couldn't agree more. Don't get me wrong, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, and I cut my teeth on the shapeshifting, human-loving dragons of Dragonlance, but to me a dragon...a real dragon, one worthy of the word, is one so alien and terrifying that it cannot be understood. The primary purpose of the dragon myth is to put a face on the horrible unknown. And the further your dragons stray from that, the more watered-down they become.
If you've read Soulwoven, you know that's the direction I took with the dragon in the book. But there are people out there who do this even better than I do. One of the authors I edit, John Tristan, has a book coming out that has the most primal, awful (in every sense of that word), alien dragons I've ever seen. If you can imagine what it might be like for a preindustrial civilization to encounter a star destroyer from Star Wars---well, that's more or less what I envisioned when I read his dragons. I'll follow up on this post once we've got a shareable release date on that book, but if you love dragons of the Old Testament sort, keep an eye out for it.
And today I want to bring you, care of Fantasy Faction, some thoughts about dragons from Stephen Deas, who apparently has been sipping from my cup of tea despite the thousands of miles that separate us geographically.
In his article, Stephen takes the time to break down a few definitions of dragons and ends up with the following:
dragon, n, Something very formidable or dangerous.
That sounds about right to me. He goes on to explain how when fantasists go too far in explaining where their dragons come from, when they humanize them too much, they take the power away from them. I couldn't agree more. Don't get me wrong, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, and I cut my teeth on the shapeshifting, human-loving dragons of Dragonlance, but to me a dragon...a real dragon, one worthy of the word, is one so alien and terrifying that it cannot be understood. The primary purpose of the dragon myth is to put a face on the horrible unknown. And the further your dragons stray from that, the more watered-down they become.
If you've read Soulwoven, you know that's the direction I took with the dragon in the book. But there are people out there who do this even better than I do. One of the authors I edit, John Tristan, has a book coming out that has the most primal, awful (in every sense of that word), alien dragons I've ever seen. If you can imagine what it might be like for a preindustrial civilization to encounter a star destroyer from Star Wars---well, that's more or less what I envisioned when I read his dragons. I'll follow up on this post once we've got a shareable release date on that book, but if you love dragons of the Old Testament sort, keep an eye out for it.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Michael Martinez on Self, Hybrid, and Traditional Publishing
Mike Martinez, for those who don't know, writes an incredible hybrid blend of science fiction and historical fantasy, in which tall ships battle for control of the solar system rather than the New World (full disclosure: I edited his novella The Gravity of the Affair, so I'm not exactly unbiased). So it's only fitting that he's a hybrid author, and he took the time recently to weigh in on a brouhaha in the publishing world forming around a survey of author earnings done by a prominent self-published author and his partner. The survey in question grabbed a bunch of data from Amazon and crunched it to try to compare average earnings of various types of authors.
There's been a lot, and I mean a lot of vitriol floating around concerning this survey.
Mike took a more peaceful approach, one shared by a lot of authors, including myself, and I wanted to share it with you.
There are an awful lot of reasons to publish a book, and the various approaches to doing so will suit you better or worse depending on what your reasons are. One book may have different reasons than another. Your reasons may change as your career progresses, and it's a good thing that authors can and are moving fluidly from one publishing model to the other and back as it suits them. Personally, I love working with authors who were self-published as an editor; they tend to be better educated about the industry than those who never went through that crucible.
I'm also immensely enjoying being my own publisher. It's teaching me a lot.
And for what it's worth, I haven't read much that's self-published that's as good as Mike's books are.
There's been a lot, and I mean a lot of vitriol floating around concerning this survey.
Mike took a more peaceful approach, one shared by a lot of authors, including myself, and I wanted to share it with you.
There are an awful lot of reasons to publish a book, and the various approaches to doing so will suit you better or worse depending on what your reasons are. One book may have different reasons than another. Your reasons may change as your career progresses, and it's a good thing that authors can and are moving fluidly from one publishing model to the other and back as it suits them. Personally, I love working with authors who were self-published as an editor; they tend to be better educated about the industry than those who never went through that crucible.
I'm also immensely enjoying being my own publisher. It's teaching me a lot.
And for what it's worth, I haven't read much that's self-published that's as good as Mike's books are.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Expanding on My Three Dances Speech: Traditional Publishers and Hybrid Authoring
Yesterday I posted a link to the first few minutes of the speech I gave at the launch party for Three Dances. In it, I talk about some of the ways in which traditional publishing and self-publishing aren't really that different.
It has occurred to me that this could be misconstrued as me saying that traditional publishing doesn't bring anything to the table. Being as I work in the industry, I want to be clear that I don't think that's the case. Three Dances was a great fit for self-publishing, because it was a project that was niche enough that it would hold little attraction to a traditional publisher no matter how good it was, and it was short and small enough that I could feasibly do all the work on my own. That's not going to be the case for all books or all authors (I have spent years of my life learning the editorial skills I put to work here).
And on top of the advance you might get through a traditional publisher, you get a pretty sweet basket of services thrown in as part of the deal. Top-notch editing, design, and production services for a novel-sized book can pretty quickly run into the thousands of dollars on the freelance market. Marketing and pr, even skimpy as it can be, adds to the cost of a book as well. I used to think thousands of dollars was too much to pay for that kind of work. Now that I make my living as a freelancer, I've realized that if you want skilled labor, you have to pay for it (indie authors may recognize this argument as one they've been making to publishers for years). As much as I owe my authors, I owe my family more.
I do think that indie writers, if they've written a good book, will make their money back over time. But not everybody has that kind of scratch to invest. I sure don't. More importantly, not everybody is a good judge of which projects to make that kind of investment on. I could have spent that money on Three Dances, but it would have taken years to make it back, even if I wildly exceeded my expectations for the sales of the book.
There are several reasons I'm pursuing a traditional deal for Nadya. One of the biggest is that the middle grade market is still very much dependent on bookstore, book club, and library placement, and those are very hard markets for an indie to break into. But the other big one is that I'm willing to sacrifice long-tail money on that book for the services I can get from a traditional publisher, and for the things I could learn from working with one.
I see more and more hybrid authors doing the same thing in my submissions pile at Carina, and I'm always happy to see them, both for their sake and for mine.
--
You can buy Three Dances as a print or e-book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
It has occurred to me that this could be misconstrued as me saying that traditional publishing doesn't bring anything to the table. Being as I work in the industry, I want to be clear that I don't think that's the case. Three Dances was a great fit for self-publishing, because it was a project that was niche enough that it would hold little attraction to a traditional publisher no matter how good it was, and it was short and small enough that I could feasibly do all the work on my own. That's not going to be the case for all books or all authors (I have spent years of my life learning the editorial skills I put to work here).
And on top of the advance you might get through a traditional publisher, you get a pretty sweet basket of services thrown in as part of the deal. Top-notch editing, design, and production services for a novel-sized book can pretty quickly run into the thousands of dollars on the freelance market. Marketing and pr, even skimpy as it can be, adds to the cost of a book as well. I used to think thousands of dollars was too much to pay for that kind of work. Now that I make my living as a freelancer, I've realized that if you want skilled labor, you have to pay for it (indie authors may recognize this argument as one they've been making to publishers for years). As much as I owe my authors, I owe my family more.
I do think that indie writers, if they've written a good book, will make their money back over time. But not everybody has that kind of scratch to invest. I sure don't. More importantly, not everybody is a good judge of which projects to make that kind of investment on. I could have spent that money on Three Dances, but it would have taken years to make it back, even if I wildly exceeded my expectations for the sales of the book.
There are several reasons I'm pursuing a traditional deal for Nadya. One of the biggest is that the middle grade market is still very much dependent on bookstore, book club, and library placement, and those are very hard markets for an indie to break into. But the other big one is that I'm willing to sacrifice long-tail money on that book for the services I can get from a traditional publisher, and for the things I could learn from working with one.
I see more and more hybrid authors doing the same thing in my submissions pile at Carina, and I'm always happy to see them, both for their sake and for mine.
--
You can buy Three Dances as a print or e-book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Three Dances Launch Party, Speechifying Part One: How Books Start Their Lives
Hello gentle readers!
The Three Dances launch party farfnoogled its way into history this weekend, to my very great enjoyment, to my stomach's very very great enjoyment, and to my waistline's subtle detriment.
I wish I could offer you a sliver of all the food and conversation, but that is somewhat beyond me.
Instead, I'm going to offer you a snippet of my speechifying. I'll be putting up three clips from it this week, one of which is a reading from the first story in the collection, "The Jazz Festival."
But today's clip touches on something different: how books start their lives, and how in some ways self-publishing and traditional publishing are very much the same.
I'll expound at greater length on some things that didn't fit into the speech tomorrow, but for today, here you go:
As a reminder, you can buy Three Dances in print or e-book on Amazon or B&N.
The Three Dances launch party farfnoogled its way into history this weekend, to my very great enjoyment, to my stomach's very very great enjoyment, and to my waistline's subtle detriment.
I wish I could offer you a sliver of all the food and conversation, but that is somewhat beyond me.
Instead, I'm going to offer you a snippet of my speechifying. I'll be putting up three clips from it this week, one of which is a reading from the first story in the collection, "The Jazz Festival."
But today's clip touches on something different: how books start their lives, and how in some ways self-publishing and traditional publishing are very much the same.
I'll expound at greater length on some things that didn't fit into the speech tomorrow, but for today, here you go:
As a reminder, you can buy Three Dances in print or e-book on Amazon or B&N.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
News for the Week of 4.2.13: Icy Roads, Encouraging Things, and SOULWOVEN Coming Out Soon!
Greetings Friends and Readers!
Apologies for the late newsletter. I spent the weekend
dodging semis on icy roads in the mountains and have only just recovered from
the shock (and the Easter meal that followed).
So, to the news:
Work is picking up on Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven.
I’m about a third of the way through it now, and while I’ve hit a few sticky
points, and I’m also really starting to get into my groove. It still has to go
through a few more rounds of reads and revisions before it will be ready for
mass consumption, but I hope to have it finished soon.
Nadya has been getting a decent response from the agents I’ve
submitted it to. So far it’s still all “no”s, but they’re the “loved this, didn’t
love this,” or “thought it was strong but just didn’t connect with it” kind of “no”s.
As an editor who writes letters like this, I know how close this means I am,
and I take a great deal of comfort in it. I plan to sneak in another round of
revision on it based on some agent feedback after I’ve finished this draft of
Exile and then send it out to a broader swath of agents this summer.
And speaking of summer, I’ve decided to self-publish
Soulwoven in the summer as well! I’m shooting for a June release date, which is
a bit ambitious, but hopefully will be manageable. What that means for you is
that you’ll be able to get a print copy, or a prettied-up digital copy, or a
bundle of both, within the next few months.
Finally, Three Dances has hit the home stretch! I’m waiting
on the final proof copy of the printed version, and as long as I don’t find any
problems in it, it’ll go live either this week or next.
The fourth story in the collection, Birdcage, is up on
Wattpad now. It’s about an ordinary human being who encounters something he can’t
explain, and a supernatural being caught in a cycle of death, rebirth, and
predation she doesn’t particularly enjoy.
It is also, despite what one early reader said to me,
decidedly NOT erotica.
Happy spring, friends! It snowed AND rained here today, so
surely the world is yawning and stretching and waking up for another round of
rabid growth.
Jeff
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Some Thoughts on Publishing and Rejection
Today as I was doing first page critiques on Wattpad, I ran across a message from a follower of mine asking how I deal with the constant threat and reality of rejection as a writer. My response to her got a bit longer than the standard e-mail, and I think it's got some points that other people will find interesting as well, so I'm going to share it here.
My response below. Thanks to @fairyfree on Wattpad for the question. :-)
For me, that's harder to deal with than rejection. Rejection can happen for so, so many more reasons than bad writing. It can be because a publisher already has too many books like the one you're submitting, or because the editor dislikes something about your writing that another editor might love, or simply because they were tired and grumpy and not in a mood to cut you any slack when they were reading your submission.
Publishing is an incredibly subjective business. Every piece of writing has an audience, and just because something isn't likely to be commercially successful (Soulwoven, for instance), doesn't mean it's not good. But publishers are businesses, and they can't afford to acquire things they don't think will be commercially successful, so not everything gets acquired.
So don't despair over rejection. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad writer or that you're doing anything wrong (though I certainly had bad novels of mine rightfully rejected early in my career). In the end, if you're writing books that you're proud of, you're winning, period. Readers are a remarkably varied and forgiving group of people, and if you love your work, someone else out there will too, even if it's not a publisher.
Happy Saturday, folks. Everyone is out of town today, so I'm working through the weekend. Wish me luck. :-)
Friday, February 22, 2013
News for the Week of 2.22.13: Soulwoven's Rebirth, More Crit Sessions, and Lots of General Excitement
Hello, Friends and Readers!
It’s been an exciting week for me. In my day job, I’m
deliriously happy about a couple of projects with amazing authors that are
coming my way, one of whom is already a star in his own right and one of whom I expect will be soon.
More importantly, things have been clipping along with my
books! My first-page critique session last Saturday was a smashing success, and
interest in Soulwoven has positively skyrocketed since I did it. I can’t tell
you how gratifying that is to me. Almost 2,500 people have read the book in its
entirety on Wattpad. That’s solid, midlist-level success, and it’s only the beginning!
Also, I’ve finally cracked the egg on Soulwoven: Exile, the
second book in the series. I’ve been experimenting with outlining the story,
which is something I didn’t try for the first book, and it’s really helping me
wrap my head around things. The beginning still needs work, which is why it isn’t
up yet, but the middle is in solid shape and I have a good feeling about the end.
I’ve reworked the first chapter into a shape I’m happy with, and I’ll aim to
put it up in the next few weeks.
And Nadya is almost ready for line editing! It’s seen
additional attention on Wattpad this week as well, so I’m going to put up the
second chapter. I’m extremely excited to finish up work on it and get it out
into the hands of agents. I think it’s going to sell, which is a feeling I
never really had about Soulwoven.
I’m still waiting for copy edits on Three Dances (I was
promised them a week ago) and have decided that if they don’t come in by
tomorrow, I’m just going to forego them and do my best to copy edit the book on
my own. It’s hard to copy edit your own work, but I’ve done it professionally,
and I’ve reached the point where I just want to get this monkey in the air.
So lots of exciting things! I’ll be doing first-page
critiques tomorrow (Saturday 2/23) at 1 p.m. EST. As usual, I’ll reserve the
first two spots for followers, so if you’re interested, send me a private
message linking me to the story you’d like critiqued.
Happy winter, dear friends. There’s snow on the ground, and
it makes me feel that all is right with the world.
-Jeff
Friday, July 20, 2012
Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Chapter 3
Quick update on the cover situation: Cover variant #3 is leading variant #1 by a few votes, so it's most likely to be the one I put up on Sunday when the next chapter of Soulwoven goes up on Wattpad.
But for now, here's what I was trying to do with Chapter 3 (spoilers below! Go read it first!).
Chapter 3 starts off immediately after the events of Chapter 2, but it takes place in Ryse's head instead of Cole's. As it starts off, Ryse is recovering from and trying to remember what exactly happened to her before the brothers Jin arrived. Before she's really got her feet back under her, she starts trying to heal people and save lives, which leads to her seeing a vision of the dragon that's now in danger of being released. Eventually, she leaves the brothers and returns to the Temple, where she gets raked over the coals for seeing the broken heart dragons, lies to protect Litnig and Cole, and decides to run for her life.
The biggest thing I'm doing in Chapter 3 is expanding the narrative. There are other things going on as well (introducing Ryse, introducing soulweaving, continued worldbuilding), but Chapter 3 is the point where the story really starts to balloon in scope. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, we're following two brothers who are really only concerned with their own lives---they have no reason to be concerned about anything else. In Chapter 3 we get a third p.o.v. character, and we get a powerful one. Ryse is a magic user. She has access to the corridors of power in Eldan, and through that access she and we learn that some weird and dangerous things are happening in the world. Most importantly, Ryse is the type of person to do something about it. When she sees the heart dragons broken, she can't just keep quiet and hope that everything will be alright.
I want to talk briefly about how I introduce Ryse, because in my last revision I learned something about how to do it that might help others as well. The sympathy for Ryse (I hope) comes from two angles: her selflessness in helping people in the graveyard and her identity as an orphan who came from nothing. In the last draft of Chapter 3, neither of those things was apparent right away. Ryse spent the whole first page thinking about herself and what had happened to her in the graveyard, and we didn't learn about her past in the slums until close to the end of the chapter.
So I moved the revelation that she's an orphan up and combined it with her selflessness. It feels a little unsubtle to me, but I think it works---the reader has an immediate reason to care about Ryse. And the reader always needs a reason to care about a character. Without it, his or her interest will wane dramatically.
It's also worth talking about the introduction of soulweaving in the chapter, which was a little difficult to do as well. In my opinion, the easiest way to introduce magic is from the point of view of a character who's just learning it, because then he or she is experiencing everything for the first time. Because the sensations are new, it makes sense for him or her to describe them.
Unfortunately for me, nobody learns soulweaving for the first time in the first book of Soulwoven. So I was left to describe magic through Ryse's eyes. I was able to do that effectively (I hope) because she's in a calm, slow, introspective moment. She's just had a traumatic experience, and she feels a little skittish and nervous, so she moves slowly with her soulweaving and takes her time making sure everything feels okay with it. Then, after something goes wrong (she sees the dragon), she has extra reason to be wary of the magic, and because she distrusts it and there's tension coming from that (both she and the reader are wondering whether she's going to see the dragon again when she soulweaves), it again makes sense for her to be thinking about and describing the magic.
When I'm reading submissions as an editor, I often find that writers go bananas describing their magic as soon as it comes into play, but that doesn't always make sense. Someone in the middle of a fight for his or her life, for instance, is unlikely to have time and headspace to start spouting out elegant descriptions about how they feel. More on action scenes when we finally get to a proper one (Chapter 13, I believe), but for now, that's worth noting.
Finally, themes and tension. I mentioned in Chapter 1 that one thing that drives the tension in the first scene is that Litnig is worried and his father, who's the adult and should be the protector, isn't. The same dynamic comes into play again and again throughout the book, including in Chapter 3. Ryse is worried that the heart dragons are broken. The Twelve, who are supposed to be the responsible ones and the protectors, do not seem to be taking it seriously, and react threateningly when Ryse lets slip that she knows what happened. So that's tension from the same type of dramatic situation, which, I suppose, is one way of describing a theme.
The tension itself comes from several sources, each of which blends seamlessly into the next. First, it's "What happened, and is Ryse okay?" which is a holdover from the last chapter. Then, as that question is answered, it's "What's this dragon? What do these visions mean, and why are the characters so scared of them?" That question is answered as well, and then it's "What is Ryse going to do about this, and what is this Twelfthman going to do with her?" There's a brief interlude of "Will Ryse give up Litnig and Cole?" and the chapter ends with "How is Ryse going to escape? What will she do? Where will she go?"
There are plenty of things I'm not completely certain about in this chapter. The worldbuilding, in particular, I'm just sort of crossing my fingers on. I introduce a lot of new concepts and organizations (the Twelve, Twelfthmen, the heart dragons, the legend of Sherduan) and two antagonists (Aegelden Elpioni and Sherduan itself). Because of that, I run the risk of the reader getting lost, and I find as a writer that it's very hard to figure out where exactly to draw the line on how much information is too much. As a rule of thumb, I try not to do more than one new concept per page, but that's kind of an arbitrary choice and I still worry about how well it works.
But for now, here's what I was trying to do with Chapter 3 (spoilers below! Go read it first!).
Chapter 3 starts off immediately after the events of Chapter 2, but it takes place in Ryse's head instead of Cole's. As it starts off, Ryse is recovering from and trying to remember what exactly happened to her before the brothers Jin arrived. Before she's really got her feet back under her, she starts trying to heal people and save lives, which leads to her seeing a vision of the dragon that's now in danger of being released. Eventually, she leaves the brothers and returns to the Temple, where she gets raked over the coals for seeing the broken heart dragons, lies to protect Litnig and Cole, and decides to run for her life.
The biggest thing I'm doing in Chapter 3 is expanding the narrative. There are other things going on as well (introducing Ryse, introducing soulweaving, continued worldbuilding), but Chapter 3 is the point where the story really starts to balloon in scope. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, we're following two brothers who are really only concerned with their own lives---they have no reason to be concerned about anything else. In Chapter 3 we get a third p.o.v. character, and we get a powerful one. Ryse is a magic user. She has access to the corridors of power in Eldan, and through that access she and we learn that some weird and dangerous things are happening in the world. Most importantly, Ryse is the type of person to do something about it. When she sees the heart dragons broken, she can't just keep quiet and hope that everything will be alright.
I want to talk briefly about how I introduce Ryse, because in my last revision I learned something about how to do it that might help others as well. The sympathy for Ryse (I hope) comes from two angles: her selflessness in helping people in the graveyard and her identity as an orphan who came from nothing. In the last draft of Chapter 3, neither of those things was apparent right away. Ryse spent the whole first page thinking about herself and what had happened to her in the graveyard, and we didn't learn about her past in the slums until close to the end of the chapter.
So I moved the revelation that she's an orphan up and combined it with her selflessness. It feels a little unsubtle to me, but I think it works---the reader has an immediate reason to care about Ryse. And the reader always needs a reason to care about a character. Without it, his or her interest will wane dramatically.
It's also worth talking about the introduction of soulweaving in the chapter, which was a little difficult to do as well. In my opinion, the easiest way to introduce magic is from the point of view of a character who's just learning it, because then he or she is experiencing everything for the first time. Because the sensations are new, it makes sense for him or her to describe them.
Unfortunately for me, nobody learns soulweaving for the first time in the first book of Soulwoven. So I was left to describe magic through Ryse's eyes. I was able to do that effectively (I hope) because she's in a calm, slow, introspective moment. She's just had a traumatic experience, and she feels a little skittish and nervous, so she moves slowly with her soulweaving and takes her time making sure everything feels okay with it. Then, after something goes wrong (she sees the dragon), she has extra reason to be wary of the magic, and because she distrusts it and there's tension coming from that (both she and the reader are wondering whether she's going to see the dragon again when she soulweaves), it again makes sense for her to be thinking about and describing the magic.
When I'm reading submissions as an editor, I often find that writers go bananas describing their magic as soon as it comes into play, but that doesn't always make sense. Someone in the middle of a fight for his or her life, for instance, is unlikely to have time and headspace to start spouting out elegant descriptions about how they feel. More on action scenes when we finally get to a proper one (Chapter 13, I believe), but for now, that's worth noting.
Finally, themes and tension. I mentioned in Chapter 1 that one thing that drives the tension in the first scene is that Litnig is worried and his father, who's the adult and should be the protector, isn't. The same dynamic comes into play again and again throughout the book, including in Chapter 3. Ryse is worried that the heart dragons are broken. The Twelve, who are supposed to be the responsible ones and the protectors, do not seem to be taking it seriously, and react threateningly when Ryse lets slip that she knows what happened. So that's tension from the same type of dramatic situation, which, I suppose, is one way of describing a theme.
The tension itself comes from several sources, each of which blends seamlessly into the next. First, it's "What happened, and is Ryse okay?" which is a holdover from the last chapter. Then, as that question is answered, it's "What's this dragon? What do these visions mean, and why are the characters so scared of them?" That question is answered as well, and then it's "What is Ryse going to do about this, and what is this Twelfthman going to do with her?" There's a brief interlude of "Will Ryse give up Litnig and Cole?" and the chapter ends with "How is Ryse going to escape? What will she do? Where will she go?"
There are plenty of things I'm not completely certain about in this chapter. The worldbuilding, in particular, I'm just sort of crossing my fingers on. I introduce a lot of new concepts and organizations (the Twelve, Twelfthmen, the heart dragons, the legend of Sherduan) and two antagonists (Aegelden Elpioni and Sherduan itself). Because of that, I run the risk of the reader getting lost, and I find as a writer that it's very hard to figure out where exactly to draw the line on how much information is too much. As a rule of thumb, I try not to do more than one new concept per page, but that's kind of an arbitrary choice and I still worry about how well it works.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Bad Signs in Query Letters
The other week I was rolling through some submissions and noticed the following bad signs in query letters (details fudged to protect the guilty). None of them is enough to make me reject a submission alone, but they're indicative of likely problems in the writing to follow. If you find any of these items in your query, you may want to get a second opinion on your novel from a critical reader before submitting.
1.) "This book can be released as (insert number) books or as one." I want to know that you've thought hard about the structure of your novel and picked the best one for it. This does not convince me of that.
2.) Random punctuation. Learning where colons, commas, semicolons, and other marks go is part of your job.
3.) Boldface. If you don't trust me to find the important elements in your query on my own, how will you trust your reader to do it in your novel?
4.) Repetition ("Dripping with power and wealth, Malcolm has a lot of money and isn't afraid to use it."). Doesn't bode well for same in your novel.
5.) Excessive passive voice. I don't hate passive voice as much as most how-to-write books do, but it has a time and a place, and every sentence in the first paragraph of your query is not it.
6.) "My book is great because it's full of great characters who do great things and have great relationships." If you tell me this rather than show it to me, it bodes poorly for the show vs. tell ratio in your novel.
1.) "This book can be released as (insert number) books or as one." I want to know that you've thought hard about the structure of your novel and picked the best one for it. This does not convince me of that.
2.) Random punctuation. Learning where colons, commas, semicolons, and other marks go is part of your job.
3.) Boldface. If you don't trust me to find the important elements in your query on my own, how will you trust your reader to do it in your novel?
4.) Repetition ("Dripping with power and wealth, Malcolm has a lot of money and isn't afraid to use it."). Doesn't bode well for same in your novel.
5.) Excessive passive voice. I don't hate passive voice as much as most how-to-write books do, but it has a time and a place, and every sentence in the first paragraph of your query is not it.
6.) "My book is great because it's full of great characters who do great things and have great relationships." If you tell me this rather than show it to me, it bodes poorly for the show vs. tell ratio in your novel.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Writing Wednesday: Confidence
On a Thursday! Those of you who have known me for a while will understand that I live in a sort of bubble that moves back and forth irregularly through the timestream. Sometimes Wednesdays happen on Thursdays. Sometimes Thursdays happen on Fridays. Very occasionally, Tuesdays happen on Mondays, but I do my best to avoid that whenever possible.
Anyway. Writing Wednesday! And confidence!
As I sit on the cozy side of the submissions desk again, one of the things that grabs my eye more often than not is confidence. Meaning, more than anything else, a willingness to be intentionally different. The Internet, the shelves of your local bookstore, and the mouths of your fellow writers are all full of advice on how to write an opening. In medias res! Start with action! Do this! Pull that! Twist here! Add a drop of lemon juice, set to 450, and cook for 25 minutes!
When you see the same elements in an opening over and over again, they get stale. I imagine that most writers-as-readers would agree. The kind of confidence I'm talking about it is a combination of the daring and the skill to say, "There's a lot of good advice out there suggesting I should jump left here. I'm going to try a misty flip instead." When I write, I try to think of it as approaching a scene from an unusual camera angle.
That's not to say that you should ignore the advice out there. It's like grammar. Learn it, then decide when and where to deviate from it for a particular purpose. But do, please, deviate from it. Imagination and beauty live in the spaces outside the normal, and experimentation is what will make you great.
Not every author who attempts a misty flip lands it. Most of them don't. Even writers who can string two or three together often don't make it to the end of a book without falling on their head a few times. But that's okay. The only way to learn how is to try, over and over again, until you get it right.
And as an editor: I notice. Even if I reject a book because the author's attempt at a double-cork 1080 takes him or her flying wildly off a cliff from which there can be no recovery, I respect the effort. It's the bold and the brash who will write the next great story.
Anyway. Writing Wednesday! And confidence!
As I sit on the cozy side of the submissions desk again, one of the things that grabs my eye more often than not is confidence. Meaning, more than anything else, a willingness to be intentionally different. The Internet, the shelves of your local bookstore, and the mouths of your fellow writers are all full of advice on how to write an opening. In medias res! Start with action! Do this! Pull that! Twist here! Add a drop of lemon juice, set to 450, and cook for 25 minutes!
When you see the same elements in an opening over and over again, they get stale. I imagine that most writers-as-readers would agree. The kind of confidence I'm talking about it is a combination of the daring and the skill to say, "There's a lot of good advice out there suggesting I should jump left here. I'm going to try a misty flip instead." When I write, I try to think of it as approaching a scene from an unusual camera angle.
That's not to say that you should ignore the advice out there. It's like grammar. Learn it, then decide when and where to deviate from it for a particular purpose. But do, please, deviate from it. Imagination and beauty live in the spaces outside the normal, and experimentation is what will make you great.
Not every author who attempts a misty flip lands it. Most of them don't. Even writers who can string two or three together often don't make it to the end of a book without falling on their head a few times. But that's okay. The only way to learn how is to try, over and over again, until you get it right.
And as an editor: I notice. Even if I reject a book because the author's attempt at a double-cork 1080 takes him or her flying wildly off a cliff from which there can be no recovery, I respect the effort. It's the bold and the brash who will write the next great story.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Authors are Amazing
I finished going through my first set of submissions yesterday, and as I pushed away from the other side of the desk for the first time in a while, I was left with one, overwhelming thought:
Authors are amazing.
The variety and scope of the stories people come up with, write, and submit is absolutely flabbergasting. Sure, there are plenty of problems with delivery. In the end, I'm reading past the third chapter for only two out of ten submissions. For many of them, I knew by the end of the first paragraph that they weren't going to work and read on for a few pages mostly out of a sense of hopefulness.
But man, the ideas. One of the coolest things about working in publishing is seeing the crazy, unwashed flow of ideas that humankind generates in aggregate. It's a beautiful and inspiring experience. As a species, we have a real gift for storytelling.
Back to work now, but I wanted to take a moment to share.
Authors are amazing.
The variety and scope of the stories people come up with, write, and submit is absolutely flabbergasting. Sure, there are plenty of problems with delivery. In the end, I'm reading past the third chapter for only two out of ten submissions. For many of them, I knew by the end of the first paragraph that they weren't going to work and read on for a few pages mostly out of a sense of hopefulness.
But man, the ideas. One of the coolest things about working in publishing is seeing the crazy, unwashed flow of ideas that humankind generates in aggregate. It's a beautiful and inspiring experience. As a species, we have a real gift for storytelling.
Back to work now, but I wanted to take a moment to share.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
The Big Thing
So if you've been following my blog over the last few months, you may have noticed a few hints about exciting things on the horizon in my professional life. The most exciting of them has happened. As of today, I am officially a freelance editor for Carina Press, a digital-first imprint of Harlequin that publishes just about every genre of commercial fiction under the sun.
What's most exciting about this is that Carina doesn't use its freelancers in the standard "We acquire a book, you edit it," manner. I get to read my own slush, acquire my own titles, and work with my own authors. It's a lot like being an editor at a traditional house, except that I will stay in Colorado, work from home, and not have to bother with meetings, contracts, or P&L statements.
For you my loyal blog followers, it means the following: there will start to be posts from Jeff the editor creeping into the blog. They will be on subjects I consider interesting and useful to people who love to read or write fiction, like things I see too often in submissions and things I don't see often enough. In short, the scope of this blog is going to widen in good ways, and hopefully its audience will too.
There will still be plenty of posting about my own writing, as well, but I wanted to cue you into the good news and the upcoming changes. I have my first set of submissions already, and I am very much looking forward to digging into it.
Here's to the future, friends and readers. Let's hope it's a beautiful one.
What's most exciting about this is that Carina doesn't use its freelancers in the standard "We acquire a book, you edit it," manner. I get to read my own slush, acquire my own titles, and work with my own authors. It's a lot like being an editor at a traditional house, except that I will stay in Colorado, work from home, and not have to bother with meetings, contracts, or P&L statements.
For you my loyal blog followers, it means the following: there will start to be posts from Jeff the editor creeping into the blog. They will be on subjects I consider interesting and useful to people who love to read or write fiction, like things I see too often in submissions and things I don't see often enough. In short, the scope of this blog is going to widen in good ways, and hopefully its audience will too.
There will still be plenty of posting about my own writing, as well, but I wanted to cue you into the good news and the upcoming changes. I have my first set of submissions already, and I am very much looking forward to digging into it.
Here's to the future, friends and readers. Let's hope it's a beautiful one.
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