Writing Ain’t Easy

Writing isn’t easy. Well, okay, writing is, but writing to a standard worth publishing is something else again.

I’m working on a book where I love the story, where I know the end game. But I’m struggling with it. I’ve had this book on the go for years, but I’m just not getting it right.

It started out as straight contemporary crime. But I was told blankly that it would never get accepted for publication as it talks about the porn industry. Apparently that won’t sell in America, which just goes to show how that is a land of contradiction.

After that I realised that I needed to do something, but wasn’t sure what. Then I got it. Madoc wasn’t a strong enough character. There was something missing. That was when I decided he had the gift, the sight, could hear the dead. Not a new idea, but not one that’s in a mainly contemporary setting.

So I rewrote the book. Even got a publishing offer for it. But I turned it out. The story wasn’t ready, it wasn’t right.

That leaves me with a story that I know is worthy at its core, but it’s just not there.

I decided Madoc needed more. He needed to be more. So I’ve gone full blown Pagan with him now and rewritten again. It still isn’t selling, but then it still isn’t right.

I was also told by an excellent writer, one who I respect a great deal, that I should give up writing contemporary crime. That was depressing. Though for full disclosure, what this writer meant was that I should concentrate on my steampunk work, which is still crime, but under a different guise. So with a sigh, and a dip into depression. I decided it was time to concentrate on my steampunk work, that Madoc’s time was done.

Wrong again!

What I realised is that I need to stop holding back. That was the problem. Rather than keeping the supernatural elements of Madoc’s ability quiet, I’m going to bring them to the fore. The solution to the crime will still have to be completely ‘real world’, but the getting there will be guided by unusual means. Hopefully, I can rewrite and make that work now.

So that it. A whole new rewrite. When I have the time.

On the Up

Just to let you now, after my little grumble yesterday, my mood is on the up today.  Part of the reason for this is without a doubt, just the erratic alteration of hormones. That said. Other things had a definite uplifting affect. 

This first may seem like a odd thing to feel good about, but it brightened my day.  I work in the conservatory and it’s usually very cold, but I went in to start work around 08:30.  What was lovely, what pleased me was that I didn’t actually have to put the heater on. Small thing, but not having to spend on heating is a good thing to my mind.

Once I settled into work, I saw that at far-too-early-o’clock I had received a message asking if I was free for an editing commission later in the year – I am, and getting work always pleases me.  If you’re looking for a structural edit this year, contact me for a quote (see gailbwilliams.co.uk).

Later this morning, I saw a friend had posted a very nice note about my writing, my books both in crime and steampunk.  Added to that, other people, most of whom I don’t know, piled in with other compliments on my writing. Apparently, I’m still a little over sensitive today, as those touching thoughts brought tears to my eyes.

Then, I made a phone call to a local gardener.  I wasn’t expecting much as we’ve recently had trouble getting tradesmen to the house. However, not only did he turn up when he said he would, he gave us a good price and he started the job straight away.  Not only that – he finished it!

I also managed to get a load of tidying up done, which is always good for my mental health.

So this just goes to show that no matter how dark one day might feel, there’ll be light in tomorrow.

Hangover

Woke up with a hangover this morning, had a bad evening yesterday and a bottle of wine.  Normally one bottle I’d be okay with, but this one must have ganged up with the one I drank last week that didn’t give me a hangover at all, and they hoodwinked me.

Unfortunately, a discussion yesterday about returning to work turned me inside out, mentally and emotionally.  It’s something that I have to get past because I need to return to work at some point, finances and all that.  I just have to learn to deal with the stress and avoid the depression it brings on.

The hangover was dealt with by multivitamins, re-hydration, a couple of paracetamol, and a 3.5 km walk.  Actually really enjoyed the walk, same walk as the other day, but my legs feel less stretched than the first one, that’s an improvement.

On the positive side, since then I have worked out the plotlines of two novels.  The last of my steampunk series of five and a standalone crime one. Guess I need to start writing them.  Just not right now.

Novel

Finished novel (prints from last page forward)

Exactly two weeks ago I got an email from my American publisher asking for books 2 to 4 of my steampunk series. Book 2 was ready, book 3 needed revision and I’d only written 62k of book 4, and I hadn’t written a word of it since January.

Books 1 and 2 were both in the region of 96k, book 3 stretched to 106k. So there was lots to do. 

I love writing, I find writing good for my mental health, so I’ve been writing book 4 with renewed vigour. Today, I’ve finished it, which is to say that I’ve finished the first draft, any writer will tell you that that still means that there’s loads of work to do. The first 2 days were taken up with checking book 3 before sending it, that means that in 12 days I have written 45k words to finish book 4.

Next step is printing out to start the editing process. The book is 500 pages. Which I got – eventually.  My printer did not want to play ball.

I colour code my writing as a reminder of whose POV I’m working from.  After 176 pages, the colour cartridge ran out. I don’t have a spare and nipping to Tesco for non-essentials is a bit off right now.  So, I turned the whole script to black text and printed the rest. Until the black cartridge ran out.  Thankfully I did have a spare black. Then the paper started getting jammed.

Urgh!

I’m glad it’s happening now, because if that had happened two weeks ago, I would have cried or possibly thrown the printer (sometimes my depression leads to rages as well as raging self-loathing).

Still, I have my latest novel, tomorrow I’ll start polishing it. Wish me luck.

Another Chapter

Struggling today. Mostly okay, but my mood is low. Motivation is hard to find. Have done chores again today (changing beds and washing the linen) just to make sure that I do more than sit on the sofa all day.

Am totally annoying myself by playing on my phone too much.  Which should mean that I’ll get up and do something soon, just to stop that. Only it’s not working, hating this.  Hating myself, and I know I have to get out of this because it’s part of that damning downward spiral, but I’m not sure what to do with myself. I would happily go for a walk, but of course, that’s not happening with all the isolation measures we all need to keep to.

What I have done today, a first for a good couple of weeks, is that I actually managed to write a whole chapter of my book, that’s around 2,500 words. This was part of book four of a set of five from my steampunk. I won’t advertise it here, for the simple reason that none of the books are available at the moment. The whole series been picked up by an American publisher and will be produced again, hopefully this year, but with the Corvid-19 situation, that may be put off.

This is something else that bugs me about me. I have this voice in my head that tells me I’m crap at everything, but right this second I have publishing contracts for six books. The series of five and a standalone crime novel. That is not crap. That shows that I can write and write well. These are the things I need remind myself of – I have worth.

Right well, that’s it for me tonight. More tomorrow.

Fiction Flashes

Another month gone by in a flash!

I’ve been quite quiet on social media and blogging through June because I have been absolutely up to my eyeballs with stuff – more over stuff I wasn’t expecting to have to do.

If you’ve read previous blogs, you will have seen that I said I had a contract for my steam punk novel – well I had a verbal contract but we all know that they aren’t worth the paper they’re not printed on, right?  Well, finally I got the real contract through.  While there was nothing actually wrong with the contract – the publisher had been fair and clear in all the clauses, but there was a tie in factor I was a long way short of being comfortable with, and a get out clause that was unnecessarily punitive.  When I saw everything set out in black and white I saw that actually it wasn’t the contract for me.

So after a sleepless night, because I didn’t want to let the publisher down (she’s a lovely lady and I’d be happy to contribute more short stories to their anthologies), I knew I had to do something I never thought I would – I refused a publishing contract. This was even weirder and riskier than when I broke with my agent.  I hated doing it – really did – but my gut was telling me that it was the right way to go and sometimes you just have to listen to the gut.

The result of which is that I am now going to self-publish Shades of Aether.  <<Bites nails to the quick with nerves>>  Luckily all the hard work was already done, structural and line edits, only the proofreading to go.

So June has been a whirlwind of finding a proofreader – thankfully Jefferson Franklin Editing made room for me – by bumping another job I had booked with them.  Then there’s the cover to think about – luckily another friend of my is a publisher (very different genre so she wouldn’t publish a steampunk book) and she gave me recommendation of a cover design company she uses.  Got in touch with them – explained what had happened and why I needed a quick turn around – and they said – we’re on holiday for two weeks so not sure, what’s your design brief?  Luckily I had one, we exchanged a few emails and they’ve stepped up to the plate with an agreement to get me draft design by end of July which should just about give me time to get it all set up for a decent print run in time to take copies to The Asylum – the Lincoln steampunk convention – not medical institution!

So – phew!

Then there’s my debut crime novel to think about – more on that later

Editing is Hard

“Editing is hard.”

One of my editing clients said this to me the other day – yes even after I’m done tearing apart their manuscripts clients do still speak to me.

My internal voice said “No sh** Sherlock,” but externally I smiled and nodded and agreed.  But it made me realised that this is news to some people.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people think that writing is easy, that you just scribble a few lines and that’s it, you can self-publish and everything will be great, best seller, right.  Wrong.

You can write a novel in 30 days (see NaNoWriMo), I’ve done it.  Normally I can write a novel in two months – well that is 60 days of work, not always every day for sixty days on a trot because I have a life and two jobs.  But if I had sixty days on full-time writing, I could do it in 60 days, hell full time I would write it in 30 days.  But it wouldn’t by any means be publication ready.

That’s where editing comes in.

Writing is the quick part, editing takes forever, and sometimes it feels like it’ll never end.

Let me give you the example of my last completed novel, Shades of Aether.  This is my first steampunk novel, and I wrote it in about 60 (non-consecutive) evenings.  Then I reread it – the first self-edit.  With that, I picked up any obvious inconsistencies, made any changes I thought necessary, in this case, I upped the level of steampunk in the text. Then I booked it in for an edit.  My editor couldn’t do it immediately, so I have time for another read through to find a few more typos, tweaks, and corrections.  Then it went off to my editor.

Let me underline that – it went off to an editor. At no point did I think that could ever get a book complete for publication on my own.

So it went off to edit, that’s another four weeks gone – though I think in this case it was five weeks.  Then it came back with loads of questions that I hadn’t even thought about, so I had to do some major edits after that to ensure that I answered all those questions for the reader.  Having the facts in my head are no use if I can’t get them onto the page.

So that was another couple of months of rethinking and rewriting, editing and tweaking. And it wasn’t easy.  Some of the questions and queries that had been raised really stretched me, forced me to re-imagine my ending completely.

Then – guess what – more editing.  Yes, I sent it off for another professional edit, because to a certain extent I had a new book.  That one is due back to me any day now, but even then, I’ll still have to edit it, then reread it.  So there’s another couple of months gone by.

Once that is done, then there is the last stage – proofreading.  More time, more money, because proofreading, like editing, cannot really be done by the writer.

Writing the full novel is only the beginning.  Once it’s done all the hard work really starts, that is editing.  So don’t underestimate how much time and effort editing takes, but it’s well worth it.  Editing is the only way that you will ever get a publication ready book.

Steampunk Saved His Life

Following on from my last blog about how writing Steampunk saved my writing life, I wanted to share what happened next.  Steampunk also inspired me to write in a new direction.

As mentioned before I mostly write contemporary crime, a bit of horror and Cthulhu too, but mostly contemporary crime. Well, a while back, I had an amateur detective who worked with a local copper and I thought it was a good book, series material in fact.  Then I sent the manuscript to my editor, Tony Fyler of Jefferson Franklin Editing, and it came back trashed.  Well, not trashed exactly, Tony isn’t the type of editor to do that, but basically, the message was – “This is rubbish, you can do better.”

And looking back now, it was a fair message, but at the time I was devastated.  And that book was consigned to the waste bin.  The main character, the police officer in that book was this guy called Maker, I’ve mentioned him a few times, mostly in Schrödinger’s Edit, a brief overview of which is that Maker was trashed and I rewrote him and was scared to see the edit.

Turns out that while Maker was never a punk, what he really needed was some steam.  What I did was take him out of the 21^st century and put him in the 19^th. For him, it was a change of clothes, not a transformation.  But it transformed the way I wrote about him, and it gave me much more license to show who he really is, and why he is that way.  It’s still basically a crime story, but one in a very different vein to anything else I have done.

Once I was done, I (in total trepidation) sent Maker back for the edit in Schrödinger’s Edit, and got nervous about what it might say.  Eventually, of course, I opened the edit up and read it.  Tony loved the new version, to quote him:  “Maker SO belongs in this time period, all tight bows[1] and tighter corsets. He’s like Darcy’s grandson.”

Yes! An actual comparison to my absolute all time favourite character!  Sooo happy!

The new book has been revised, I did the thinking bigger I was advised to do, and it has also gone through a name change, it’s now “Shades of Aether”. And it’s back with Tony as I write this, to see what he makes of it now.  Hopefully not a dog’s dinner!

The point is, in the last blog I said thank you to Steampunk for saving my writing life.  This blog is saying thank you to Steampunk for showing me where Maker belonged – for saving his life – Literally.

 

 

[1]  Bow the action, not the bow you tie in a ribbon.

Dreaming Cost nothing. Giving up All Dreams Costs Everything.

 

I’ve been a writer all my life.  I’ve tried all sorts and come to settle on crime (mostly).  But I also came to settle on the idea that I just couldn’t get published, I was ready to give up my dream.  Then one day I heard about this call for short stories for an upcoming anthology, the theme being “The Strange Island of…”

I was instantly inspired, dreamed a new story, so I wrote a piece.  It took some changes to my thinking of how to write because it was a very different genre to the one I was used to.  The piece, The Steel Inside, still had mystery and suspense, like my crime writing, but there wasn’t a crime, well not in the illegal sense.  The whole island isolation helped.  The fact that I had read a few steampunk books helped too.  But mostly what helped was having a good story idea and then twisting it.

So I finished the story – all 10,000 words – and sent it off.

Then promptly forgot about it.

I try to do that.  Remembering that I’ve sent something off for consideration always leads to painful worrying.  Will it be okay?  Will they like it?  Will I tie myself up in knots wondering?  The only question I ever answer yes to is that last one.  I guarantee I tie myself in knots waiting to hear.

Then I heard.  I really thought that it was going to be another thanks but no thanks, but – stunningly – they loved it.  I was accepted!

My first ever piece of steampunk and it won through.  Amazing.

The Steel Inside, is now the last entry in Steel & Bone from Xchyler Publications.

The real point of all this isn’t blowing my own trumpet, though that’s quite nice too. The point is the effect that it had on me.  I was just about ready to give up on the idea of ever being published, and finally a proper bona fide publishing house was going to print one of my stories.  It renewed my belief that I really can write.

Renewed belief allowed me to carry on, and I have since managed to secure an agent in Ian Drury of Sheil Land Associates. I have also published a collection of short crime stories, Last Cut Casebook.  The Steel Inside also inspired me to write a whole new steampunk series, but I’ll tell you more of that later in the month.

Without steampunk I wouldn’t still be writing, so thank you Steampunk, you saved my writing life.

Rules and When to Break Them

Rules, rules, rules.

At a conference, I once heard Joanne Harris say that the reason she wrote Chocolat was to break every rule she had been given by an author who had critiqued (and torn apart) another of her novels.  I love that story.

We all know that there are always rules to every aspect of life and writing is no exception.  But here’s the thing about rules – there are exceptions, so I thought I’d highlight a few of those exceptions.

Rule:  Never use ‘Emolument’ when you mean ‘tip’.

(Stephen King)

What this rule is actually saying is keep it simple.  I have an editor who screeches about some of the vocabulary I use.  He hates words like ascend, he writes comments on why it should be ‘went up’, similarly with descend, he doesn’t even like entered or exited.  Now, maybe I wouldn’t use emolument (because I had to go look up what it meant anyway) but as for ascend and descend, entered or exited, they have there a place in the English language so they have a place on the appropriate prose.

When to break the Rule:  When it’s appropriate to what you are writing.

I write crime, mostly contemporary, but I have recently written a steampunk crime novel set in the 1870s.  These are very different styles.  No one in the twenty-teens would descend – that lot go down stairs.  My Victorians though – they descend from the upper floors.  Then there’s conversation.  Like Stephen King says in another of his rules – Talk whether ugly or beautiful, is an index of character. The vocabulary picked for the character tells the reader who that person is.  So if you want an upper-crust, over-educated egotist, they might not so much leave a tip as talk about extending emolument. Yes as a reader I already despise that character, but then that is the point of the description and the vocabulary choice.  Remember Mark Twain’s rule: Use the right word, not its second cousin.

Rules: Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue

(Elmore Leonard)

The more that I edit, the more I agree with this rule.  It also goes back to the previous rule: keep it simple – I say.  Also remember that you don’t have to use speech tags on every line of speech.  But yet, I can’t always agree with Mr Leonard on this one.

When to break the Rule:  When it gets boring.

There is nothing more irritating to a reader than constantly reading the same word, and after a while, that is true of ‘said’ too.  So if someone shouts, say they shouted.  If they whisper, use the word whispered.  But make sure they do so sparingly and correctly.

Rule: Work on one thing at a time until finished.

(Henry Miller)

If you can stick to this rule, good on you.  I can’t and I’m not going to beat myself up over that.

When to break this rule:  When it works for you.

Love this rule as an idea, but let’s get real here it’s not always possible. So let’s bring a little reality to the world and let me give you a clue how this works for me.  Right now I am writing a User Manual, my second steampunk crime novel, and a contemporary thriller.  Now the manual – that’s part of the day job, so I do it in working hours.  While I’m in the office, because I’m also doing other things, if I have to wait for a long calculation or upload, I have my notebook by my side to write the steampunk because I write that out first in long hand, I find it helps with the Victoriana tone. But when I get home at night, if I’m not editing, I write my contemporary crime because I’m doing that on the computer only.  Three things, all writing, and all happening at the same time.

Rule:  The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season

(Stephen King again)

Wow!  To be honest, there’s a huge part of me that utterly agrees with this one.  Generally, I do complete a book in that time frame, so why is it in my list of rules to break?  Because this is a list of WHEN to break the rules.

When to break the rule:  When life gets in the way.

I know that that sounds like a cop-out, and frankly it is, but here’s why.  Unlike Stephen King, I haven’t yet been able to give up the day job, so I can’t write solidly for three months.  If I could this would be easy.  The book that got me my agent was written entirely during NaNoWriMo.  But I know a lot of writers and a lot of us are unnecessarily harsh on ourselves, so you have to be real about the rules you follow.  I started a novel in November I still haven’t finished.  Why haven’t I finished it?  Because I’ve was diverted on to a different novel by some solid agent-y advice, and I have taken some time out to (a) edit my first steampunk crime novel and (b) do a paid editing job.

Admittedly I haven’t finished the other novel either, but I’m 37k words in and trying for 1000 words a day, but even that goal goes by the wayside when I get home from the day-jobbery exhausted.  So the real point of this is to give writers a reason to give themselves a break – don’t beat yourself up too much if you can’t meet this time frame.  Equally – don’t take this as a reason to slouch either.  If it’s taken ten years to write the first draft, that’s not a good sign.

So, go on, be a rebel, break some rules but get the writing job done anyway.