You'll know, I hope, that I recently put all my books on a free offer from Kindle for three days. I'm happy to say that hundreds were taken in that time, of all three novels, so it went quite well. Of course I get no money for any of them, but with any luck it will raise awareness, bring in more reviews and so on, so in time it should work out. Big thanks to everyone who picked up a copy, then, and one more request; please, if you can, leave a review on my Amazon author page!
Social media work is taking up as much time as writing itself does, now. I've always tried to write for a minimum of an hour a day, at the least, though on some days that's mostly spent staring out of the window and thinking. Sometimes even about whatever it is I'm writing. But that's working too, so it's OK. Now though, it's harder to find that time because I have to check my blog, and review a piece or two on the Google+ author pages, and check my Facebook page, and the Kindle store, and CreateSpace and Book Blogs and Feed-A-Read and....
I'm not really au fait with social media. For all I know I might be going about this all wrong. Writers are sometimes quite introverted people, you might catch a glimpse of one on a moonlit night if you're very, very quiet, but you likely won't spot us chuntering away on social media sites, or playing MMORPG's ten hours a day. So we don't know how to use the online system properly - or I don't, anyway: I might be over-generalising here. For me, it means I spend two hours doing what might take someone else thirty minutes, and with the best will in the world, it cuts into my writing time.
I'm starting to think that mastery of social media might be as unlikely as mastery of writing. Hemingway once said that every writer is an apprentice in a craft in which no one ever becomes a master, and with the way internet sites change and evolve, the web is probably the same. That's why computer wizards are always young; by the time they hit thirty, everything's changed and they're old news. But writers start later (usually) and have a longer career arc, so we're inevitably going to spend time goggling at the screen while spluttering, "What the hell is that?"
Well, nothing worth having ever comes easy, or so I'm told. Still, if anyone has any advice, I'm listening.
Saturday, 24 August 2013
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Utterly Alien
I've been thinking recently (for some reason) about the writing tips that we bump into every few days. You know the sort of thing: Show, Don't Tell is a common one, and Avoid Adverbs pops up all the time. It seems as though half the authors and most of the critics in the world just can't wait to share their wisdom in yet another Top 10 Hints.
The one I've been thinking about is Write What You Know.
There's truth in it, of course. Every author draws on his or her own experiences, the things we've done and felt and seen. Otherwise our work would be no more involving than a shopping list. But there are limits. This is Fantasy, after all. Robert Jordan never travelled with Loial in Andor, and I'm very nearly certain that JRR Tolkien didn't stop by Bag End for a crumpet and tea with Bilbo Baggins. Part of Fantasy is writing about things we don't know.
It's also about things we've invented, preferably ourselves, rather than borrowed wholesale from someone else's work (see my blog Ditching the Light Sabres for a rant about that, if you like). Our job is to create and invent a new world, people it with strange and wonderful beings, and then take the reader by the hand and lead him to explore. None of that can possibly come from writing what we know.
I suspect this is why so many aliens aren't alien at all, but humans in different skin. Star Trek is especially guilty on this - again, see an earlier blog - because it takes humans and gives them pointy ears, or ridged brows, and calls them alien. It's very hard to conceive of a non-human species which thinks in a different way to us. It's then even harder to convey that to the reader in an interesting and engaging way. How can we empathise with a species that doesn't have the concept of love? Or a race that has no children, no young, but like Celtic elves builds bodies out of forest matter and quickens them with life?
That's utterly alien, a people with which we struggle to find a common frame of reference. In writing I think it's very nearly impossible to do. The closest I can think of would be the Martians in Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", or perhaps the Fithp in Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall". Both are SF books, not Fantasy, but the principle is the same. I'm sure there are others, and if so I'd like to take a look at them, so suggestions are more than welcome.
I might be thinking about all this because I'm writing Starfire, which depends heavily on several different patterns of thought. Mostly that's indirect, but it's still tricky. I feel as though I'm wrestling with an oiled snake in a mudbath. But it's working, slowly - at least I think it is - I hope it is. And perhaps I'll be a little slower to criticise in future, when someone chooses to go for funny-looking humans again, because trying the other way is really hard.
PS - all my books are FREE from August 20th to 22nd on Amazon Kindle. Two are also free via coupon on Smashwords; the codes are SX99K for Risen King, and SU58A for Blood and Gold. Pick them up, hope you enjoy them, and spread the word!
The one I've been thinking about is Write What You Know.
There's truth in it, of course. Every author draws on his or her own experiences, the things we've done and felt and seen. Otherwise our work would be no more involving than a shopping list. But there are limits. This is Fantasy, after all. Robert Jordan never travelled with Loial in Andor, and I'm very nearly certain that JRR Tolkien didn't stop by Bag End for a crumpet and tea with Bilbo Baggins. Part of Fantasy is writing about things we don't know.
It's also about things we've invented, preferably ourselves, rather than borrowed wholesale from someone else's work (see my blog Ditching the Light Sabres for a rant about that, if you like). Our job is to create and invent a new world, people it with strange and wonderful beings, and then take the reader by the hand and lead him to explore. None of that can possibly come from writing what we know.
I suspect this is why so many aliens aren't alien at all, but humans in different skin. Star Trek is especially guilty on this - again, see an earlier blog - because it takes humans and gives them pointy ears, or ridged brows, and calls them alien. It's very hard to conceive of a non-human species which thinks in a different way to us. It's then even harder to convey that to the reader in an interesting and engaging way. How can we empathise with a species that doesn't have the concept of love? Or a race that has no children, no young, but like Celtic elves builds bodies out of forest matter and quickens them with life?
That's utterly alien, a people with which we struggle to find a common frame of reference. In writing I think it's very nearly impossible to do. The closest I can think of would be the Martians in Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", or perhaps the Fithp in Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall". Both are SF books, not Fantasy, but the principle is the same. I'm sure there are others, and if so I'd like to take a look at them, so suggestions are more than welcome.
I might be thinking about all this because I'm writing Starfire, which depends heavily on several different patterns of thought. Mostly that's indirect, but it's still tricky. I feel as though I'm wrestling with an oiled snake in a mudbath. But it's working, slowly - at least I think it is - I hope it is. And perhaps I'll be a little slower to criticise in future, when someone chooses to go for funny-looking humans again, because trying the other way is really hard.
PS - all my books are FREE from August 20th to 22nd on Amazon Kindle. Two are also free via coupon on Smashwords; the codes are SX99K for Risen King, and SU58A for Blood and Gold. Pick them up, hope you enjoy them, and spread the word!
Tuesday, 30 July 2013
Apologies and a New Story
Well, apologies first of all, because it's been over a month since my last blog. I moved house and found the wifi at my new place was down, so I've been running back and forth to the library to use the PCs there, getting the new novel published and trying to keep up with emails and so on without paying so much that I can't afford biscuits (a disaster, that). So I'm sorry I've been missing, I'll try not to let it happen again.
The good news is that The Gate of Angels is now published, available on Kindle as an e-book and soon in print via CreateSpace too. This finishes the Songs of Sorrow duology, picking up where Blood and Gold left off and taking the story to its conclusion. It's a story I needed to tell, I think. Religion was a large factor in ancient societies, so it's hard for a Fantasy author to ignore the subject. My problem was that I kept returning to a sort of quasi-Christian belief system - one God, one Heaven and so on - even in stories that didn't need it.
So I decided to deal with that by writing a story that was all about such a belief system. I hoped doing so would scratch my itch, if you like, and mean the theme would stop worming its way into other things; which it has, now. I don't know - it's a guess - but I think a lot of writers probably encounter something like this, a topic that lodges in their mind and won't be shaken loose. People often say they have a story that they need to tell, and maybe this is what they mean. Anyway, it's done, so I hope you enjoy the book.
I'm now back writing Starfire, which has given me such trouble before, but I think I might have cracked it now (famous last words, eh?). I've shuffled the events around so they're told in a different order, and I've expanded the early sub-plot until it fills almost the whole of volume one. I think it'll work. And wondering about it's half the fun, after all. Probably the story will wriggle about as I write it, wanting to take a different shape to the one I had in mind... and that's good, it shows the tale has some life in it, and isn't just a cardboard pastiche.
That's it for now. I just hope when I do the next blog, I'm not muttering about how Starfire doesn't want to be written.
The good news is that The Gate of Angels is now published, available on Kindle as an e-book and soon in print via CreateSpace too. This finishes the Songs of Sorrow duology, picking up where Blood and Gold left off and taking the story to its conclusion. It's a story I needed to tell, I think. Religion was a large factor in ancient societies, so it's hard for a Fantasy author to ignore the subject. My problem was that I kept returning to a sort of quasi-Christian belief system - one God, one Heaven and so on - even in stories that didn't need it.
So I decided to deal with that by writing a story that was all about such a belief system. I hoped doing so would scratch my itch, if you like, and mean the theme would stop worming its way into other things; which it has, now. I don't know - it's a guess - but I think a lot of writers probably encounter something like this, a topic that lodges in their mind and won't be shaken loose. People often say they have a story that they need to tell, and maybe this is what they mean. Anyway, it's done, so I hope you enjoy the book.
I'm now back writing Starfire, which has given me such trouble before, but I think I might have cracked it now (famous last words, eh?). I've shuffled the events around so they're told in a different order, and I've expanded the early sub-plot until it fills almost the whole of volume one. I think it'll work. And wondering about it's half the fun, after all. Probably the story will wriggle about as I write it, wanting to take a different shape to the one I had in mind... and that's good, it shows the tale has some life in it, and isn't just a cardboard pastiche.
That's it for now. I just hope when I do the next blog, I'm not muttering about how Starfire doesn't want to be written.
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Ditching the Light Sabres
A couple of nights ago I saw the film District 9, for the first time. Without wanting to give away spoilers, I can still say that this is what Sci-Fi can be when it grows up and ditches the light swords and aliens who are just pointy-eared humans.
What is it that SF and Fantasy allow a writer to do, that other genres don't?
The simple answer is: create a whole world. A whole culture, with its own history and beliefs, its own superstitions and folk tales, all the million little things we hardly think of but which children absorb as they grow. This is what Tolkien said he set out to do: create a complete, internally consistent mythos for the British people. So it drives me mad when Fantasy authors just spout ripoffs of Tolkien - worlds under threat from (another) returning Dark Lord; Elves living in deep forests and Dwarves under deep mountains, wearing leather and carrying heavy axes everywhere. Terry Pratchett has spoofed this unthinking repetition in the Discworld books, but it's a shame he has to.
Because really, the advantage of writing F & SF is that you can imagine. You can create elves more like the Norse ones, all dark magic and bitterness; or you can invent your own people from scratch, as Robert Jordan (to his credit) did in The Wheel of Time. And then in your next book you can invent it all anew, imagine a different world with different peoples and cultures, different beliefs, and so on. You could create a world with different gravity, for god's sake, or some sort of raptor animal that means humans are not top of the food chain, or whatever you like. I have an idea for a future novel which includes some of these ideas, by the way, so we'll see where that one goes.
But I don't see the point of retelling the same story all over again. It isn't just that some authors copy Tolkien. It's that they then retell the same story again, and again, using the same world/ kingdom/ culture as a background to the tale. I can name two Fantasy writers who have, essentially, repeated the same story over and over now for 30 years, and they're not the only ones.
Why? Why does someone who wants to write Fantasy then not imagine his own world, but borrow someone else's? Why do the fighter-craft in Star Wars perform dogfights that could be right out of World War I? Why are nearly all Star Trek aliens not alien at all, but just humans with one weird feature, like ears or ridged foreheads? It's a failure of imagination, a failure of nerve I think. It's no good saying "This is what sells", because of course it will sell if it's what people have become accustomed to. The trick, surely, is to show the reader or viewer something fresh, something more creative, and do so in such an enticing way that they come into that strange land with you.
I'm not at all sure I'm a gifted enough writer to do that. But I'll bloody well try, because I don't have the slightest interest in adding my name to the long list of dreary copyists who churn out the same old cack over and again. Better to explore those strange lands, and hope some of you stay with me while I do.
What is it that SF and Fantasy allow a writer to do, that other genres don't?
The simple answer is: create a whole world. A whole culture, with its own history and beliefs, its own superstitions and folk tales, all the million little things we hardly think of but which children absorb as they grow. This is what Tolkien said he set out to do: create a complete, internally consistent mythos for the British people. So it drives me mad when Fantasy authors just spout ripoffs of Tolkien - worlds under threat from (another) returning Dark Lord; Elves living in deep forests and Dwarves under deep mountains, wearing leather and carrying heavy axes everywhere. Terry Pratchett has spoofed this unthinking repetition in the Discworld books, but it's a shame he has to.
Because really, the advantage of writing F & SF is that you can imagine. You can create elves more like the Norse ones, all dark magic and bitterness; or you can invent your own people from scratch, as Robert Jordan (to his credit) did in The Wheel of Time. And then in your next book you can invent it all anew, imagine a different world with different peoples and cultures, different beliefs, and so on. You could create a world with different gravity, for god's sake, or some sort of raptor animal that means humans are not top of the food chain, or whatever you like. I have an idea for a future novel which includes some of these ideas, by the way, so we'll see where that one goes.
But I don't see the point of retelling the same story all over again. It isn't just that some authors copy Tolkien. It's that they then retell the same story again, and again, using the same world/ kingdom/ culture as a background to the tale. I can name two Fantasy writers who have, essentially, repeated the same story over and over now for 30 years, and they're not the only ones.
Why? Why does someone who wants to write Fantasy then not imagine his own world, but borrow someone else's? Why do the fighter-craft in Star Wars perform dogfights that could be right out of World War I? Why are nearly all Star Trek aliens not alien at all, but just humans with one weird feature, like ears or ridged foreheads? It's a failure of imagination, a failure of nerve I think. It's no good saying "This is what sells", because of course it will sell if it's what people have become accustomed to. The trick, surely, is to show the reader or viewer something fresh, something more creative, and do so in such an enticing way that they come into that strange land with you.
I'm not at all sure I'm a gifted enough writer to do that. But I'll bloody well try, because I don't have the slightest interest in adding my name to the long list of dreary copyists who churn out the same old cack over and again. Better to explore those strange lands, and hope some of you stay with me while I do.
Friday, 7 June 2013
Inca Roads, and a Bicycle
Well, I made my long-planned expedition onto Exmoor last weekend, intending to cycle across the whole National Park. I managed 45 miles, hit a pothole and broke my back wheel, and had to abandon. All day I'd seemed to be riding a yard out from the road edge because the tarmac there was crumbling away. So of course this got me thinking - once the cursing had stopped - about how ancient cultures maintained their roads.
See the way my mind works?
So when I got home, I researched it. Turns out a lot of ancient peoples didn't really have many proper roads. Even Greece didn't: mostly they were content with dirt tracks that baked solid in summer and turned to mud every winter. The Egyptians were a bit like that too, except they built great causeways high above the plain, so they stayed dry when the Nile flooded. I'm sure they needed a lot of work to keep them intact, but they managed. The Romans built legendary roads, of course, engineering marvels, and so did the Inca. In South America the main north-south road was the Qhapac Nan, and ran nearly 4,000 miles along the Andes Mountains.
4,000 miles, across one of the highest mountain ranges in the world, spanning deep ravines and boring through rock at times. And the Inca worked almost entirely with stone tools! But they could build and maintain a road like that, and many others besides, while in Britain we can't properly repair a road over a moor less than two thousand feet high.
All this indicates two things. Firstly, I'm still rather vexed that my long weekend was ruined by a hole in the road. Secondly, doing the sort of writing I do requires a hell of a lot of research. This interest in roads likely won't matter much: I don't want to bore readers with endless minor details like that. But it might supply a line of prose, once or twice, and add a little to the feel and sense of the book. If I do that with ten different things I'll have quite a different story.
Reviewers of my work constantly ask about the research I do. I take it as a compliment, because it means they've realised the background work that goes into each project. But I usually don't have to bust a wheel and skid halfway across the road in order to get there.
See the way my mind works?
So when I got home, I researched it. Turns out a lot of ancient peoples didn't really have many proper roads. Even Greece didn't: mostly they were content with dirt tracks that baked solid in summer and turned to mud every winter. The Egyptians were a bit like that too, except they built great causeways high above the plain, so they stayed dry when the Nile flooded. I'm sure they needed a lot of work to keep them intact, but they managed. The Romans built legendary roads, of course, engineering marvels, and so did the Inca. In South America the main north-south road was the Qhapac Nan, and ran nearly 4,000 miles along the Andes Mountains.
4,000 miles, across one of the highest mountain ranges in the world, spanning deep ravines and boring through rock at times. And the Inca worked almost entirely with stone tools! But they could build and maintain a road like that, and many others besides, while in Britain we can't properly repair a road over a moor less than two thousand feet high.
All this indicates two things. Firstly, I'm still rather vexed that my long weekend was ruined by a hole in the road. Secondly, doing the sort of writing I do requires a hell of a lot of research. This interest in roads likely won't matter much: I don't want to bore readers with endless minor details like that. But it might supply a line of prose, once or twice, and add a little to the feel and sense of the book. If I do that with ten different things I'll have quite a different story.
Reviewers of my work constantly ask about the research I do. I take it as a compliment, because it means they've realised the background work that goes into each project. But I usually don't have to bust a wheel and skid halfway across the road in order to get there.
Saturday, 25 May 2013
The Flabby Perils of Star Trek
So I watched Star Trek: Into Darkness last night. I've always liked Star Trek, despite its sometimes cheesiness. Like a lot of sci-fi/fan, when it gets it right it really does get it right. The first J J Abrams/Chris Pine/ Zachary Quinto film was very good, not only decent cinema but a good plot too, and well told.
Sadly the sequel isn't. It's still a decent film, but the 3D gimmicks are annoying me now, they're pointless and sometimes distort a film just so the director can fit in that really great shot with bits flying towards the audience... but mostly the story is just poor. The idea is good, but it isn't well told. There are too many knowing nods to the earlier Star Trek, that of Shatner and Nimoy et al, and the last hour (or nearly) of the film is just one flash-bang-scream piled on the last, which just made my eyes ache.
A peril of being an author: you notice when a story is flabby, or when it wanders, or when something has been stuck in just because it goes wheeee but it doesn't help the story at all. There's an old saying; kill your darlings, which means that any writer has to be able to review his own work and cut out this, trim that, skip that whole scene... However good it is, or however keen on it you are, you have to cut. (Spoiler alert) An online reviewer called Caroline Sheehan said of The Risen King that there were scenes she'd have liked to see, rather than just hear about, for example the fall of Gailhom and the deaths of the king and Stefan, but I just couldn't fit it in. The novel is nearly 140,000 words long anyway, I had to cut like a madman just to keep it down to that.
It's a shame J J Abrams doesn't seem to have done that with Into Darkness. It's the same malaise that ruined the latter three Star Wars films, when nobody was close enough to George Lucas to say No, stop, that bit of dialogue clunks like a wooden leg and by the way, Jar-Jar Binks is a REALLY bad idea. I'm not sure anyone can be trusted to do this editing all alone. Everyone needs a reader who can tell them where the clunks are, when the story waffles and grows fat without going anywhere, and so on. I can see it with Into Darkness, but I know from experience that it often takes someone else's eyes to see it in my own writing.
And on that note I'll quit, before this blog post also becomes flabby.
Sadly the sequel isn't. It's still a decent film, but the 3D gimmicks are annoying me now, they're pointless and sometimes distort a film just so the director can fit in that really great shot with bits flying towards the audience... but mostly the story is just poor. The idea is good, but it isn't well told. There are too many knowing nods to the earlier Star Trek, that of Shatner and Nimoy et al, and the last hour (or nearly) of the film is just one flash-bang-scream piled on the last, which just made my eyes ache.
A peril of being an author: you notice when a story is flabby, or when it wanders, or when something has been stuck in just because it goes wheeee but it doesn't help the story at all. There's an old saying; kill your darlings, which means that any writer has to be able to review his own work and cut out this, trim that, skip that whole scene... However good it is, or however keen on it you are, you have to cut. (Spoiler alert) An online reviewer called Caroline Sheehan said of The Risen King that there were scenes she'd have liked to see, rather than just hear about, for example the fall of Gailhom and the deaths of the king and Stefan, but I just couldn't fit it in. The novel is nearly 140,000 words long anyway, I had to cut like a madman just to keep it down to that.
It's a shame J J Abrams doesn't seem to have done that with Into Darkness. It's the same malaise that ruined the latter three Star Wars films, when nobody was close enough to George Lucas to say No, stop, that bit of dialogue clunks like a wooden leg and by the way, Jar-Jar Binks is a REALLY bad idea. I'm not sure anyone can be trusted to do this editing all alone. Everyone needs a reader who can tell them where the clunks are, when the story waffles and grows fat without going anywhere, and so on. I can see it with Into Darkness, but I know from experience that it often takes someone else's eyes to see it in my own writing.
And on that note I'll quit, before this blog post also becomes flabby.
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Free Books, Contests and Getting Wet
Well, first things first - Blood and Gold e-book will be free at Amazon Kindle on Monday 13th/Tuesday 14th of May. Feel free to pick it up, and please tell people about it, the more freebies the better.
So, on to other things. I'm going to enter Black Lord of Eagles for the Yeovil Prize - that's a writing competition here in the South-West of England. I decided to do so after attending an event at the Barnstaple library on World Book Day, including an address by the author Sophie Duffy, so thanks to her and to the staff as well. Black Lord... has also just gone off to an agent for the first time; fingers crossed that someone will pick up on it.
I can't get Starfire written though. I hit walls all the time: solve one problem and another pops up. I think there must be something wrong with the structure of the story, or the basic execution, but I can't put my finger on what it is. So that will have to be shelved until I can work it out (probably about 2019, the speed my brain chugs along at). On the brighter side, I've finished volume one of Chained Dragon, a book called The Bone-Smile, and I'm just starting on volume two. And I still have the ideas for The Pyramids of Saqoma, and The Cross-Tree, and also The Rainbow Bridge. Plus I've done some outlines for a series called The Playground of Fawns, which is very ambitious and just a bit scary, to be honest. I'm not ready to tackle that yet, but there's plenty to be going on with.
Quite a lot of titles beginning with The, now I look at that. Maybe one or two will change as I go. Ho hum.
Now spring has finally arrived, I'm looking forward to hiking up onto Exmoor at some point, to spend a few days with zero connection to the outside world at all. It's astonishingly liberating to do - blimey, I sound like a self-help manual - and if I take a few pens and some paper, I might get some good thoughts down. Of course I might also get very wet, and end up eating half-cold beans out of the tin because the fire won't light properly, but that will just make it easier for me to imagine the characters in my books.
I'll keep telling myself that, anyway. And who knows, I might even get a handle on how to fix the problems with Starfire.
So, on to other things. I'm going to enter Black Lord of Eagles for the Yeovil Prize - that's a writing competition here in the South-West of England. I decided to do so after attending an event at the Barnstaple library on World Book Day, including an address by the author Sophie Duffy, so thanks to her and to the staff as well. Black Lord... has also just gone off to an agent for the first time; fingers crossed that someone will pick up on it.
I can't get Starfire written though. I hit walls all the time: solve one problem and another pops up. I think there must be something wrong with the structure of the story, or the basic execution, but I can't put my finger on what it is. So that will have to be shelved until I can work it out (probably about 2019, the speed my brain chugs along at). On the brighter side, I've finished volume one of Chained Dragon, a book called The Bone-Smile, and I'm just starting on volume two. And I still have the ideas for The Pyramids of Saqoma, and The Cross-Tree, and also The Rainbow Bridge. Plus I've done some outlines for a series called The Playground of Fawns, which is very ambitious and just a bit scary, to be honest. I'm not ready to tackle that yet, but there's plenty to be going on with.
Quite a lot of titles beginning with The, now I look at that. Maybe one or two will change as I go. Ho hum.
Now spring has finally arrived, I'm looking forward to hiking up onto Exmoor at some point, to spend a few days with zero connection to the outside world at all. It's astonishingly liberating to do - blimey, I sound like a self-help manual - and if I take a few pens and some paper, I might get some good thoughts down. Of course I might also get very wet, and end up eating half-cold beans out of the tin because the fire won't light properly, but that will just make it easier for me to imagine the characters in my books.
I'll keep telling myself that, anyway. And who knows, I might even get a handle on how to fix the problems with Starfire.
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