Empire: After The Fall

So, I've finally figured out the ending of my current WIP. It even has a title! Empire: After The Fall. Hopefully, Empire will become a series for Changeling (although I've planned series before, and after the first book has completely failed to sell, the rest have been cancelled, dammit).

Empire is my post-apocalyptic near future cyberpunk drowned world. The premise is, er, well post-apocalyptic near future cyberpunk drowned world. Okay, okay. The ice caps have melted, and half the world is underwater. Most of the most important cities, built by the sea or on rivers, have disappeared. Treaties, alliances and unions broke down. Nations crumbled. Humans died in their millions. This is referred to, obliquely, as the Fall. It happened a while ago. I don't know when.

(image borrowed from Dragon Cave RP)

Out of the wreckage emerged one superpower. It's known simply as the Empire, and it controls everything. It knows everything. It controls everyone though fingerprint and retinal scans (variable to suit species. Since the world's human population has vastly diminished, it's populated heavily by vampires, werefolk, fae, and various other beasties). Every bit of technology is scanned and recorded.

There have been wars and revolutions against the Empire, but none of them have been successful. Yet.

I'm trying to write a blurb and a cover art request. It's not easy, since the blurb will require some of the above information, vastly condensed, and also some of the incredibly complicated set-up between my tiger-shifter heroine and vampire mercenary hero. Or anti-hero. Or something. See?

Currently, I'm being aided in this by my Empire playlist. It includes: Kasabian: Empire (naturally); Vast: Touched; Coldplay: Viva La Vida; Jamiroquai: King For A Day; Rufus Wainwright: Hallelujah (do NOT get me started on whatserface from X Factor); Robyn: With Every Heartbeat; and if I can get iTunes to play along, Take That: Greatest Day. I'd also have the music from C4's The Devil's Whore on there, especially the piano piece, if it was actually available as a music track. Eclectic? You have no idea. Imagine what a mess the story is right now!

(Incidentally, why is it that Mozilla flags Kasabian as not being a properly spelled word, but has no problem with Jamiroquai?)

So, what do you listen to when writing? Or can't you bear to listen to anything? Often, unless it's one particular song strongly soundtracking a particular scene, I don't listen to anything. This is more like mood music.

And yes, I am mildly obsessed with The Devil's Whore right now. The DVD is on my birthday list. And no, my birthday isn't for months. My hero, Carver, has more than a touch of Edward Sexby about him. Apparently, both John Simm and the production team wanted to deliberately make Sexby unsexy, especially considering his name. Hence the scar and the hair and the many references to enjoying cutting people's throats. Unfortunately, they failed. Miserably.

Image from Channel 4)

PS: Still no Yahoo mail. Useless bastards.

Back to work

Okay, no real excuses this week. No distractions. Diet's back on, work is back on, and--ooh look, it's snowing! Ahh, pretty pretty, and the kittens are going nowhere near it. Daisy is curled up by the fire--that's how impressed she is by the cold stuff outside. Only a dusting, not even enough to throw snowballs for Pepper. Or at Pepper, depending on how well she's behaving.

Anyway. Where was I? Oh yes, work. Well, I started on a new idea for Changeling, in the cyberpunk-ish genre as mentioned. At the moment it's just called Empire, but my editor and I are thinking that might make for a series name, if this one does well, so it'll need a proper title. I'm working on that while I finish the story. What's it about? A shape-changing tigeress who's tired of being married to a neo-puritan; a vampire with a sword, a bionic arm and psychopathic tendencies; a drowned world; microchips and underwater cities; lying and tigers and bareness, oh my.

I've also got to get Kett kicked into shape so I can send her back to my editor at Samhain, and then I really want to get the Untied Kingdom cleaned up and submitted to agents and editors again. It received a round of unequivocal form rejections last time, so clearly there's something wrong with it.

I'm looking at going to Washington for the RWA conference this year. You know what sparked this off? Filling out the health form for the blood donors, getting to the 'Have you travelled outside the UK in the last 12 months' bit, and ticking 'No'. In fact, not for about two and a half years. How depressing is that?

In other news, I had a dream last night that I phoned up my brother, who went away this morning with his friends, to check he'd arrived okay because a lot of roads had been closed. This morning, I open my curtains to see snow on the road, and hear that travel is, indeed, difficult. Spooky or what? I warned him to be careful, and also to take a map in case he needs to make a diversion!

I also had a dream I met the woman who was going to make my wedding dress. We'll have to wait and see on that one (but if it comes true a) it's a gorgeous dress and b) how bloody weird would it be!)

Rejection

It's a horrible word, isn't it? Rejected. Reject. Even worse when you put 'form' in front of it and use it to describe the response from a publisher. Even worse when, after more than a year, they confess they've lost it and ask you to re-send by email, so you do, and four days later the Form Rejection comes through your door. Does this mean they found it? Or they read my email super-quick?

Either way, not a fantabulous start to the week.

The plot thin-ens

Or whatever the opposite of 'thickens' is.

I've just finished re-drafting Kett's book, and while I've blogged below on the changes to Bael's and Kett's characters, I haven't mentioned much of the plot. It did need some changes, because as my editor pointed out it started with one plot, dropped it for a second plot, then dropped that to pick up the first again. Clearly, this made no sense.

So, I sat and tried to work out what each plot point was there for. Did it advance the characters' growth, motivations, conflicts? Did it develop the romance? Or was it just for my own ends, to move the characters about and get them into place for the big set pieces? (see my rant on the end of the Transformers movie for reasons why this is a bad device to use. Yes, the entry starts about Buffy. It moves on to Transformers. Just scroll down to the picture of things exploding.)



For plot A, which begins with Kett and Bael chained up together in a cave, complete strangers with no knowledge of how they got there, the answer was that most of it was there to develop the characters and their relationships not just with each other, but with other secondary characters. Part of Kett's development is accepting her place within her family, which isn't very conventional, and part of Bael's is coming out of denial about his heritage, which is dark and complicated.

But plot B? This concerned Kett helping her cousin Chance, heroine of Almost Human, to track down some teenagers her father, Striker, had been experimenting on. I'd originally intended this to be a lot more involving than it was, but when I looked back over it, I realised it was only there as a device to move Kett and Bael into various situations, most specifically the one that brings on their big black moment.

I realised that with a little rewriting, I could more or less lift out Plot B in its entirety. All I needed to do was work out if my characters really needed to be put into these situations or not, and whether there might be another reason for them to be there, one that might have grown more organically from their conflict and development. The biggest problem was getting them into place for the black moment--which is quite complex, and I won't go into it here--but eventually I realised that their geographical relocation could be caused not by looking for one of Striker's teenagers, but by somebody who'd been held by a group called the Federación, and freed by Kett and Chance at the end of Almost Human.

Both Kett and Bael have come up against the devious and dangerous Federación, who have an interest in kidnapping and experimenting on paranormals. In fact, Bael suspects that the Federación were behind the whole cave thing in the first place. So it fits pretty neatly into the hole left by Plot B; even the theme of searching out a paranormal who's been experimented on.

Cutting out Plot B meant cutting out several characters, but I found I didn't miss them much. Towards the end of the book, they collectively take on the role of damsel--ie someone important to Kett who is in danger, who can be rescued by Bael, thus helping to prove his worth to Kett. Their place was easily taken by characters in a few early scenes who were never seen again.

That's just a couple of examples of plot-fixing. One or two scenes needed to be rewritten totally; in some cases it was just a line or two, or perhaps changing one name for another. But I remember back when I first submitted Almost Human that I was told there were far too many secondary characters. Some of them--such as Chance's parents, friends and former lovers--were integral to the plot. Quite a few of them could be cut without leaving a trace.

So, my advice for fixing a convoluted plot? Work out what's essential to the growth and development of the relationship between your characters, and get rid of the rest. If you find you're inventing a plot just to put in some spectacular set piece--whether it's a love scene or a fight--then that's the plot you don't need. Find another reason for the set piece, or take it out altogether.

Things to do this week:

I need to finish revising Kett's book. I figure I've worked out how to fix it; now I just need to make sure I'm actually doing it right. I also need to go over the galley proofs for Sophie book 4, which I was sent aaages ago and forgot about. Whoops!

Instead I shall be: going shopping for shoes that I don't need and can't afford (procrastination at its finest); getting a scan of my brain (just in case my labyrinthitis turns out to be gremlins nesting in my cerebral cortex); watching the RNA on Eggheads (tonight, 6pm, BBC2); fretting about looking like a beached whale when I go to Center Parcs next week; trying to find clothes at are a) clean and b) fit me, which is my usual method of packing a suitcase.

I shall also be staring adoringly at the cover for Spaceport: Courtesan, and attempting to come up with an idea for my next Changeling book. I was going to write about Janus Valdec, but he turned out to not be a very nice guy, so I probably won't.

Probably.

The key to Kett's character

Is probably right here in a conversation she's having with her father. When he remarks that her life never has a dull moment, she replies wearily,

“I like dull moments. They’re peaceful and quiet and people aren’t trying to kill me.”

I should probably stick this on a Post-It to remind me of her character and motivation.

Where I'm at, part two (b)

Bael's character, again.

For the background on these revisions, look at these posts. I've been working on some points about the plot, and think I might have got it figured out. When I'm a little further through revisions, I'll blog about which plot elements I've changed, and why.

Now onto Bael's character. My editor said he needed 'tweaking', and mentioned a random outburst of violence as a case in point. I wrote Bael with a bit of a Petruccio vibe: extremely self-confident, an adrenaline junkie who sees dangerous women as an extreme sport to be enjoyed. A bit edgy, and unsettles a lot of people because he just doesn't seem to fit in, and they're not entirely sure why. He's capable of great charm, but is also unpredictable and has embraced superficiality as a way of keeping the darker elements of his life at bay. However, this means he also comes across as childish and arrogant, neither of which are traits I find particularly heroic.

At one point Kett describes him to her family thusly:

“What’s he like?” Nuala begged, and Kett, mildly shocked at her own behaviour, answered without thinking.
“Big,” she said. “And mad. And loud. And…” she frowned, formed a mental picture of Bael, and described what she saw. “He shouts at kelfs, ‘cos he’s scared of them, I think. And he picks fights with them when he’s angry. And he gets thrown in jail sometimes. And he doesn’t think in straight lines. But he can be sort of kind when he wants to. And he’s very persistent. No, stubborn. He’s sort of…” she scrunched up her face, trying to describe him. “About eleven, really, inside. Well, maybe sixteen,” she amended, thinking of his unstoppable interest in sex.
A small silence followed.
“Well, he sounds…charming,” Nuala said.


Here's a bit from the first scene narrated from Bael's point of view. He's just woken up with Kett and both of them are pretty happy to see each other, but they're interrupted before they can get to the good stuff.

First of all, the scene as it was originally written, with my notes on why it wasn't working (this is like doing Eng Lit at school again).


A tiny sound behind him made them both freeze.
“Don’t stop on my account,” said a sweet feminine voice in accented Anglish.
Before the voice had even died away, Kett had already kicked him off her, leaving him sprawling naked in the dirt as she sprang to her feet, tight and low in a defensive crouch.
Bael stared up, his hands reflectively cupping his jewels from the dozen or so eyes looking right back down at him. And the half-dozen hunting bows.

All Bael’s doing here is lying on the ground being comical. Kett has immediately reacted to the threat, but he hasn’t even sat up. Some hero he is.

Also, I think I meant to type 'reflexively' there.

A woman in bright, silken robes was perched elegantly side-saddle on a handsome white horse. She was tiny, with long glossy dark hair and tilted eyes, and she was smiling. Bael figured that was probably because she was surrounded by kelfs with bows and grim expressions. Oh, and the fact that both he and Kett were totally bollock naked. Literally, in his case.
Kett scowled up at the woman. “Miho?”
The tiny woman smiled wider. “Kett. I didn’t know you were in the country.”
“Well, funny thing.” She relaxed a little, stood up straight. “Neither did I.”
“You know her?” Bael looked between the two women, his tall, scarred warrior and the tiny, delicate creature on the horse.
“Yes. Miho and I…go way back.”
“Well, that’s great.” Bael got to his feet. “Reckon she could lend us some clothes? Get some food? Dunno about you, but I’m starving.” He glanced at the kelfs surrounding them, bows still drawn. Bloody kelfs. No smiles. They wound him up beyond belief. “Maybe we could eat one of them.”

Why, what have they done to wind him up?

Kett didn’t smile.
“Joke. Takes bloody hours to cook ‘em, and even then you can never cut them up properly. Too stringy to eat whole.”
Miho looked a little puzzled by his joke. “But why would you—”
Bael grabbed the skinny arm of the nearest kelf. “Look, see, no meat on it—oi!” The kelf had pushed his hand away. “Gerroff!”
He shoved the kelf, who whipped his bow in Bael’s direction. Bael knocked it to the ground. He hated kelfs. Never done a thing to them, but they all, collectively, despised him and his species.

Okay, so it’s a species thing. Still, he’s being very childish.

“Aha,” he grinned at the creature, now defenceless, and raised both hands in a fighting stance. “Whatcha gonna do n—”
There was a sudden zip and whine, and then a furious pain in his left arm. Bael stared at the arrow sticking out of it, and whirled on the kelf responsible. “Hey! What the fuck was that for?”
“You did just beat up one of his mates,” Kett pointed out. She didn’t seem in any hurry to come to his defence.

No, and he's being so childish I can't blame her.

“It was just friendly playing. You,” Bael rounded on the kelf who’d shot him, “I actually am going to beat up—”
“Bael, stop,” Kett said.
“No! He just bloody shot me!”
“And what good will beating him up possibly do?”
He glowered at her, then at the kelf, who stared impassively back. Bloody kelfs. You could beat them, but they never bruised. You could shoot and slash at them, but they never bled. Their colourful, hairless skin was like iron.
They bowed and scraped to every human in the five Realms, but became deaf the minute he uttered a polite request.
Well, a request, at any rate. Bael wasn’t sure he’d ever been polite to anyone.

Actually, he’s perfectly capable of being polite. It’s just something he can turn on and off when he needs to.

“Oh, piss off,” he snarled half-heartedly, and turned his attention to the arrow in his arm. It hurt like buggery, but it didn’t seem to have hit anything major. “Stupid fucking kelfs,” he growled, working the arrow back and forth and eventually gritting his teeth and yanking it out.
He made a pointed yelp of pain. Kett and Miho, who’d been quietly conversing, both glanced over.
“Men over-react so much,” Miho said.
“Yep.”
“Well, thank you,” he said, scowling, pinching the wound to make it bleed and still securing no commiseration. “Thank you for your sympathy.”

This isn’t helping us see either Kett or Bael as sympathetic characters. She doesn’t even seem to care that he’s been wounded.

“Shouldn’t’ve attacked the kelf, should you?” Kett said, as a munta was led out from the trees. Four-legged and a little like a camel without the hump, the creature was covered in shaggy dark green fur and looked at him with huge eyes as the kelfs started unloading game carcasses from its back.
“Come on,” Kett said, mounting the creature and holding out her hand. She didn’t seem remotely perturbed to be sitting there completely naked, and after a moment, Bael swung up behind her.

What I have here is a scene that tells the reader Bael is a childish bully. All right, so he is capable of being pretty childish, but he isn’t really a bully. It’s entirely his own fault that he got shot, which is why Kett isn’t terribly sympathetic, but it would have been nice if she’d at least checked it wasn’t a bad wound. There's also nothing here to tell me why he really doesn't like kelfs. It's a species thing? Well, that's only a few steps away from racism, which definitely isn't an attractive trait.


Here's the rewritten version of the scene:


A tiny sound behind him made them both freeze.
Bael looked up and saw an arrow. A bow. They pretty much occupied his attention until Kett said, “Why is that kelf aiming an arrow at us?”

Bael notices the danger from the weapon first, and not the person behind it. Kett can see the bigger picture (we find out later that she's had a lot of training in this area). She is surprised to find a kelf threatening her. Why? They don’t usually threaten people?

Bael refocused. Behind the bow and arrow was a small green figure, three fingers on each hand, skin hairless, eyes huge. It stood immobile, impassive. Inhuman. His lip curled. He bloody hated kelfs, and this was precisely why.
“Look, I don’t interrupt you guys when you do…whatever it is you do in bed,” he said, rolling Kett away and getting to his feet.

All right, so Kett might think they’re okay, but Bael doesn’t like them very much. He’s not remotely surprised to find one threatening him. However, he’s not attacking it yet. He's demonstrating his disinterest in kelfs, but also his detachment, telling them (and us) that he usually steers clear of them.

I've also got a small description of a kelf in there, because this is the first one to turn up in the book.

The kelf said something in its own language, which irritated the hell out of Bael. It knew he couldn’t understand it. Kelfs never taught their own language to anyone.

He knows the kelf is doing this on purpose. Also, it foreshadows something later in the book, concerning the translation of something in kelfish.

“You don’t—” Kett began, stepping towards the creature, and it turned its bow on her.
“Oh no you bloody don’t,” Bael said, lunging for the little green bugger, but it was too fast for him.

Aha! Bael’s doing something heroic! A bit stupid, but heroic nonetheless. Defending the heroine is top hero behaviour. A much better start, and it hasn't compromised Kett's character either.

There was a sudden zip and whine, and then a furious pain in his left arm.
Bael stared at the arrow sticking out of it, and whirled on the kelf, murder in his eye. “Hey! What the fuck was that for?”
“You are trespassing,” said a sweet feminine voice in accented Anglish.
Before the voice had even died away, Kett had whirled to face it, her hands curled into fists, muscles tight, body low in a defensive crouch.

Here’s Kett going into warrior mode. She still hasn’t attacked the kelf, however, because unlike Bael she doesn’t have an irrational hatred of them, plus she understands that they don't attack humans for no good reason (this is also a foreshadowing). As for our hero, he hasn’t attacked the kelf completely without provocation; and neither has it shot him without reason, as we’ll see in a few lines.

Bael stared at the dozen or so kelfs who had emerged from the trees, each holding a bow trained on him. Maybe they could smell the blood. Little bastards.
“This is their land,” said the woman’s voice, and he tore his eyes to her. “They graciously allow me to hunt with them, but they don’t like trespassers.”

All right, and here’s the reason why the kelf was aggressive.

She wore bright, silken robes and perched elegantly side-saddle on a handsome white horse. A crossbow rested on her lap. She was tiny, with long glossy dark hair and tilted eyes, and she was smiling. Bael figured that was probably because she was surrounded by kelfs with bows and grim expressions. Oh, and the fact that both he and Kett were totally bollock naked. Literally, in his case.
Kett scowled up at the woman. “Miho?”
The tiny woman smiled wider. “Kett. I didn’t know you were in the country.”
“Well, funny thing.” She relaxed a little, stood up straight. “Neither did I.”
“You know her?” Bael looked between the two women, his tall, scarred warrior and the tiny, delicate creature on the horse. His arm throbbed, blood oozing from the wound.
“Yes. Miho and I…go way back.”
“Well, that’s great.” Bael waggled the arrow in his arm. “Reckon she could lend us some clothes? Get some food? Dunno about you, but I’m starving.” He glanced at the kelfs surrounding them, bows still drawn. Bloody kelfs. No smiles. They wound him up beyond belief. “Maybe we could eat one of them.”

Here’s the Bael I know and love: making jokes while he’s in pain. He’s not complaining about the wound…yet.

Kett didn’t smile.
“Apologies for your injury,” said Miho, nodding regally at Bael. “There are medical supplies at my house.”
Bael nodded and considered grabbing the kelf’s bow to shoot back at it. Not that it’d have done much good.
Could have been this kelf who killed your mother. Could have been any of them.
How can humans love them so much?

Right, so now we know what Bael’s specific grudge is, and also that he’s not fully human.

Kett poked at the arrow, ignoring his flinches.
“Flesh wound,” she said. “You’ll live.”

Here’s Kett showing some concern. Since Bael isn’t thrashing about wailing for someone maternal, and since he’s still standing upright, she knows it’s not bad, but she’s just checking to make sure he’s not being overly stoic. When he flinches, she knows he’s not, and lets him deal with the results of his scrap by himself.

He glowered at her, then at the kelf, who stared impassively back. Bloody kelfs. You could beat them, but they never bruised. You could shoot and slash at them, but they never bled. Their colourful, hairless skin was like iron.
They bowed and scraped to every human in the five Realms, but became deaf the minute he uttered a polite request.
Well, a request, at any rate. Bael wasn’t good at being polite.

Better than saying he’s never polite.

“Oh, piss off,” he snarled half-heartedly, and turned his attention to the arrow in his arm. It hurt like buggery, but it didn’t seem to have hit anything major. “Stupid fucking kelfs,” he growled, working the arrow back and forth and eventually gritting his teeth and yanking it out.
He made a pointed yelp of pain. Kett and Miho, who’d been quietly conversing, both glanced over. Bael pressed down on the bleeding injury, giving them a wounded look.

He’s angling for sympathy (well, he is a man), but he’s not going over the top. Also, he’s applying compression, which says he’s not totally clueless about how to treat an injury.

“Shouldn’t’ve gone after it, should you?” Kett said, as a munta was led out from the trees. Four-legged and a little like a camel without the hump, the creature was covered in shaggy dark green fur and looked at him with huge eyes as the kelfs started unloading game carcasses from its back.
“Oh, sure,” Bael said, “this is what I get for being chivalrous?”
“It wasn’t really going to shoot me,” Kett said patiently.
“Yeah? They’re not as nice as people think,” Bael said, lifting his fingers from the wound on his arm and showing her the blood.

Differing points of view here: Kett really didn’t believe the kelf was going to harm anyone, and Bael thinks she’s being naïve. But they’re not arguing about it. Yet.

Kett just rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, mounting the creature and holding out her hand.



All in all I think that’s a better introduction to Bael’s character, especially as it’s the first scene we get from his POV. More sympathetic? More heroic? More sane?

What do you think?

Where I'm at, part two

Bael's character.

Another sidenote on revising this book: I actually finished my own revisions and sent it to my editor several months ago, completely forgetting she was getting married in the autumn and therefore taking some time off, so it took her a while to come back to me. It's for this reason that I've been able to get some distance from the book. Had she replied within a week I'd probably have thrown a tantrum because she Didn't Get It. Now I can see what she's getting at, but while I was still so close to the book, I wouldn'tve been able to.

Now, onto Bael, my unheroic hero.

The beginning of the book is in Kett's POV, so we first meet Bael through her eyes. In fact, we don't see him so much as feel him: Kett and Bael are strung up in a dark cave, so all she can see is his dark hair and a white smile. She can really feel him, however. And what she feels is so pleasant she assumes she's having a hot dream.

On waking and realising that the situation's a bit more nightmarish, Kett freaks out and it's Bael who calms her down. Now, I'd forgotten about this. During the rest of the book, Bael's not precisely calm or soothing. He's a complete nutcase. The next scene sees him beating up a kelf (an elf-like creature who serves and protects humans).

Bael does have a reason for not liking kelfs: he's a creature called a Nasc that I introduced in Almost Human, part human and part animal. Since kelfs believe themselves to be inferior to humans but superior to animals, they find Nasc to be very unnatural and try to avoid them. Bael would have gone along with this, but he's been told his mother was killed by a kelf, and the resentment has built up. But has it built up enough to justify his attack on a creature who wasn't doing anything to him at the time?

His extreme dislike of kelfs is something Kett uses to remind herself that she shouldn't be with him. It's part of her proof that he's not worthy of being loved. From her point of view, a kelf would never hurt anyone, and Bael's insistence that she's wrong irritates her even more.

I've been dithering about this scene. I want to demonstrate that Bael is unpredictable and violent, just like Kett, but that doesn't make him very likeable. At the end of the book he finds himself relying on and fighting beside a kelf, having grown a little bit. He has become a Better Person. But when the reader first meets him, is she going to think, "Okay, he's angry about a kelf killing his mother," or, "Okay, he's a psychopath"?

Where I'm at, part one (b)

Kett's character, again.

Kett is a complex character who needs a lot of explaining, in fact so much explanation that it takes up a whole book, let alone a blog post. See below for Kett's background, and why she is like she is.

By the beginning of Dragon Knight, she's living on a remote ranch in the mountains, training dragons with her friend and mentor Jarven, who only speaks about five words a year. She doesn't want any sort of relationship with anyone, and is even prepared to give up sex in order to live in peace. She's abrasive, prickly and self-defensive, and she moves with a limp after an incident involving a sabre-toothed tiger three years ago.

How can I make her more likeable, without changing everything she is? This is the challenge. Standard tricks usually involve giving the character something cute and fluffy to care about, but I've never really bought that, because finding a puppy or a kitten adorable isn't a trait only shared by nice people. Plenty of psychopaths love animals.

Kett has many reasons for distancing herself from people--nearly all her relationships have gone horribly, horribly wrong--but can't escape the people who actually seem to like her, namely her stepmother and half siblings (her father, Tyrnan, is a bit of a question mark). Bael of course likes Kett a great deal, but he's quite insane, and besides I need to come back to him. And of course there's Jarven, who's always been there for her as a sort of surrogate older brother.

But why do they like her? Well, her stepmother, Nuala likes everyone. She's one of those effervescent people who sees good in everyone and wants to bring it out and make people happy. In fact she's the polar opposite of Kett in that respect. So she's not much help to me. What Nuala wants is for everyone to be as blissfully happy as she is, and since marriage and children have made her happy, she thinks it will work for everyone else (in this respect, Nuala is like every married person I've ever met), including Kett, who's tried marriage on for size and found it a very bad fit.

Her father? I did actually write a scene where Tyrnan tells Kett he's proud of her. He doesn't really understand her all that well, and he realises he's screwed up on several levels with her, and he treats his younger daughters quite protectively. Kett thinks this is because he's ashamed of her and doesn't want them to turn out like her; in fact, he wants to protect them from all the things that have hurt Kett.

What about her half brother and sisters? I've been thinking about it, and there aren't many scenes where they really interact--and when they do, it's Kett discovering something surprising about her siblings, not them making revelations about her. But they do like and respect Kett an awful lot. Why?

So, fix number one: Let the reader see what Kett's siblings see in her. That while she's scary and aggressive, she's using attack as the best form of defence. Kett is vulnerable to being hurt, just like everyone else--in fact, more so, since she's suffered so badly at the hands of people she thought she could trust. Kett's family are proud of her, because while she's a proper nutter she's also brave and loyal, smart and resilient.

Okay, next problem. Kett is very self-defensive, to the point of aggression. Why? Well, she's been badly hurt, repeatedly, and has seen everything around her turn to crap more than once. To protect herself and other people, she keeps her distance. But did I explain this in the book?

Fix number two: make it clearer why Kett pushes people away. It's a textbook reason anyway.

What about her violent streak? Well, she's been trained from a young age to be a mercenary--the knight of the title. Added to which, right from the start other kids made fun of her, and Kett learned they were less likely to do so if they were scared of her. And it's not hard to get people to be scared of you when you can turn into a tiger.

As she got older, Kett repeatedly got herself into fights. She actually actively looked for violence, culminating in picking that fight with the sabre-toothed tiger who gave her the limp. In her earlier years she was quite a nihilist. Since nearly losing her ability to walk, she's calmed down a bit. but maybe not enough?

Fix number three: tone down the aggression. A few well-placed gestures to demonstrate that she's not afraid to take care of herself are better than pages of angsty fight-picking.

Okay, that's some work on Kett's character. Next up, I'll be working on Bael. Meanwhile, I have to try and fix the plot. And believe me, there's a lot of fixing to do...

Where I'm at, part one

Kett's character.

(Okay, but first I'm going to have to tell the joke about the country boy who gets a Harvard scholarship. On his first day, he genially greets a group of well-dressed students: "Hi, y'all. Can you tell me where the library's at?" The snooty students regard him down their noses, and one of them replies, "At Harvard, one does not dress as if one is working on a farm, and neither does one end a sentence with a preposition." The country boy just smiles and says, "I do apologise. Can you tell me where the library's at, assholes?")

Where I am at, apart from procrastinating with bad jokes, is trying to find a way to make Kett's book...well, better. The main problems my editor pointed out are that neither Kett nor Bael are quite likeable enough, and that there appear to be two plots that have nothing to do with each other.

Firstly, Kett's character. Now, I first wrote Kett about five or six years ago, when I first invented this world--

(actually, interesting historical sidebar: way back in the mists of my writing career when I was probably only eighteen or nineteen, I invented an author character who wrote about a world where her main characters were a man with a magical sword, a girl who could sing any note, and a guy who turned into a wolf when it got dark. I got so interested in her characters that I started writing about them instead of her, and dreamt up an adventure where they visited this new world, accompanied by a ditsy girl and a man who'd gone mad. They became Chalia and Striker, and this time I switched to writing about them [do you see my lack of attention span here?]. I wrote about six or seven hundred thousand words about them, including Chalia's doomed affair with Captain Tanner; Chalia becoming Princess Nuala's bodyguard for a short while; Tyrnan being best friend's with Nuala's regal brother, and eventually marrying Nuala; and eventually Chalia and Tyrnan discovering they're actually brother and sister. Later, I thought about what would happen if Striker, the most evil and powerful man in the world, had a daughter. She became Chance, heroine of Almost Human).

--so she's been in my head a long time. In one of those rather terrible early books, Striker finds out that Tyrnan had a teenaged affair that resulted in a daughter who was half shapeshifter. I called her Kett Almet. She was mad in both senses of the word: angry and unhinged. She was a teenage delinquent. She seethed with resentment that she'd a) been turned to stone as a baby and only released as an eight year old; b) her mother had never claimed her so she'd been raised in the Koskwim training house for young mercenaries, leading to c) the other kids making ruthless fun of her for never having learned things that normal eight year olds can do, like walk and talk and eat food; and finally d) her father never having even heard of her existence (although he protested, quite truthfully, that Kett's mother had never tried to contact him, Kett replied equally truthfully that he'd left her absolutely no way of doing so).

Anyway. Bit by bit Kett evolved into a young woman who was frighteningly fearless. She could change her shape into any animal of similar mass, and preferred large predators such as tigers and gryphons. She swore the page blue and never apologised for anything. Frequently changing her shape in public, she quite often forgot clothes and enjoyed other people's embarrassment over this. As she got a bit older and discovered the opposite sex, she developed a voracious sexual appetite, but never had much in the way of interpersonal skills.

In short, when she appeared as Chance's cousin in Almost Human, she was like a wild animal who could turn herself human-shaped. She walked and talked like a human being, albeit a human being who possessed animal grace and swapped punctuation for swearing, but she behaved like a tiger in a zoo who's been zapped one too many times with the cattle prod.

And yet...I decided to make her the heroine of my next book. As Joey Tribbiani put it, "Well, that was a nice move, dumbass."

Reread, rewrite, redo, undo (again)

Kett's book again.

You ever start a book you wish you'd left alone? This one's driving me mad. Perhaps it's because I kept breaking off work on it to write something else that, you know, was actually contracted and might actually make some money, so the book's rather disjointed and I spent a lot of time simply re-reading and trying to remember where I wanted the plot to go. This is, of course, one major disadvantage of being a pantser.

But even when I'd finally got the first draft done, I had a load of work to do. Firstly, it was horribly long (just over 100k, and I already cut some). The plot was a mess. There were scenes full of nothing. So, I beat it onto shape, or into better shape at least, and sent it to my editor who, bless her, has only edited one book of mine, which another editor actually bought. She finally emailed me back today with an "I love it, but," revision request. It's funny, because I met some RNAers for lunch today, and we were talking about revisions and edits; plus I've just been reading Julie Cohen's blog about her revision process.

I need to clean up the plot, because there's too much and none of it makes sense. I also need to make Kett more likeable, because I intended her to be abrasive but apparently she's just a little too unsympathetic. Also, there are several questions my editor asked--such as, why is the hero keeping such a big secret? Would anyone care if he told everyone?--that I'm sure I knew the answers to when I wrote it. I'm going to have to re-read it all now to see if I can figure out what I meant.

I've had a break of several months from this story, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I've got some distance from it, which I find usually makes it easier to fix problems (and I can totally see what she means; I'm not arguing that they are problems). On the other, I can't find any of my damn notes on it from the first time around.

Funny: I've always labelled this 'Kett's book' because I couldn't find a title I liked for it. But the thing is, Kett first apepared in my head as a problem child, a stroppy teenager who could change her shape. She was horribly annoying, but people generally ended up liking her.

Looks like her book's going the same way!

Checking in

I have been writing like mad these last few days. I know, right? It's sort of my job. Well, it is my job. But sometimes it ebbs and sometimes it flows, and this week it's definitely flowing.

A while back I started messing around with a new fantasy universe, in which certain people can utilise the strength of crystals to develop special powers. They're known as Chosen, since they're believed to have been picked by the gods for this, and their talent is manifested by a tattoo-like mark that appears all by itself. The location and pattern of the mark denotes the talent. I don't know why it is I keep writing characters with funky tattoos; I've done at least three for Changeling, off the top of my head, and even the Smart Bitches were commenting on how many paranormal covers have tattooed chicks on them these days.

Anyway. The setting for this story is a world based very loosely on ancient Rome, with a strict social hierarchy of Citizens and peasants and a well-laid-out city with things like drainage. And here my knowledge of Rome stops.

The thing that's kept me from writing historicals in the past is the research. I actually love doing research, you never know what you might find out that sparks off a new idea, but I'm very detail-orientated when I write, and I find myself wanting to know every detail of daily life: clothing, food, routine. Who buys the food and where from. What time people get up in the morning. How they filled their days. If I wanted to know which senator stabbed which emperor in which year, I'd get the info in two clicks on Wikipedia (and then I'd double-check it somewhere else). But social history? Harder to come by!

Names

(okay, the world didn't end. But they're still firing it up)

So, this morning my mum read in the paper that Clarissa Dickson Wright's full name is Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright, which, quite apart from almost being child abuse, must take her forever to initial clauses and correct cheques. The other week I read that Dido's full name is Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong (at least, being a Christmas Day baby, she was spared the cliche of Noelle). And I recalled reading in Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue about a WWI army major labouring under the almost endless name of (take a deep breath) Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati (it gets better) Tollemache-Tollemache-de (still here? keep breathing) Orellana-Plantaganet-Tollemache-Tollemache.

Quite apart from the breathtaking madness of four uses of the same name, I think it's Denys coupled with Fraduati that really gets me. Denys: the guy who sold you your third-hand car. Fraduati: a bohemian artist from Florence.

So, naturally, it got me thinking about character names. My own name, in full, has twenty-one letters and seven syllables (most of which come from my middle name, Elizabeth, without which I've a paltry eleven letters and three common sylables). When I was little, I used to hate being called Kate, very boring and pedestrian, not even Katherine. I preferred Elizabeth. You could be a princess with a name like Elizabeth (I always wanted to be a princess. It was the clothes, you see). There was never a Princess Kate (although give Wills and Kate a few years and we'll see). Now I quite like it, not least because it's easy to spell and people can usually pronounce it correctly.

My characters have to have names that reflect them. Sometimes it happens accidentally, as with Sophie (who was originally called Sally). I gave her the surname Green because I wanted her name to be entirely ordinary (much as Fleming gave James Bond an ordinary name). Later I realised it describes her fledgeling status perfectly. Luke Sharpe, on the other hand, I named purposefully: he's all acute angles and biting wit. He's smart, he's quick, he's a great shot. He is, basically, sharp.

Plus there's a minor pun in his name, or at least there is if you can do a northern accent.

I named Major Harker because I wanted a name that was, again, hard and sharp, but a little less refined, a bit rougher. Harker is a harsh sound, it's unpleasant to say and sounds like it's being barked out--well, he is a military man. He's an officer by virtue of hard work and promotion, not class and commission. His name also has a more literal sense: I ended up cutting a scene in which his 2ic explains that Harker, while never reading memos, always knows what's going on because he has his ear to the ground.

Striker took ages to name. I remember sitting there with my massive thesaurus and a pad of paper, trying to find the right name. I looked up all sort of synonyms for hard, cutting, cruel, harsh--those sorts of names. His love-rival I named Tanner--a warm name, like summer sun or supple leather. Incidentally, I gave them both nicknames or surnames--their real names are Captain Leander Tanner (nearly always addressed by his rank and/or surname; he does Not Like being called Leander) and Ganymedes Lorek (a person Striker stopped being many years ago).

Chance and Dark came, fully-formed, with their names. I can't imagine them being called anything else. Chance is a person who isn't supposed to exist, who's only there in one out of thousands or millions of realities. Dark is someone with a lot of demons inside him. I gave him a proper name, but it didn't seem like it belonged to him.

For me the names have to suit the characters, but also the universe they inhabit. Since I don't write historicals, I don't have to worry so much about accuracy, but even a contemporary character has to have a name that matches their age and social background. You wouldn't have an aging society lady named Chantelle, any more than a modern teenager would be called Doris. For my fantasy characters, I like to have a bit more fun, and sometimes make up names or use obscure ones--although what's obscure to me might be very ordinary to someone else.

Then again, you can have fun with names anywhere. I named Harker's sister-in-law Tallulah Watling-Coburg just because I felt like giving her a silly name (and I felt she could cope with it). Sophie's shadowy associate is called Macbeth, and no one ever finds out his real name (I don't even know it). In The Book That's Still Being Ignored the heroine is called Lolita Muffy, usually shortened to Loli. That was mostly me being silly, but the tone of the book is very light and fun (and it affords the hero, no slouch himself with the name Benedick, plenty of opportunities to playfully tease her).

What are your favourites? Are there names you just can't stand for characters, and why? Do you have favourites? (I keep naming characters Jack and Will, please stop me.)

But the day I in all seriousness call a character Reighnbeaux, feel free to shoot me.

If You're Going To Sing, There'd Better Be A Damn Good Reason

I've been watching Once More With Feeling again. And reading my OMWF scriptbook (it was a gift, okay?). And I've been thinking about things I've learned from the works of Joss Whedon. I've got a list, y'know. No, I really have.


Anyway, what I was reading in my scriptbook was that Joss had wanted to do a musical episode for a while, but hadn't wanted to just stick one in gratuitously. He figured a lot of sitcoms had been doing them, and the songs had just been stuck in for entertainment--they hadn't meant much or explained anything or moved the plot along. In OMWF, he moved along the character arc for pretty much every character, and also the story arc for the whole season. In brief:

Going Through The Motions: the opening number. Buffy sings that since she was brought back from the dead, she's felt as if she's "going through the motions, walking through the part" of being the Slayer, and indeed the sister and friend she's always been. She desperately wants to feel alive again.

Under Your Spell: Tara's love song to Willow. The least obvious of the numbers in terms of subtext...well, apart from all the innuendo at the end. But what Tara's singing is that it's Willow, and her magic, that have brought Tara out. "I'm under your spell, how else could it be anyone would notice me?" The only reason she's feeling so happy and in love is because of her magical girlfriend. But we know Willow's been using too much magic, and she and Tara have rowed about it...and Willow has cast a spell on her girlfriend to make her forget the row. Viewed like this, it's kind of bittersweet that Tara's only so happy because of the one thing that's driving her and Willow apart. In the next episode, Tara leaves Willow, who becomes over-reliant on her magic and spirals into self destruction (note to writers: yes, we get it, Willow's on drugs).

I'll Never Tell: a retro pastiche by Anya and Xander, who are getting married soon. The song exposes their doubts about each other, and about their relationship as a whole: "Am I crazy/Am I dreaming?/Am I marrying a demon?". Is Sunnydale's sparkiest couple going to be able to live happily ever after when they're so riddled with doubt? sure enough, later in the season Xander walks out on the wedding.

Rest In Peace: Spike's Billy Idol-type rock song. Tired of Buffy continually coming to tell him all her problems, without ever considering him to be a friend, Spike tells her to give in to her darker urges or just leave him alone. It exposes the conundrum at the heart of Spike: that he's a soulless, murderous Slayer-killer of a vampire, in love with the one woman who poses a serious threat to his unlife ("There's a traitor here beneath my breast, and it hurts me more than you've ever guessed"). He wants her, but deep down he knows that if she ever gives in, it'll be a betrayal of everything she stands for--everything he loves her for.

Standing: Giles watches Buffy training, and knows he'll have to leave her soon, or she'll never be able to stand on her own two feet and face the world. It's a wonderful description of his fatherly love for Buffy ("I wish I could lay your arms down and let you rest at last, wish I could slay your demons, but now that time is past"), but also his increasing realisation that by protecting her, he's just holding her back. This leads to:

Under Your Spell/Standing Reprise: one of the loveliest numbers, and in fact one of the loveliest duets I can think of. Short and very bittersweet, it reprises Giles and Tara's numbers as they both know they'll have to leave. Tara has just discovered that Willow's been ensorcelling her to forget about their fights--which hurts a great deal as Tara's mind has already been messed with recently, by the evil god Glory ("You know I've been through hell; Willow don't you see, there'll be nothing left of me?"). Giles sings, "Believe me, I don't want to go, and it'll grieve me 'cause I love you so." At the end of this number, we know that Giles isn't going to help Buffy any more, and that Tara isn't going to let Willow use her magic much more, and that both of them are going to have to leave while they still can.

Walk Through The Fire: the 'Tonight' quintet (only, er, there are really four parts: Buffy, Spike, Sweet and the rest of the Scoobies taking turns). After Giles refuses to help Buffy when she learns her sister Dawn has been kidnapped, she walks off by herself. Spike offers to help, but Buffy embarrasses him by mentioning his song, and his humiliating crush on her, so he rescinds his offer.

Buffy still can't seem to feel anything, but she knows she still has to save her sister, even if she dies in the process: "To save the day, or maybe melt away: I guess it's all the same." Spike is incensed that Buffy has walked away from him, and vows to kill her...but can't follow through: "I hope she fries, I'm free if that bitch dies...I'd better help her out." Giles is torn: "Will this do a thing to save her? Am I leaving Dawn in danger? Is my Slayer too far gone to care?" They all know the inevitability of coming together to fight: "We'll see it through, it's what we're always here to do," even if they don't want to.

Something To Sing About: Such a world of explanations in one song! To start with, Buffy, still feeling numb, begs, "Don't give me songs—give me something to sing about." The force of Sweet's demon musical spell (don't ask) compels her to spill her biggest secret, one only Spike knows. When her friends resurrected her, they expected they'd rescued her from a hell dimension. But, "I live in hell, 'cause I've been expelled from Heaven," she tells them, and they're appalled. No wonder she's been so nihilistic lately.

Buffy nearly dances herself to death (cf the Red Shoes), but it's Spike who saves her. Yes, Spike, and he'll continue to save her, physically and spiritually, until the series finally ends. "Life's not a song, life isn't bliss, life is just this: it's living."

Where Do We Go From Here: The gang have all revealed things they didn't want to, and now they're all appalled by what their friends and family know about them. "The curtains close on a kiss, God knows, we can tell the end is near." Nobody really knows where to go, except for Spike who gets sick of the whole singing thing and escapes before he does something really embarrassing. But he's too late: Buffy catches up to him, and while she sings, "This isn't real, but I just want to feel," he replies, "I died so many years ago, but you can make me feel," and then...well, then they both make each other feel something, and finally kiss.

But while some fans (like me) were jumping up and down screaming happily, Buffy and Spike weren't quite riding off into the sunset. Because their physical relationship is just about feeling something, killing the numbness, it's hardly healthy. both of them eventually come to realise that their relationship is destroying Buffy, and Spike has even sung, "You're scared, ashamed of what you feel." Because he's a vampire, and soulless, and she can't let herself love him. And because he's a soulless beast, when she ends it Spike can't really let her go, which is where the attempted rape comes in, and...

Okay, now I've veered off into another lesson. We'll call that one I Love You, But... and it can be all about conflict.

The point about OMWF is this: that while it's spectacular and entertaining, it's also very important in the story arc. Take it away, and you've lost a lot of the impetus of season six, and indeed seven. And a lot of the things that five was building to. So...the lesson for writing? Don't put set pieces in to make things more shiny. You'll end up like the Transformers movie, which I watched last night, and I still haven't figured out why the big set piece ending was in a city centre (you're hiding a MacGuffin you know these gigantic destructive robots are after, and you're on the Nevada/Arizona border. You're surrounded by nothing. So what do you do? Take it to the middle of the desert, of which there is a local abundance, or to a heavily populated area where the gigantic robots can destroy buildings and kill people?). The only possible reason is that it's really spectacular in a city. Sand isn't so exciting.


Gratuitous scenes are...well, pointless. Look at all those books leaping on the erotic romance bandwagon. All that sex crammed between the pages...you can take most of it out and the story is unchanged. And that might as well be porn. The sex should alter the relationship, the character development, it shouldn't just be there to titilate. Same goes for the sort of conflict that relies on a Big Mis--can it be solved by a simple explanation? Yes? Then why can't you explain? The reason why...that's your conflict. If there is no reason why, then there's no conflict at all.

See, back on conflict again. Bad Kate. Save it for another day.

I never really loved you anyway

The thing is, I'm not exactly new to the whole submission process. I've been (in many cases ill-advisedly) submitting books to publishers for, oh, maybe five years now. I know it can take forever and a day to get a response. I know things get lost. I know sometimes the Royal Mail just throws a hissy fit and decides that today, they're going to eat ice creams instead of delivering the post; but still. Sometimes you wait and you wait and you wait, and then a year after you put your baby in the mail you just think: well, fine. I didn't want to be published by you anyway.

Not even when several authors I like personally as well as professionally have published books with them. Recently. Submitted just before me and had the book published last month. See, a book being published in under a year--and mine hasn't even been read. And it's only three chapters. Maybe they're really chewy, hard-going chapters, and it's so hard to read it's taken the submissions editor a week to get through each paragraph. In which case, at the end of the first hour she should have put a form rejection in the mail.

And it's not as if several authors I know have singled me out to say, "You should definitely write for this line!" Oh no, wait, it is.

And I emailed in January to ask if they'd got it. So I can't blame the post office for not delivering it twelve months ago.

But like the Murphy's, I'm not bitter. I mean, I'm not the only one who's waited forever and ever to hear back on an unsolicited partial, am I?

Am I?

Ack, this is depressing. Let's look at a picture of Daisy being adorable instead.

Reread, rewrite, redo, undo

Ah, the self-editing process. Self-loathing, more like it. The part where you look at a manuscript that's just not selling, and conclude that it must indeed be absolute rubbish. So do you give up on it, or try and fix it?

Me, I can stubbornly hold onto a book for years before concluding it's not going to work. And even then, as with the Sophie books, sometimes they come off the shelf and sell eventually. But I, Spy? had to be rewritten, especially at the beginning, a gazillion times.

So, here I'm looking at the Untied Kingdom with a view to sending it out. Despite it once more getting rejected. Twice. Last week. I can't see anything especially wrong with the opening, but in looking at the next couple of chapters I've cut loads of rambling crap out and replaced it. With what might turn out to be more streamlined crap, but you never know. I certainly don't.

The thing is, I love this story. And I know I'm not the great arbiter of what's going to sell (boy howdy would I be rich if I was!), but I can't be that off. Can I?

RNA conference notes--part five: Sunday afternoon

These appear to be the last set of conference notes I have! I actually found a lot of Julie's advice here really useful for revising Kett's book.

Julie Cohen: Pacing—it isn’t just what you do in Jimmy Choos while waiting for The Call.

It sure isn’t. I don’t own any Choos. I’ve only ever seen one pair in real life (Alysia, you know I’d nick them if they were in my size!).

Anyway. Pacing, as explained by the not-at-all-hungover Julie Cohen, is about being a Timelord (here we both regretted that she didn’t have a David Tennant picture to display) and controlling your reader’s experience of time. We’ve all experienced the OMG of sitting down to read a little of your book while dinner’s cooking, only to look up what seems to be minutes later, and find your kitchen filling with smoke. The book changed your experience of time, so you didn’t notice the minutes ticking by, or indeed the smoke alarm going off.

How to do this? It does depend on how long the book is. Julie writes short contemporaries for M&B Modern Heat (about 55k, I think) and longer books for Little Black Dress, which are nearly twice as long. In the LBDs, there’s more room for subplots, downtime and introspection, that there isn’t in a shorter book.There’s also space for more worldbuilding and the action can take place over a longer time period.

But all this can slow the pace of a book down. The basic thing you want to do is to make the slow, boring bits of life go faster, and the fast, exciting bits go slower. Lots of conflict slows down the pace, which is exactly what you want for the big dramatic moments in your book—you don’t want them to be over in a twinkling.

Similarly, there are certain bits of exposition that are necessary, but maybe not all that exciting. These could do with being speeded up or incorporated into another scene. You never, ever want your reader to have an excuse to put the book down, or worse, skim bits. You want your reader to burn her dinner (well, you don’t really, but you know what I mean).

Be efficient in your writing. Don’t waste time with things that aren’t relevant, and try to make each scene have two or more purposes. This isn’t about what happens in the scene, but about what it actually does for the story. Does it move the plot or subplot along? Are your characters being developed? Does the scene create environment/atmosphere/conflict? Does it impart information?

Revise for pace. Don’t try and cram it all in on your first draft. Julie often prints out her scenes and writes down what each one actually does in terms of the above. If you do this and discover that you have scenes doing nothing but imparting information, you might want to consider rewriting those scenes, as they’re going to be quite slow. Try to start, and end, each scene with a hook.

Vary the mood, topic, style and theme of your scenes. Julie gave us a breakdown of the first act of Romeo and Juliet with a bullet-point list of what happens. Shakespeare varies, in almost every scene, the tone and style of the language—the younger lovers, the older parents, the aristocracy, the servants. He alternates high drama with comedic moments or fanciful, romantic scenes. The combination is different in almost every scene, and thus a whole lot happens, the world is built and the characters introduced all in the first act, without the pace dropping for a moment.

If you have secrets to impart in your story, try to hand them out gradually. Reveals are dramastic, and they keep the reader coming back for more. Slow down these moments, make them full of emotion and drama. If they pass too quickly, they’ll just vanish and your secret-keeping will have been in vain.

Julie compared novels to comic books (her forthcoming LBD is about a comic book artist), where all the action takes place in the white space, call the gutter. Don’t be afraid of white spaces in your books—use them to break up scenes. They allow time to lapse without filling in pages of boring, “and then this happened, and then that”.

What should you speed up, or even skip altogether?

Coffee and shopping scenes. In films they’re always cut down to montages anyway. These scenes don’t actually do anything (unless the coffee meeting or shoe shopping is the backdrop for important revelations!).

Descriptions for the sake of it. You can tell me the minutest details about your heroine’s outfit, but unless those details are relevant in the scene—the over-tight corset that makes her faint, or the borrowed shoes that cause her to stumble—it’s all completely pointless. Ditto surroundings. This ties in with what Anna said in her workshop on settings, that there should be an emotional connection to the setting, and your characters need to interact with it. If there isn’t, and they don’t, then why are you telling me about it?

Things that are necessary in real life but not in fiction. Your character is driving--I don't need t0o know every gear change. I don't need to know about every meal they eat or how often they use the bathroom (I really don't). There’s a Jude Deveraux book (I can’t remember which one, and I’m not about to go through all twenty-twelve of my books to find out!) where the heroine is a cook, and she makes lots of jam. The reader is treated to page after page of nothing but checking temperatures and boiling sugar, or whatever it is you do in jam-making. I’d tell you, but I was so bored I skipped pages at a time, so I have no idea.

Naturalistic but unnecessary dialogue. I was reading a book the other day—and mercifully I’ve forgotten what it was—where every single word spoken by everyone in every conversation was recorded. You and I know that when you make a phonecall you start off with the pleasantries, but your reader knows this too, and doesn’t need to read, ‘Sarah picked up the phone and dialled Jane’s number. “Hello?” said Jane. “Hello, Jane, it’s me,” Sarah replied. “Sarah?” “Yes. How are you?” Sarah asked. “I’m fine, how are you?” Jane replied. “I’m very excited about the date I had last night,” Sarah said.’ See? Disaster. Your reader has skimmed most of that. If your narration just runs, ‘Sarah called her best friend and said, “Jane, I’m so excited about the date I had last night…”’ you’ve imparted the same amount of information without boring anyone.

Bits at the start and end of the scene. Start with a hook, and go straight in. Don’t re-cap anything.

Resist the Urge to Explain. Remember the jam story? Have R.U.E. painted on your keyboard. Remember about keeping secrets? Your readers are smart people. They’d like to think they’ve figured things out for themselves without being told in every scene what’s going to happen, what’s happening and what’s just happened. Don’t be afraid to cut anything that’s not useful or entertaining.

Analyse your pacing after the fact—especially if you're like me and Julie, and can’t plot in advance. Julie said that for Girl From Mars she made a quick summary of everything that happened in a chapter, then made a chart marking out who was in the chapter, and what was happening with them. Each character got a coloured dot—a small one if their presence didn’t make much of an impact, and a big one if something important was happening to them. This way, she can tell if there are different things happening in each chapter; if there’s a big dot in each chapter; if there’s something from each character thread in each chapter. It’s useful in seeing what the important thing in each chapter is. Can you cut the rest?

I bastardised a version of this for Kett’s book (which despite a list of potential titles running over two pages, still doesn’t bloody have one), which I know is over-long and has pacing problems. My version has columns for character and plot development, and then for the tone and content of the scene—one each for humour, love, lust, drama, and hate. I put in varying shades of each colour for varying degrees of content. Sounds complicated, but it enabled me to see where there were chapters with lots of plot development, but apparently no humour, love, lust, drama or hate. The characters didn’t develop much either.

See the highlighted box near the top? Skim along to the right, and you'll see only one colour there—plot development. But absolutely nothing else. That's the Hateful Chapter Five, which has since been fixed, to be funnier, sexier, and less hateful.


On the other hand, I could see where the Black Moment fell by the big dark colours in each column. The Drama and Hate columns had lots of colour there, but after that the Hate column got paler, while the Love one got darker.

It’s all about using what tools work for you. If you’re a better plotter than I am (and I can’t even write notes on my plots, or the creative bit of my brain just goes on strike) then you might not need all this. But if your book is plodding a bit, try using some of Julie’s advice to tighten it up a bit.

I really do want to write about superheroes

The thing is, I wrote about superheroes before, and it flopped. Badly. It was going to be a whole series (for the three or four of you who bought it, that's why the whole supervillain thing was never resolved) but after the first book failed so badly, no more were commissioned. That's the thing with series. The first one has really got to succeed.

Perhaps it was because Naked Eyes was an erotic romance, and supers don't do so well in the erotosphere? (new word, like it?) I was thinking of a new book more along the Sophie lines--non-erotic (although there may well be some sexx0ring) one central character, a couple of love interests, sequels, save the world, diet-to-fit-into-supersuit, etc.

Or maybe it's that superheroes do well in comic books, and on the big screen, but not in books.

Or maybe it just sucked.

Thoughts? Reactions?

Heat Stroke cover

Yes... isn't it hot? Props to Renee George who designed it! Fifteen Minutes from the Sun is a little short story snippet about two hot people on a shuttle facing meltdown. I'm flexing my sci-fi muscles here, people.

RNA conference notes--part four: Sunday morning

I've categorised these into their own folder, so if you click the '2008 RNA Conference' link at the bottom of this post, it will bring up all my conference reports for this year.

Kate Walker: Get yourself out there! Internet publicity

Kate gave an entertaining and informative talk on how and why to market yourself online. As Steven Williams of Midas PR noted, the Internet is one of the biggest marketing tools there is, and authors really can’t afford to miss out on it. If you’re not on the Internet, you don’t exist to a lot of readers. They might have heard of you through a different medium, but when they come to look you up online to find out more about you and your books, they’re not going to waste too much time if they can’t find information quickly.

The best way to do this is with your own website. Kate gave a 20 P Guide to getting your website right. Most of these pertain to a website; but could also be relevant to a blog.

1. Popular. Make people come back to your site again and again. If your site is popular, word of it will spread. Get a stat counter so you can find out who is visiting your site, and where from. Google Analytics will do this for you, entirely for free. Tracking information tells you how many visits you’ve had each day, and where they come from. And that ‘where’ is pretty comprehensive. It tells you not only which websites have referred visitors to your site (for instance clicking on the link to katejohnson.co.uk on the left would show up on my stat counter as a referral from etaknosnhoj.blogspot.com); which search terms they have typed in to find your site (ie did they Google for Kate Johnson, Sophie Green, Samhain books, ebooks, spy mysteries, mad pink book covers, etc); and even which part of the world they’ve come from (I can even tell which town…apparently I’m popular in Cambridge and Reading).

One word of warning is against visible stat counters (you know, that tell you you’re the 1,684,325th visitor to the site), unless you really do have a lot of visitors. Telling readers that only twelve other people have looked at your site since 2001 isn’t likely to boost your popularity.

2. Pertinent. Make the website directly about you and your books. You can put other stuff on there as well, but make sure that you’ve got the info readers want: what your books are about, where/when they’re available, what they look like, and who you are.

3. Personality (but not Personal). Make the site reflect your personality as a writer. Are your books girlie and fun? Are they dark and serious? Try matching your web design to the designs on your books (Anna Louise Lucia did this to great effect with her website). If you write serious historicals, you probably don’t want a site with orange and green sparkles all over it (if you write sparkling romantic comedy, like Julie Cohen, that’s much more appropriate!). The tone of the website should also match your tone as a writer, perhaps to a lesser extent, ie you could make it more humorous if you write comedy.

Don’t confuse personality with personal. Your website doesn’t need to be cluttered with the details of your daily life—keep this for your blog.

4. Professional. A bad site is worse than no site. Home made sites look home made. And for the love of God, check for spelling errors. If people are coming to you’re website, there going to loose they’re faith in you if your not bothering to check their for bad grammer.

5. Promotion/Promotions. Build an image. Don’t do the hard sell, readers hate it. Don’t forget we’re in the entertainment industry, and while we might not be featured in Heat (thank God), readers still want to know about authors, they’re interested in personality.

Use promotions such as contests and blog parties to build interest. Offer a signed copy to one lucky winner, or a relevant trinket (I made a Christmas ornament featuring the cover of my first Christmas novella, and gave it away as a prize, for instance). But don’t do these too often, and beware professional contest enterers, who are just in it for the prize and not interested at all in you. Oh, and if you’re offering a signed anything, always make it a personal signature—it deters wannabe eBay sellers!

6. Protect yourself. Assert copyright, and never give out personal contact details on your site. Use a different email address than the one you have for personal stuff. There are crazies out there.

7. Purchase. Make it easy for people to buy your books. And I mean really easy. It’s a good idea to have a buy link to your newest book on your homepage (the first page people see when they type in your website address). Link your site to directly to your book’s page at online booksellers like Amazon and Waterstones. A lot of big chains have affiliate programs where if a reader uses the special Amazon link to buy your book, you get commission. Getting paid twice for one book, brilliant!

8. Print. Whatever you print out for promotional purposes—bookmarks, letterheads, business cards, t-shirts—put your website address on it. You don’t even really need to bother with the www bit—every single web address starts with this—but don’t forget the suffix, the .com or .co.uk or whatever. Make your web address stick in people’s minds. Make it easy for them to look you up. And keep business cards/postcards/whatever with you all the time (I keep business cards in my purse, postcards in my bag, and my mum carries my cards with her everywhere too!).

My own advice for printed materials is to use Vistaprint. Their usual method of charging you for everything, from uploaded images to colour printing, is pretty annoying but there is a brilliant get-out. Sign up for their special offers and, sooner or later, an email will arrive in your inbox offering you stuff for free. Upload an image for free, choose colour printing for free, then order a hundred postcards (the only downside is you'll have to do your own images, but they do give you guidelines and you can probably do them using whatever imaging software came with your computer). You'll pay for postage, nothing more. Order another hundred, and pay the postage there. It's still cheaper than ordering two hundred and paying the full price!

9. Present. As in, not in the past. Keep your website up to date. I’m personally not a fan of those ‘newest updates!’ bits you get on some homepages—they don’t tell me anything useful at all. But make sure your newest book is right there for people to see the minute it’s available. No; before that. The minute you know about it. Get your cover up there ASAP. Release dates. Let people know things in advance.

As before, this isn’t the place to announce every detail. Keep the less relevant details to your blog and just put the concrete details on your homepage: your newest title, its cover and release date, maybe the ISBN and a quick blurb. The wrangles with your editor over said cover and blurb can be detailed on your blog!

10. Past. As in, your backlist. Your website isn’t just to advertise your newest book. It’s to advertise all your books, your entire career. Don’t put all the info on your homepage, but do make it easy to get to. It’s recommended that all important information should be no more than two clicks away—don’t make people load page after page, they’ll get bored and go away.

If, like me, you write in series, then it’s a good idea to post a list of these on your website. If, like me, these are slightly labyrinthine, you might want to put some thought into how you’ll do this! For my Cat Marsters books, which are both novels and novellas, print and e-book, in single- and multi-author series, it took me a while to work this out in a way that made me happy (I divided them into print or ebook, and then series or standalone). A reading order is also a good idea for your series.

11. Project. Figure out what sort of image you want to project. This is tied to your Personality. What sort of colours match your image? Bright, pale, dark? What sort of pictures and logos do you want?

I spent a while coming up with ideas for my two sites. I wanted them to look similar, so you could tell they advertised the same person, but writing two different kinds of books. Kate Johnson got a pink theme to go with the black, and Cat Marsters got purple. Since the books I have as Kate Johnson are spy stories, albeit rather silly ones, I used a black background, blocky fonts and made my header image with a few key elements: the silk background, the gun, the lipstick (I have those two on my business cards too) and the lines of code. To foil the darkness and match the girlieness of the books, I made the main colour pink.

For Cat Marsters, who writes erotic romance, the theme was simpler, although it took me a while to get the image of the naked girl right—didn’t want her to be too naked! I was going for that Sophie Dahl poster—you know the one I mean. To counter the dark sexiness, the titles are all written in a breezy purple font—purple traditionally being a signifier of passion, as well as one of my favourites.

12. People. Who are you aiming at? Will your target audience appreciate black and pink, or will it put them off? Try not to age yourself.

Think of your global audience. One of the massive advantages of the Internet is that it’s not constricted by time or distance…although language can be a barrier. If your books are translated, consider adding a Babelfish widget to your site, which can automatically translate it (although such translations can be a bit comical!).

13. Pictures. These make a site SO much more interesting! And covers of your books are very necessary. You want people to be able to recognise them easily.

Make sure you’re using images with a reasonable resolution, but size them so they’re not overwhelmingly big. Large images take forever to load, and people get bored and give up. Don’t cram a page with too many images, as this also affects the time it takes for a page to load (people on dial-up won’t thank you). That author photo again…it can be a matter of pride! You can always cheat and have an obscured photo—taken from behind, or just showing your hands at the keyboard—if you really don’t want to post your ugly mug on the Internet.

But as mentioned above, readers do want to know about you as a person. There’s a school of thought that says your author photo ought to be appropriate to the kind of books you write—the leather-jacketed mystery writer, the chick-lit author in fabulous heels, etc—but I’m not so sure it’s necessary. Approachability is what you’re aiming for, but perhaps try to keep your writing personality in mind.

14. Promote. If you have a web presence, use it to promote your website. We’ve mentioned including your web address on your printed matter, but don’t forget to include it in your email signature—at least, your professional email—and when you post on forums and message boards. Again, you want people to become familiar with it. More people read forums than post on them—there are a lot of lurkers—and it’s free publicity.

15. Posting. This is simple: post up-to-date-information. Keep updating your site and make sure it’s current.

If you have a blog, keep it current. Don’t let it fester, unloved, for weeks at a time. Some people post to their blogs several a day, some only once or twice a week. Whatever you do, try to maintain consistency, and don’t forget to be professional. Although here, more so than in the body of your website, you can get a lot more personal.

16. Prompt. As soon as you have information, add it to your website. Don’t leave it until the day before publication to show people your book cover!

17. Procrastinate. No, not you. Other people—make your website a procrastination tool! Make people spend ages tootling around finding what you have to offer. Add information that’s relevant to the books: perhaps some details about the research you did; things that didn’t make it into the books; the music that inspired you; explain things that are briefly mentioned in the book—for instance all the movie quotes in Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation are listed on her website.

A blog is a great procrastination tool. If you’re going to have one, make it very easy for people to find from your site. Some people have their blogs integrated to their sites, some have them separate, like mine (I’ve considered integration, but running it on two sites would make it more difficult). But make sure people can find it easily.

18. Purpose. Remember what your purpose is: to sell books. Whatever else you do with your site, make people want to buy your books, and make it easy for them to do so.

19. Presentation. See #4 re: spelling errors! Most programs come with spellcheckers these days (and as for posting on blogs, you can get a spellchecker add-on for Mozilla Firefox that checks your spelling as you type. You can probably get the same for Internet Explorer, but then why would you when Firefox is so much better?).

20. Pretty (and pussy cats). Make your site appealing. Make it pretty, but don’t sacrifice readability.

As for pussy cats, Kate Walker says she often puts pictures and snippets of info about her cats on her website, and has even produced a cat calender of them, but some readers don’t seem to like it. For what it’s worth, my experience has been the opposite: I get more readers and more comments when I post pictures of my furbabies on my blog.



Caroline Sheldon: It’s tough out there—shortening acceptance odds.

Caroline Sheldon, who has run her own literary agency for over twenty years, gave an informative talk on what agents are looking for now in the UK market.

Since the collapse of the net book agreement, big bookselling chains and supermarkets have taken over, and what they’re interested in is bestsellers. This means that independent booksellers and midlist authors are really losing out—nobody can afford to stock books they can’t guarantee will sell, and so fewer and fewer authors are being stocked. Publishers have also conglomerated into supergroups, and are looking for fewer titles and lots of bestsellers.

The minimum sales publishers are looking for are 4-5k hardback, 15k paperback. And yes, hardbacks are still desirable, to publishers at least, because they get onto lists like the Sunday Times bestsellers, which have lots of marketing clout. The midlist has been cut right back, with half the number of books per month. Publisher are always asking for something fresh, new and different…but not too fresh, new and different, or it might not sell.

What seems to be in favour right now are: romantic comedies, chick-lit (despite the doom-and-gloom forecasts. The glut of bandwagon-jumpers seems to be over, and peopke are still buying the good stuff) and its older sister mum-lit. Gothics and weepies are on the rise, and sagas—in the sense of big sweeping stories—are still popular. Quality historicals, like Philippa Gregory’s, are very popular (although Philippa Gregory denies that she writes romance. Despite winning the RNA’s main award!). Caroline accepts fantasy and paranormal books, which she thinks may be about to break through, but isn’t keen on science fiction.

What do you need to catch an agent’s eye? A catchy title helps a lot, and a gripping first line and paragraph. There are more agents than there used to be, but in the current publishing climate, you’re better with one than without one.

Caroline accepts submissions by email and post, but prefers post. She doesn’t print out many of the emails she’s been sent. The query letter is important, and a very short synopsis of one double-spaced page is preferred. She says perhaps one in twenty submissions, or maybe even forty, is re-read. Unusually among agents, she likes submissions in bright coloured folders—it makes them easier to find in the slush pile!