The Other End of the Year Post

Well, essentially 2012 was the year of The Copper Promise. As you might remember, it was around this time last year that I released the very first part onto the wild plains of Amazon; The Copper Promise: Ghosts of the Citadel was supposed to be the first in a series of short sword and sorcery novellas. They were supposed to be fast, written and released one after the other, and they were supposed to be short.

 

And then while I was writing part two, at the beginning of this year, several things happened at once to change that. Firstly, I realised that releasing each part after I’d written it just wasn’t going to work – maybe if it was a silly thing that didn’t really matter, I could get away with that, but TCP was growing more complicated, and if I wanted it to be good, I would need to be able to go back and polish. And that was the other major thing: The Copper Promise was growing. I loved the characters, who felt frighteningly real to me, and I loved the story, which had accidentally grown into some sort of weird epic/pulp hybrid.

 

So I threw out the idea of instant gratification and wrote parts 2, 3 and 4 in 2012. And then I redrafted, and edited, and then edited some more, and ended up with a book nearly twice as long as anything else I’d written (it’s still too long). And what happens to it now? Well, that is the question.

 

Thanks to some quirks of fate and a writing buddy who always seems to know what’s going on before I do (I’m looking at you, Adam) The Copper Promise ended up on the desk of the fabulous Juliet Mushens of the Agency Group, and in a sudden twist of awesomeness that I’m still getting my head around, I got an agent. Undoubtedly one of the highlights of my year was meeting Juliet for the first time (who is every bit as sharp and hilarious in real life) and hearing her quote bits of my book back at me. I mean, you wouldn’t think that would be weird, but it is. In a brilliant way. Next year proves to be very interesting indeed.

 

There were other things happening in 2012, of course. After ignoring it for a year I finally summoned up the courage to read and edit my Urban Fantasy book The Snake House, and much to my huge surprise I didn’t totally hate it. I also started work on a YA Fantasy book called London-Under-Sea (all weird religion, sea monsters and fishpunk) although that is on hold for the moment while I revise The Copper Promise. In non-book stuff Mass Effect 3 came out and proved that it is indeed the greatest video game series of all time, if not the greatest SF trilogy of all time, and I sobbed and cheered my way through it in an epically messy fashion. I finally watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and utterly fell in love with it.

 

Other, more random moments of 2012: I saw two sets of friends get married and danced at their weddings, I wore a corset for the first time and didn’t die, I oversaw new episodes of Dark Fiction Magazine, and I attended Bristolcon, which was brilliant. I got hugged by a wookie in Wales, saw my name in the acknowledgements of a real, live book (twice, technically) and partially helped nag my lovely boyfriend into taking up writing regularly again.

 

And that’s all I can really remember at the moment – no doubt I’ll have left something significant off the list, but all in all, I reckon I can chalk 2012 up as a goodun’. Wishing you all a fantastic new year full of excellence and joy!

 

Editing, the Second Draft and Serious Business

So the second draft of Ink for Thieves is finally finished. I’ll probably need to give it one more read through before I pass it on to my brave and wily beta reading team, but for now the big chunk of work is done. At least, on that book it is. The next couple of months will see more pulling out of hair and knuckle chewing as I read my way through the rough draft of Dead Zoo Shuffle and realise exactly how much delicate surgery that book needs before it’s readable- along with plenty of merry hacking, amputating and other bloody works.

 

Last night I remembered something Stephen King mentions in his book, On Writing. He said, (I may be paraphrasing slightly here) that you “shouldn’t come lightly to the page”. The first time I read that I don’t think I really understood what he was talking about. I thought perhaps he was suggesting that writing, real writing, was always hard work and could never be fun, which clearly wasn’t true at all. Now, having slogged my way through my first novel-length edit and emerged with what is, hopefully, a much shinier and sexier book, I think I’m starting to understand.

 

I think he’s talking about an acceptance of the sheer work involved. Yes, it’s fun and there are moments when the story suddenly comes together and the characters wander off to do what they want, and then the writing is exhilarating, but what you are doing is serious business. It is art. And you may well have to write this damn book over and over again until it is any good, and that thought is daunting, but no one ever said this was going to be a walk in the park, where gnomes massage your toesies and butterflies waft their secret songs into your ear holes. Much of the time in fact it’s rather more like heaving a giant dung ball on your back (that may or may not have a diamond secreted in it somewhere) and hauling it to the top of an impossibly tall mountain while goats with sarcastic eyebrows frown at you in a judgemental manner. But that’s alright because this is hardcore, this is SRS BSNS.

 

At least, I think that’s what he was talking about.

The Tasty Joy of Finishing the First Draft

So, I finished the first draft of Dead Zoo Shuffle a couple of days ago. The last few chapters took a little longer than I anticipated, although so far every single book has been the same; you think you've got the ending all figured out, and then it throws up a few little surprises just when you're convinced you're on the home stretch.

This book has been an interesting journey. It was my first attempt at crime (er, as a genre, I didn't do any actual bank robbing) and  my first attempt at novel length first-person narrative. It was the first book I planned chapter by chapter and my first real experiment with the trappings of science-fiction. And I think the risks paid off, at least in terms of how much I enjoyed the writing. In many ways I feel like I found my voice with this story, or the beginnings of it.

There's an awful lot of work still to be done, of course, with the editing and redrafting already looking to be a big job, and there's plenty of stuff I know needs to be tightened, or added, or cut entirely. Unusually though I'm looking forward to it (remind me of this when I actually come to edit the thing, I'm sure I'll be less enthusiastic then).

So now I'm putting Dead Zoo Shuffle aside for a short time while I finish polishing Ink for Thieves. I'm also starting to put together notes on a potential fantasy/steampunk novel called The Iron-Haunted Heart, a project that's been bouncing down my mental rapids for a while now (no, I don't know either) and fiddling about with a couple of short stories. I said in January that this would be the year for editing and submitting, didn't I?  So as much as I might like writing books and then putting them in a drawer to forget about, I do believe it is time to embrace the red pen...

The End Is In Sight- A Small Writing Update

I’ve not done a writing update for a little while, so here’s a wee quickie.

 

Dead Zoo Shuffle currently stands at 98,000 words, and is reasonably close to being completed- I would say between another 5,000-10,000 words and I’ll be able to write THE END in a giant font and dance around the room. I already know that DZS will need a heavy beating with the editing stick, not to mention the addition of an entire subplot that needs to go in there somewhere, so the work is far from over. Still, I’ll be glad to have the first draft under my belt at least.

 

This is a strange stage. Now that I’m so close, finishing the book seems, for the first time, inevitable. At no other point in the first draft do I feel like I’m definitely going to get to the end. I spend most of the draft convinced that I will lose all energy and enthusiasm and splutter out at around the 65,000 word mark (I usually get this feeling most intensely at the 60,000 word mark, funnily enough). So this is a nice place to be. Another week, two weeks, and I’ll get there if I keep plodding on. Although, Marshall and Zootsi have been so much fun to write that I’m glad there’s going to be at least two books in the DZS series - I couldn’t bear to part with them at the moment!

 

So I'm thinking I need to develop some sort of writer's ritual for finishing the book. You know, type THE END, sit back, light a cigar. Or have a glass of wine. Or break open that special box of chocolates. Or sprint round the block banging a saucepan with a dessert spoon whilst singing Lady GaGa's Bad Romance.

Any suggestions? And if you're a writer, do you have a ritual?

Sauce

Just a brief update to say that so far this year, I am more or less behaving myself.

I don't really do New Year's resolutions, but the two words I do have in mind at the moment are EDIT and SUBMIT. Every six to twelve months-ish Marty and I will have what we call a "planning session" down the pub, where we get bits of paper and make lists of what we want to have done by when, and what we need to do to get it done. It's possibly the most informal planning session ever, with plenty of drink, doodling and amusing names for our plans, but I find it very pleasing and we stick our bits of paper up on the box room wall for all to see (us and the cat). Thanks to my aversion to a) editing and b) showing anyone my work, edit and submit were featured very highly on my list this year.

My current schedule is writing in the morning, editing in the evening. As simple as that, but, amazingly, I seem to be making some progress. Stuff that needs tidying up is getting tidier, and the Steampunk story is chuntering along slowly (Dead Zoo Shuffle is briefly on hold while I sort this thing out).

So let's hope I can keep up my slow and steady progress, and 2011 might be the year I let another human soul read one of my books for the first time. Possibly.