Trying to do the right thing…

So last night, on the Seven News in Sydney, reporter Damien Smith tried to do the right thing in terms of observing the cultural complexities of Australia Day and failed miserably.

Spoken while standing on the shore of Sydney Harbour, the Opera House in the background - ‘Ever since the white settlers sailed through here 220 years ago, the harbour has been admired for it’s beauty.’

So, points for calling the first fleet ‘the white settlers’ and trying to be sensitive to Indigenous Australians, but FAIL for thinking they hadn’t admired the beauty of the harbour for the centuries before white man arrived.

Some thoughts on revising and rewriting

Been a while, I know, but for the past couple of weeks I was posting over here: http://fantasywritersonretreat.wordpress.com/ The retreat was fabulous, thanks for asking. Finished copyedits of book one, re-wrote book two based on reader feedback and did a bit of reading – not as much as I would have liked.

You’ll note that I’ve said ‘book one’ and ‘book two’ and not ‘insert title here’. That’s cause ‘insert title here’ isn’t altogether set, not for any of the books. I’m guessing a decision will be made soon – HarperCollins will start trying to convince booksellers to order the book next months.

Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about how I’m revising and rewriting at the moment, cause it’s become a different thing over the past couple of years. Initially, I had a series of steps worked out that I went through – I’d do up a write of each scene, and see how it was going, and I’d do a character plan, and I’d read aloud for dialogue and then sentence structure and then I’d check spelling and grammar. That’s probably why book one went through a total of ten drafts (holy cow!)

Book two will be eight drafts, book three less than that (I’m envisaging around six) and I think five to six drafts will be the most I’ll do from now on. That’s cause the system appears to be developing as follows:

1) Draft zero – after a certain amount of planning and research, I’ll sit down and write the story out. For me, this is a time to discover the land, to meet and become good friends with the characters and to try a few ideas. At the end, the real plot and story will be clear.

2) Draft one – Knowing what I know, I’ll now write the real story.

3) Draft two – Immediately after finished draft one, I’ll plot it against something Cat Sparks showed me – Michael’s Hauge’s Screenplay Structure.  If there’s also a strong romance plot, I’ll run that through the romance story structure provided in Valerie Parv’s The Art of Romance Writing. This gives me an overview of how the story is coming together – is the overall pace working well. I’ll then put it aside for a few weeks and let this ferment. When I sit down, I’ll have identified some of the weaknesses and I’ll decide to whip some characters out, put others in, change parts of the plot, speed bits up and slow bits down. Then I’ll give it to my first round of beta-readers.

4) Draft three – After letting the novel rest again for a month or so, I’ll read through beta-reader comments (and meet with a couple). I’ll also plot the pace of the novel out, to see if it’s lagging in any  particular areas (based on blog posts by Justine Larbelestier and Scott Westerfeld. Then, based on those thoughts, more rewriting. Once that’s done, I’ll give it to a couple more readers.

5) Draft four – Bit more resting, bit more thinking, bit more feedback. Polish, check spelling and grammar, read aloud to make sure it’s not total crock, and start submitting.

Note that all the things I said used to be my steps of rewriting – writing up scenes, character plans and so on – have become a much more internal thing – as my writing’s improved, I’ve gotten better at recognising straight away if a scene is achieving what it should, or if I’ve not worked through a character well enough because I’m having problems writing their response to something.

This won’t be the end – I’ll have to do more rewriting based on feedback from publishers and editors, but that’s how it’s panning out for me. If you’ve gotten to the point that you can finish a novel, but you’re not sure how to polish, maybe some of the ideas that I’m following might work for you too.

One deadline done, another looms

I mailed the copy-edits in yesterday. I like the little sub-plots that have developed in this process of working with HarperVoyager. In particular, there’s all this political manoeuvring and extreme manifestations that I’m really enjoying playing with. They’ve also given me great stuff to move into book two.

So now I’m onto book two, and I’m doing some rearranging, bringing some parts of the plot forward so there’s more happening at the beginning. I may have to re-think the initial elements of the romance – get them in the sack faster, cause they spend a lot of time sitting around angsting about getting together and it takes up wordage that I can use on stuff like monster attacks and threatening their lives and so on.

Have I mentioned how much I LOOOOOVE my job?

Copy-editing progress

The plan was to send the edits back to the publisher today. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Christmas/travelling/landlords/back problems got in the way. So I am hauling the mass of pages over to Berry and the new plan is to have it in the mail by Friday.

This was also impacted by not being one hundred percent sure HOW to tackle the changes necessary. My editor identified three things (all backstory but big) that needed to be addressed while I had two things (plot based0 that I wanted to adjust/thread through. I’d read somewhere that a good idea was to work through one thing at a time, which I started to do, except then some things overlapped, and then as you get to the end of the book and everything pulls together I found I needed to know about things that I hadn’t really decided on yet…

So after a week of pulling two of the things through, I went back, made my decisions on the rest and started again, going page by page. There’s a lot of tweaking, a lot of changes. I’ll be emailing literally dozens of new paragraphs or scenes through to the editor, while the pages themselves are such a scrawl that I’m feeling sorry for the poor typesetter.

I finished it all yesterday, but now I’m going to go through the book from beginning to end, reading every sentence (including all the new sections) and making sure it makes sense and that what I’ve written is good quality, spelt right and so on. I have to say, I’m really happy with how the book has turned out and I’m so glad I’ve gone through this process. It’s now a much stronger story, with a more interesting and deep world, then it was when it was purchased by HarperCollins last year.

I’ll be sending the edits back a few days before deadline, so hopefully the editor will have time to work her way through all the changes and make sure everything makes sense. But damn, that Christmas/travelling/landlords/back problem thing has been a pain in the arse.

I need to get going on book two. It’s due at the publisher on Feb 1.

Over the next couple of days, I also need to clean the house, pack, travel to Berry and most importantly, celebrate my tenth wedding anniversary.

Hmm, wonder why I’m feeling a bit stressed?

Looking forward, looking back

I didn’t think I had it in me to do a reflective post – my head is full of the copyedits – but reading other people’s has inspired me.

Firstly, the Noughties themselves. I got married in January, 2000, so that has been the defining aspect of this decade compared to the previous three. They say most people get a honeymoon period of around seven years before reality really hits home – we barely made it three months before Hubby got ill. Our lives have pretty much been dominated by his health concerns ever since.

In 2000, I also quit teaching after more than nine years, and so began on the road that has eventually led to my publishing contract.

As a writer, it’s been a long learning experience. I had my first short stories accepted for publication in 2000, but they’re still something that I’m working on getting good at. I finished a novel for the first time also in 2000, and since then have written somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen novels (unfortunately, in various computer moves I’ve lost that original novel – a shame, I’d like to read it to see how much I’ve changed as a writer).

I had major crises of confidence in my writing ability and decided to see if I should be an editor, which led to The Outcast and Issue 25 of ASIM, which were both fantastic experiences. I hope to one day have the time to edit again.

In 2003, I decided to try my hand at freelance writing, to start earning some money from the gig. That led to a part-time job at the South Coast Register, where I ended up editing in all but name the South Coast and Southern Highlands Senior Lifestyle magazines, along with The Shoalhaven and Nowra News. In 2006, I decided to go fulltime and moved to Canberra to work for the Chronicle, which I did for nearly two years. Here, I was acting editor of the third-largest free weekly newspaper in Australia four times, an experience which taught me that I really didn’t want to be a newspaper editor. Overall, I also learnt journalism isn’t the job for me, although I learnt a hell of a lot from it.

In 2006, I also re-committed myself to my own writing. In February 2008, I left the Chronicle and started to work on the novel that had been critted in the CSFG novel crit group – Love in Control. In July 2009, I sold that book and the rest of the trilogy to HarperVoyager and so I finish the Noughties as a professional writer of fiction, the thing I’ve wanted all along.

I’ve moved six times – I hate moving – from Sydney to Sussex Inlet, bouncing around Sussex before heading to Nowra and from there to Queanbeyan, where we’re on house number two. Hopefully, we can stay here for a while. The longest I’ve lived in any one house since I left home in 1988 is three years – and I’m over it.

I’ve changed a lot. My weight has shrunk and ballooned again. I’ve been a redhead, black and am now rocking a blonde do – all thanks to the genetic lottery that saw me going grey in my mid-20s. My eyesight has worsened, as has my hearing – yes, I’m getting older. Most importantly, I have changed – I’ve come to accept who I am, to like who I am, and to start to push myself on the things that I can do but I’ve been telling myself I can’t. Having confidence in myself is a strange and mythical land that is proving interesting every day.

So, in 2009, my life changed in a way that I had always hoped for, but hadn’t ACTUALLY believed would happen – I sold a novel to a major publisher. Three novels, in fact. In the space of just twelve short months, I went from committedly writing but having no real pressure to having deadlines out the wazoo. This all coincided with a really intense learning phase for me as a person. The result – I’m finishing 2009 more self-aware, stronger and more excited about my life than I ever have before.

2010 therefore is the  year of publication. Love in Control hits the shelves in July. Around that is copyediting, proofing, marketing and the like. And later in the year I’ll get stuck back into Battle for Odana, which I had to drop in July but which is going to be the next project I shop around.

2010 is also the year I hit the big 40 – I’m soooo looking forward to the party. And it’s probably the year my sister gets married, so that’s something else to look forward to.

As far as the next decade is concerned, the big focus is going to be on turning the opportunity I’ve been given with the Balance of Power Trilogy into a career. 2011 is when the next two books come out and thus far, that’s it. So right now, I’m working my arse off and will continue to to show the publishers I’m an author they can rely on and continue to work with and hopefully I’ll be able to start getting readers as well.

Personally – the old work/life balance thing needs some attention, particularly in terms of quality and quantity of time spent with Hubby, family and friends. As I become more comfortable with the requirements of being a professional author, I’m hoping I’ll get this sorted and so they’ll get the time and attention they deserve as well.

Yeah, would love to lose weight, get fitter – and they are important for health if nothing else, so need to factor in time for that as well.

Wow. Major times gone, major times ahead. Can’t wait to see what the future and I can create.