So, how does a novel change it’s name?

Well, in my case, it was quite a long, drawn out procedure. I sold the trilogy to HarperCollins in July under the name The Balance of Power, with the title of the first book Love in Control. The book’s title existed a long time before the trilogy title, and points quite clearly to it’s beginning as more a romance in a fantasy setting than a strong fantasy romance.

One of the first things the publisher said to me was ‘There’s been some comments about the name of the trilogy – bit too close to a big name author's book’. Well, I was quite happy for the title to be played with. One thing I know I’m not good at is titles – a lot of my short story titles get changed and when I was a journalist writing headlines – well, many many changes there.

After acquisitions, it was decided to change all the titles – too romancy, not matching the urban fantasy marketing that was being planned. I sent in some suggestions. They weren’t suitable. I sent in more suggestions. They weren’t suitable. I sent in more and said ‘That’s it – I can’t think of any more. You guys are the experts, if none of these work then you do it and I’ll be happy.’ This process took several months and during that time, the 2010 publications catalogue went out with the title Love in Control.

By the time the copyedits were being sent to the typesetter in January (so six months after the title change first came up), deciding the title became very important. It turned out that they did use two of my suggestions, although in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The Dream of Asarlai, the new trilogy title, came from my suggestion Asarlai’s Dream – HC didn’t like the apostrophe s. The book title, The Secret Ones was actually a suggestion for the trilogy title. I have to say, the reaction everyone’s had to the title of The Secret Ones is great – people really like it, which only goes to show that HC are the experts in this, and I don’t have a clue.

What all this means, of course, is that books two and three don’t have a title yet. I did have what I thought might be a brief flash of inspiration regarding book three yesterday, but of course didn’t write it down and now it’s gone. But in a few months time, the angst over titles will start again as book two moves through the production process.

Hopefully, thanks to the great folk at HC, I’ll get as good a title as The Secret Ones. Maybe some of their brilliance will rub off on me too.

This is a strange moment. I should be excited, and I am, but I’m also quite sad. Cause this is the beginning of the end. I mean sure, there’s still a long way to go – book three won’t hit the shelves until July next year – and yet there’s now a completed story and soon it will be published and submitted and yeah, there’ll be editing to do with the publisher, BUT after all these years, I have to face the fact that I’m going to be saying goodbye to these characters.

No more of Maggie’s cheekiness, or Ione’s quirkiness, or Bernadette’s quiet wisdom. No more of Lucas’ dedication, or Stephen’s intensity, or Hampton’s sensitivity. And then there’s all the non-pov characters to miss – Owen, Kenyon, Jack, Jacob, Oswald, John, Siobhan, Peter, Liam, Elizabeth, Helga. Even my antagonist, Asarlai, and the character I love to hate, Sarah.

There is the possibility of a follow-up trilogy, and I’ll meet up with them again but that’s also partly a commercial decision – if this trilogy doesn’t sell, if the world of the gadda doesn’t work for readers, then there’s probably little point in going back to them.

This has all just hit me, you know. I wrote the title of this post and then BAM! There I was, getting sniffly over the fact that the trilogy is done.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on this book – I know some of the areas of weakness already, and will be interested to see what other areas I find as I start to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. The plan is to polish it up and have it ready for my readers by the end of March. I’ll get it back beginning of May and then have two months to tweak and fix it before it goes off to the publisher.

That wide time-frame should also give me ample time to deal with the proofs of The Secret Ones, and the edits of book two. If I have any time left over, my plan is to start on the research and planning for Battle for Odana, which is growing from a stand-alone book into at least a duology, if not a trilogy.

Would love to have book one of that done by the end of the year, so next year I can work on book two (maybe three) and possibly the beginning of a new gadda trilogy. If folks like the first one.

There’s so much in this writing game that’s such an unknown.

So, I’ve been pretty much cruising with this whole ‘writing, shit yeah, I can write novels’ stuff for the past couple of months and then BANG! I hit book three of the trilogy, and come across the need to not only establish my romance and give it the Happily Ever After it deserves, but also to wind up the overarching storyline of the series.

So the words come. And they come. And they come. And I start to wonder why it was I thought I was any good at this.

No, that’s not true – I am still good. The book is good (although I’ve already identified some weak patches that hafta go baby!). It’s just that there’s a new challenge involved with this book, one that I’ve not faced before. When I first wrote these books they were a series – same world, shared characters, but no linking storyline. This is the first time I’ve every had to write the end of a three-book long story.

I’m trying to keep in mind that I can’t make things too easy for the characters – that after three books, the end of it all has to be satisfactory for the readers, they need to feel that the whole time they’ve been reading is worth it. I’m certainly not going for a HEA for the entire series – something mammoth has happened, and there will be long-lasting consequences. The world won’t be the same.

Yet there are elements of it all that are now relatively easy to deal with, and I’m wondering if that’s okay. Is it all right that after all this time, when they find the antagonist, locking them up and throwing away the key is a simple matter (mostly because of what happened in book two)? I mean, there’s still fall out from the antagonist’s actions, and the threat is still out there.

At the moment, things look like they’re going well, and all the problems are going to just be tidied up. But in the next chapter – bang, it all goes to shit again. Are readers going to be so disappointed with the way things seem to be going that they won’t keep reading? Or will the question ‘but what about x?’ be enough to keep them going?

I guess my beta readers are going to have to answer that one for me.

In the meantime, I keep writing, and watching the wordcount go up, and worry about whether I can bring this story in under the expected length.

The good news for this week has been the arrival of the cover for The Secret Ones, and let me tell you, it’s soooooo purty! I can’t believe that it looks so good. I mean, of course I expected a cover from a major publisher to look good (although with some of the furore over whitening of covers in the States, maybe I shouldn’t expect that) but I can’t believe that MY cover looks so nice. I mean, if I saw it in a bookstore, I’d pick it up and go ‘oooh, it’s sooooooo purty’.

Having said all that, when I can finally show you, you’ll probably all go ‘meh’. Well, do your worst! I LOVE my cover.

I’m tickled pink that Mary MacKillop is Australia’s first saint. A) Cause she’s a girl. B) Cause she’s a nun (and nuns are pretty cool – I was considering it myself at one point). C) Cause as a person, she’s a real Aussie.

You see, Mary espoused a lot of the virtues that have made Australia the country it is – she was a hard worker, she was loyal to her friends, she spoke up on behalf of the downtrod, when people were in trouble she went out and helped them and when the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church tried to put her in her place, she told them where they could stick it. Yep, that great Aussie irreverence for authority.

In fact, at one point Mary was excommunicated because she was considered such a rebel – that means basically she was chucked out of the church and banned from any of the sacraments. The Bishop of Adelaide didn’t agree with the rules Mary established for her new order of nuns, nor with their educational practices and tried to make her change, but Mary refused to budge and was removed from the church for a few months before the bishop relented.

Mary was in a lot of ways your typical frontier sort of woman – tough, determined, hard-working, no bullshit - it’s just that instead of being driven by love of a man, or love of her children, Mary was driven by love of God.

The first school I taught at, St Nicholas of Myra in Penrith, had the distinction of being one of the schools founded by Mary herself. The other primary school in the Penrith parish is called Mary MacKillop Primary. They had to put a Blessed up in front of her name when she was beautified in 1995, and are now going to have to take that down and put up the ST. So this canonisation thing is going to be expensive in many ways :)

I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have met some seriously cool nuns. These were women who saw their vows as giving them a responsibility not just to be good, but to do good. They saw they had a part in the fight for justice and equality. They were feminists who wanted to find the way within the structure they had to serve to give everyone the sense of power they deserved.

Everything I’ve read of Mary strikes me that she was this type of woman, and that’s why I’m really pleased that she is Australia’s first saint.

It’s been a strange couple of months weather-wise around Canberra. Actually, you only have to go back a few weeks, really. This summer, we’ve had humidity (humidity! It’s been strange). We’ve had incredible heat. We’ve had some great storms. And then, over the weekend, we got the rain we’ve been dreaming of for – well, years.

From 9am Friday to 9am Monday, the Canberra region averaged 100mm of rain. We’ve had entire years where we’ve barely managed that much. And none of it was intense or stormy – it was a solid, soaking downpour that somehow has turned our previously entirely brown front yard into a surging sea of green. As it tailed off yesterday morning, I thought to myself – how nice to have the rain without the storm elements that have caused Sydney all those problems (although Queanbeyan didn’t escape totally and lost a couple of trees with the soil loosening up).

Then, late yesterday afternoon, the wind started and boy, was it a howler! We had to shut up the house because of the noise, and even then you’d get the occasional howl echoing through your chest. Today it’s bright, and sunny, and that wind is still tearing around corners, hoping to find something to tangle with.

It got me thinking – you don’t much see the impact of weather in stories, and yet it’s something that impacts on our lives a lot. And I’m not talking dramatic weather events either – for example, there would have been a lot of primary school teachers who woke up this morning, heard the wind and sighed. Kids get manic on windy days – when I was teaching, it was pretty much a given that the fabulous lesson you had planned for after lunch was a bust. You’d scramble to find a nice, quiet activity that required no mental processing cause those kids would come in after fifty minutes out in the wind acting as though it had taken control of them.

Rainy days weren’t too bad (apart from the fact that you didn’t get as much of a break from the kidlinks as you usually would) because they tended to quieten down. For a day or two. The third day of constant rain would be the day you’d start to wonder if maybe you should tip a bit of whiskey into the kid’s drinks. Or maybe into your own.

Even with the increasingly internal lives that we live – inside the house, inside work, inside the car – the weather is still a factor in our lives. If it’s really hot, we get drained. If it’s raining, we get wet going to and fro and there’s all that mould build-up. If it’s windy, you can have problems going to sleep.

Little things like this can add colour and tension to a scenario in a story. Say, for example, you have a band who are planning an assassination of the king on the day he’s crowned (and for the purpose of this story, it must happen at this time). They’re going to get into the castle through the sewer system (of course). Except it started raining last night, and it hasn’t stopped, and every hour you are aware that the sewers are slowly but surely filling with water. You keep going to the window, hoping for a break in the cloud, praying for the rain to stop otherwise you’re not going to get to the king, and then…

And then there are the dramatic weather events – storms, cyclones, tornadoes, floods – which can, in a story, add a whole new level of tension and danger to a situation. What if it’s been raining a bit on the battlefield, but raining more further upstream, and when you’re in the middle of the most important part of the battle, the river starts to rise… Can you get things done before the battle is washed out? What if the wrong people end up on the wrong side of the swollen waters?

I know that I hadn’t really considered the weather as a source of tension before last night, but I will from now on.

I decided to take a break from writing for a week after the stress of doing the copyedits for book one and submitting book two within the space of a month. It’s been a good move – last night, I started to get inspired for book three. I went to sleep with the vision of a pivotal scene in my mind and I’m looking forward to writing it. Without giving too much away, I’m going to force my heroine to face her darkest fears and make the choice between doing something that fills her with bone-freezing dread, or saving the man she loves. My hope – the readers will also love him so much that they’ll be screaming blue murder at her to say yes. I know what the answer will be – but I’m not going to say :)

Getting re-enthused for book three has been helped by the moves taking place at the publishing level. After a lot of angsting and back and froing, the trilogy and book one now have new titles and these are the ones that will stick. The trilogy will be called The Dream of Asarlai (Asarlai is the antagonist of the whole trilogy) and book one is called The Secret Ones, which I think is a seriously cool title. These came together quite quickly because of another deadline – the book needed to go to the printers so that the advanced reader copies could be put together to send to reviewers and bookstores in the hope of getting the buzz going.

So it could well be that right now, somewhere in Sydney, there are boxes and in those boxes are my book! Okay, it doesn’t have the proper cover and it’s been created out of the uncorrected proofs but still, there it is – my novel exists in book form. Happy dance time!

At the moment, I’m looking at starting work on book three on Monday and my plan is to have it done by my birthday in early March. It should be doable – I’d done 80,000 words of it before the copyedits arrived, and while there are changes I need to make to it because of changes to the the first book, I can’t see why I can’t get the re-write finished by around March 10. Then I’ll leave it a couple of weeks before revising it and hopefully getting it to my readers at the end of April. Their feedback should be with me at the end of May, and I then have all of June to get it polished and up to speed to be delivered July 1.

Of course, I’ll have proofing of book one, structural edits and possibly copyedits of book two and I’ll have to start work on the publicity side of things for the July launch of The Secret Ones…

February 1, 2010. This date was etched as meaningful two years ago, but became meaningful for reasons I didn’t dare plan back then.

A quick recap – on Feb 1, 2008, I walked out of the Chronicle office for the last time. After mistakes by both myself and management, the relationship between myself and my editor had soured to the point it was unsalvageable and working there had become a blight on my soul. I didn’t have a new job yet, but had to leave what had become a poisonous situation. So, Hubby and I had a dilemma – did I go get a job in the public service (more money, but still causing problems in writing fiction cause it used up all my creativity) or get an easier, part-time job (less money but more time and brain space in which to write).

History shows that we chose the second option, and I set a time limit of two years, after which time there would be a review.

Hence the anticipated date of Feb 1, 2010.

I had an aim for that date – if after two years of solid effort, I was a better writer and to all appearances had a good shot at being a published novelist, I would keep going. If, however, it was now blatantly clear that no matter how hard I worked I was never going to have what it takes, then I would go back to writing as a hobby, for happiness, and re-evaluate my life direction. I didn’t set goals for things that I had no control over, so I didn’t say ‘in two years, I’ll have an agent’ or ‘in two years, I’ll have a publishing contract’.

Which makes what Feb 1, 2010 did become quite ironic – it was the deadline for book two of the trilogy to be delivered to HarperVoyager.

Still, I will review after two years, as I said I would. Verdict – I think you’re getting better at this novel writing thing, and you should probably keep going :)

In all seriousness, I am a much better writer than I was two years ago. No, actually that’s not true – I’ve always been a good writer, I wouldn’t have lasted four and a half years in journalism if I wasn’t. No, what I’ve become is a much better novelist. I’m better at plotting. I’m better at pacing. I’m better at taking ideas and running with them and delving down into them and bringing the interesting stuff to the surface.

Still have aways to go, and I’m looking forward to testing myself with future novels. For example, I know that the next project with have more POV characters. And I’m interested in seeing how I can better develop and wind through sub-plots. And then there’s things like trying first person, and maybe having another go at epic fantasy, and science fiction, and maybe straight romance.

I’m going to set myself another two year goal, and this one’s going to be a little different – I’m going to punt with a few things I can’t control. So, apart from wanting to continue to develop as a writer and novelist, I want to: a) Get an agent and b) sell at least two more novels, and maybe even five. That would entail Battle for Odana (which is going to be developed into a duology) and depending on how things go with this trilogy, a follow-up trilogy.

Will be interesting to see how things are sitting on Feb 1, 2012.

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.

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.

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?