Welcome to the ongoing Writing Process Blog Hop! This week it's my turn to share a little about my writing process. First, I want to thank Isabella Norse for inviting me to participate. Make sure you go check out her blog hop post! And now I get to talk about my writing process a little. 1) What am I working on? Right now, I'm getting Sarya's Song ready to publish. The release date is April 10, and I've got some proofreading to do and then the formatting. Up after that is my six-book series, Daughter of the Wildings. It's in the initial stages of revision (the whole series at once, to get it all consistent). Once Sarya's Song is out the door, I can work on Daughter of the Wildings full time. 2) How does my work differ from others of its genre? I write fantasy which has a strong romantic storyline between the two main characters pretty evenly balanced with the fantasy plot. You couldn't take away either the fantasy or the romance from my novels and still have a story left; both are essential. 3) Why do I write what I do? I've always loved fantasy, and I've always loved a good love story, but I had trouble finding books that combined the two in a way I found satisfying. Either the fantasy or the romance was an afterthought; I like them both to be equally important to the story. So I write the kinds of books I'd love to read. Plus, wizards in love. :D 4) How does your writing process work? My ideas usually come in the form of a character or two in a specific situation. I can see the characters, what they look like, what their surroundings are, what they're doing. I start exploring who they are, what sort of world do they live in, why are they in that situation and doing what they're doing, and the story develops from there. When I start writing, I like to know who the main characters are and what they want or need to do in the story, what sort of conflicts and opposition they face, the first few scenes, at least a couple of major scenes throughout the story, and a general idea of the ending (good triumphs over evil; girl/guy gets guy/girl). The more detail I have figured out ahead of time, the happier I am, but usually the story also develops in different ways while I write it from what I planned. And some stories don't like to be planned much in advance; when that happens, I end up feeling my way through a few scenes at a time. I have to know what I'm going to write before I sit down to write, so I'm not staring helplessly at a blank screen. When I'm writing a first draft, I aim for about 2000-2500 words a day, though I'd love to increase that. At that rate, a first draft will take a month or two to write (depending on the length of the novel and disruptions to my writing schedule). When the first draft is complete, I take it through a major revision using a method based on Holly Lisle's How To Revise Your Novel course. After that, it goes out to the test readers, then I take it through another major revision based on their feedback. Then I do a revision to refine things like description and dialogue and any plot points I'm still struggling with, then another editing pass to polish up the prose, followed by a couple of proofreading rounds. Then I format the book and put it up for sale! Thanks for joining me this week, and be sure to check out next week's stops on the Writing Process Blog Hop:
John James Loftus is the author of Celtic Blood. He has been interested in medieval history since seeing a book with a cover detailing the battle of Agincourt. The book engaged his imagination, and drew him to the period. He has one novel to date and a co-credit as a feature film writer, Underdog's Tale. He was in the Queensland Police Service for ten years reaching the rank of senior constable. A former Karate instructor, he is a past Queensland champion. He lives in Brisbane with his wife and two children. (Writing Process post here) Heather Heffner is an avid fan of fantasy/science fiction books, the longer the better! She is the author of the urban fantasy Changeling Sisters Series and the dark fantasy Afterlife Chronicles. And if you still can't get enough, I came across another Writing Process blog tour post today, by Dyane Forde. Check it out!
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Been working hard on revisions to Sarya's Song and Daughter of the Wildings, and thought I'd come up for air and show my readers a little of the process I use to take a manuscript from not so great to, well, maybe not great but a lot better than it was! I've learned revision through many years of revising novels, but the best method I've learned has been Holly Lisle's How To Revise Your Novel course. Ms. Lisle worked as an emergency room nurse for many years, and this general approach to revision can be likened to taking care of a patient in the E.R. When the patient first arrives, you don't start just randomly doing surgery on him. First you have to figure out what's wrong (and also what isn't wrong, so you don't end up removing a perfectly good spleen or something), then you make a plan for fixing it, then you take him into surgery and start cutting. Likewise, in this approach, you don't just start crossing stuff out in your manuscript right away; first you figure out what's wrong with it (and what's right), then you make your revision plan, THEN you get out the red pen and start making your corrections. So, here's an overview of what goes into bringing you another fine Kyra Halland fantasy novel :D 1. I write a novel. This is a whole different process, and one I'll talk about more another time. 2. When the first draft of the novel is finished, I print it out on three-hole-punched paper and put it in a binder. This revision method will not work if you're working from a computer screen. Here's the printout of all six books of Daughter of the Wildings. My husband saw this and said, "That's a big binder." Of course, what he meant was, "Wow, I'm really impressed that you wrote something that long!" (This picture was taken right after I started the analysis or triage stage of the revision; I'm now about 2/3 through that stage.) 3. I make sure I have plenty of my trusty Tul Needle Point Fine Black Gel pens on hand. Then I start reading through the novel, making notes of problems I find with various aspects of the novel, such as characterization, plot, worldbuilding, patches of really bad writing, and so on. I also analyze each scene in the novel for structure and to make sure it really serves a purpose in moving the story forward. This analysis (or triage) step condenses approximately the first nine weeks of the HTRYN course into one step. 4. Once I've gone all the way through the manuscript and made my notes, I get out a bunch of index cards (index cards are key to this method, and I've developed something of a fetish for them :D). I make an index card for each scene as I want that scene to be (not as it is now), giving a one-sentence summary of the scene and what the scene is supposed to accomplish, story-wise. Then, referring to my sheaves of notes, I write a summary on the back of each card of the changes I want to make in each scene. Finally, I color-code each card with a post-it, showing approximately how much work each scene is going to need. Neon green means I'll be changing up to about 25% of the scene, bright yellow means 25-50%, neon orange is 50-75%, hot pink is 75-100% or a completely new scene. (I love post-its. Along with 3-hole-punched printer paper, Tul pens, and index cards, they're one of my essential non-computer writing tools.) 5. Once I've got my plan in place, I start marking up the manuscript. This can get pretty messy (like a good bout of surgery). I use red pen for corrections, and I've also learned to keep a blue pen handy to un-correct, that is, to mark where I've made changes in red and then changed my mind and decided to keep the original. Where it gets really interesting is where I've marked out a correction in red, and then decided to keep it, so I've got my changes circled in blue to not change them... Or something. It all makes sense when I'm doing it. To illustrate, I took some photos of pages from the current revision of Sarya's Song. (Warning: not for the squeamish.) Here's a marked-up page; if you look closely, you can see where I circled something in blue that I had crossed out and then decided to keep. I make use of top, bottom, and side margins, and the arrows pointing off the side show where the new writing spills over onto the back. And here's another one. You can see I've got stuff going all over the place. It looks like the poor page has been savaged by rabid weasels. This picture shows some of my notecards. This page isn't as marked up, but you can see where I've circled chunks of text and drawn arrows showing where they should be moved to. And, finally, here's the back of a page with new stuff written in. I'm about halfway through this revision of Sarya's Song, and so far I've added about 3000 words to the story. 6. Strictly speaking, you're supposed to wait until you've marked up the whole manuscript before you start typing in the corrections, but I'm afraid I'll forget what half of my arrows and cryptic scribbles mean, so I type up each day's revision when I'm finished. I do this process twice, once on the first draft and once on the second draft after I get the feedback from the test readers. After that comes a revision to fix up any leftover bits of bad writing and continuity mistakes, then a line edit/copyedit, and then some rounds of proofreading. And, voila, a finished novel!
Update: while we're on the medical theme, I'm happy to report that after a lot of tests (including a stress test which I rocked, working out hard with absolutely no symptoms), I had an appointment with a cardiologist today and got good news (or, at least, better news than I was afraid it would be). I have a small to moderate amount of fluid around my heart (pericardial effusion), which apparently has been there for a while. It isn't causing any serious problems, except for some occasional discomfort. We're going to keep an eye on it to see what it does, if it gets worse or stays the same or goes away. In the meantime, the doctor suspects that it was caused by inflammation/autoimmune activity (which would also be consistent with my chronic fatigue syndrome) and so the next step is to see a rheumatologist. Hopefully we can pin down the underlying cause and treat it, which will control or eliminate the pericardial effusion. ***If you're a writer, I highly recommend the How To Revise Your Novel course. It's a brain-wrenching, gut-wrenching five months and costs about $250, but if you want to publish your writing, it's the best 5 months and $250 you can spend. The link is my affiliate link; I get a commission when someone buys the course through that link. But I don't promote the course because I'm an affiliate; I promote it because taking it has been the best thing I've ever done for my writing. Regular link if you want to find out about the course without following my affiliate link. I've been thinking about this post since reading Dean Wesley Smith's post on setting writing goals for 2014. This year got off to a rocky start for me; I had an abnormal EKG a week before Christmas, which was kind of alarming, and I've been dealing with tests and a lot of anxiety since then. Everything is still inconclusive so far, but right now it looks like we're not dealing with anything immediately dangerous; most likely it's nothing serious, or we've caught something more long-term serious in the early stages. Getting this glimpse of my own mortality had the contradictory effects of making it hard to make future plans and goals (who can make plans for the future when they're afraid they're going to drop dead at any moment?) (seriously, I'm a terrible hypochondriac) and making me really zero in on what I want to accomplish in my life. The main thing I realized, besides wondering who would make the Christmas fudge and homemade dinner rolls at our house if I wasn't around (getting alarming health news right before Christmas really sucks) is that I would be extremely bummed out were I to shuffle off the mortal coil before getting Daughter of the Wildings out. I've instructed my husband that should something happen to me, DoW is to be made available however seems best at the time - put up for sale, or just posted for free, or whatever. The problem is, as it is right now, still in rough draft, it kind of sucks. It's not terrible, but there are parts that make me cringe or that are just plain wrong, and I really don't want it to go out into the world this way. So, with that as my focus, and now that I'm not quite so convinced that I'm going to drop dead at any moment *knock on wood*, here are my plans and goals for the coming year. Although Sarya's Song is the next book scheduled to come out, I'm going to be spending most of my work hours on the initial revision of Daughter of the Wildlings. DoW is a huge project, nearly 300,000 words, and if I'm going to get it released on any kind of schedule, it needs to take priority. This shuffling of priorities will mean that the release of Sarya's Song may be delayed a bit. I'm hoping for a February release, but it may take until March. My target for releasing the first DoW book, Beneath the Canyons, is June, though that may be a bit optimistic. The plan is to get all six books to where once I start releasing the series, a new book can come out about every other month. Once Sarya's Song is out and DoW is well under way towards being released, there are a couple of different areas I'm thinking I'll turn my attention to. One is a couple of partially-written novels set in Estelend, the world of Chosen of Azara. I also had a reviewer say they wished Chosen was a trilogy instead of one book, because they wanted more backstory on some of the characters and events. Rewriting Chosen as a trilogy isn't going to happen - I just don't feel it that way - but I'd like to do a set of stories giving some of the backstory the reviewer mentioned they'd like to know more about. Maybe I'll make this a Camp NaNo project in April or July. And the very first novel I ever wrote, Prince of the Trozdozh, and its sequel are sitting on my hard drive, calling out to me. I think they're probably salvageable, so I want to run them through my revision process and see it they really are something I can release to the public. As far as production goals, right now I can't really set a word count goal. By the end of the year I aim to have released 5 novels (Sarya's Song and the first four Daughter of the Wildings novels) and at least one short story collection (the Chosen of Azara companion stories). I had five releases in 2013, so six releases in 2014 sounds like a good progression. And, onward. Happy New Year, everyone! May it be happy and productive and with a minimum of unpleasant surprises. You may or may not have noticed, a few days ago I posted "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Path of Latan the Clerk," two connected short (well, kind of long, actually) stories loosely related to Chosen of Azara. They'll be free to read here on the site until Dec. 12, and then they'll go up for sale on Amazon. [Update: these stories are now available on Amazon in a volume titled The Warrior and the Holy Man.] In Chosen of Azara, as Lucie is researching the history of the Madrinan Empire to try to decide if Sevry's story is true, she comes across a passing reference to a discredited Kriethi historian and his female Krunabashai bodyguard. These two stories tell the tale of the historian and the bodyguard. I'd been calling Latan "the Scholar," but he's really just a lowly clerk who dabbles in historical research in his spare time, and since he's such a modest fellow he insisted I change it to "clerk." But he still made it into at least one of the history books of his world. I don't know if he'd be more pleased or embarrassed about that. In the titles, I also replaced "tale" with "path." "Path" is a little more different and interesting, plus a major theme in both stories is the paths life takes us on, both expected and unexpected. Both Haveshi and Latan think they know what they want out of life and exactly how their lives are going to go - they're happy, or at least content, with the paths their lives are following. Then unexpected events force them from those paths and require them to find new ways to live. These two stories are a great example of how old ideas evolve into new ones. Haveshi's story originally started out as a novel set in Estelend [Edit: I have since changed the name of this world to Tehovir] (the same world as Chosen of Azara, with magical Sources playing an important role), with the events the same as in the story and then dragging on and on as Haveshi and her companion Daivashan went from one place to another without actually accomplishing much of anything. Back in those days (early 90s), you either wrote novels or you wrote for the short story market, and I was a novel writer. If I ever decided to dabble my toes again in publishing, I would need novel-length offerings to present to agents and editors. And so I took a story that didn't really have enough story in it to be a novel and tried to stretch it out into one. Then, in the last year or so, when I was looking through my old story files and thinking about the new, expanded possibilities offered by self-publishing - no arbitrary word count or length guidelines set by publishers based on the economics of publishing paper books or magazines; stories could be as long or short as they needed to be - I realized that Haveshi's story would be perfect as a longish short story. She finds her answer without all that pointless wandering around, and sets off for her new life, the end. The other seed of this pair of stories came from this fragment. (And I'm going to be really really brave and post it here exactly as I wrote it umpteen years ago.) "You're the guard Bodric sent?" Sevry stared at the short, sturdy woman in front of him. He hoped there was a mistake. Ok, first of all (besides the head-hopping), you may notice a few familiar names. Sevry, the name of the wizard in this fragment, became the name of the last King of Savaru and the hero of Chosen of Azara. That Sevry is many things, but most definitely not a wizard; I decided that name worked well for him, so I re-purposed it. Also, Perar became Perarre, the heroine of The Lost Book of Anggird, who is also most definitely not a bodyguard. So with the characters' names being used for other stories, I had pretty much decided this fragment was dead. But I still liked the idea: a lowly member of some sort of order about to set out on a journey finding out, to his dismay, that a woman has been assigned to be his guard.
Eventually, Sevry the wizard morphed into Latan the Scholar (and then the Clerk), And then I made the connection - the female bodyguard is Haveshi, from that other abandoned project. This set Latan's story firmly in the world of Chosen of Azara. When I tried to figure out the point of the journey he was going on, I realized that he had made a momentous discovery related to the conspiracy that destroyed Savaru, and he's going to present this discovery to the High Priest of the Madrinan Empire. And, ta daa, I had my stories; it was just a matter of writing them. Haveshi's story comes first in the duology. It tells how she got derailed from the path her life was on and came to be a mercenary in a conquered land that is now part of the Madrinan Empire. Then her story continues with Latan's story, when she's assigned to guard him on a journey that proves as disruptive to his life's path as the events in her story were to hers. I suggest reading Haveshi first, then Latan, but it could work the other way around, too. "The Path of Latan the Scholar" contains a spoiler for an event early on in Chosen of Azara, but the way it's presented, and the fact that the event happens so early in Chosen, it won't spoil the whole novel - I like to think of it as a teaser. Chosen of Azara also contains a spoiler for "The Path of Latan the Scholar," but that spoiler doesn't take in nearly the whole of the story. So either way, there's information given. If you're wondering what to read first, I'd say it could go either way - consider "The Path of Latan the Scholar" a teaser for Chosen of Azara, or a supplement to it. I've also posted an updated map of Estelend, showing Source Tiati, where Latan lives, in Krieth in the south part of the Madrinan Empire. If you haven't read Chosen of Azara yet, you can get an introduction to that world in "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Path of Latan the Clerk," and if you've read it, you can get the scoop on that discredited historian and his female bodyguard. I hope you'll take a look, and enjoy the stories! ***Shameless self-promotion (but hey, it's my blog, it's all about self-promotion!): if you haven't read Chosen of Azara yet and want to, it's available at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple | Sony | Diesel Smashwords | CreateSpace | All Romance eBooks In addition to Thanksgiving and my birthday, for me November means National Novel Writing Month. And since no one can procrastinate like a writer on a deadline, November also often means finding new and creative ways to put off having to commit words to paper (or the screen). This year, the way I came up with to procrastinate was counting my lifetime output of words. Many writers have a strange obsession with word count. In the days of using typewriters, you gauged how much you accomplished by how many pages you had written. Now that most writers use computers, pages are irrelevant and productivity is measured by the number of words you wrote. National Novel Writing Month requires 50,000 words to complete the challenge. Agents and publishers specify the number of words manuscripts need to have to be considered for publication. Writers set goals of 1000 or 2000 or 5000 words per day. And there's a bit of common writerly wisdom that it takes a million words to get good at writing (or, alternatively, "the first million words are crap"). Like most common wisdom, there's some truth to this, but it isn't entirely true. It is true that writing is something you get better at the more you do it. But the measure of a million words seems kind of arbitrary. Someone who is an avid reader and/or got good grades in English (or whatever language they're writing in) is probably going to start out ahead, quality-wise, of someone who's never read a book or who doesn't know how to put understandable sentences together. Granted, some people have a natural instinct for storytelling that transcends proper writing mechanics, so they're ahead as far as that goes, but writing is communication and it doesn't matter how good your story is if you can't communicate it in a way that your readers will understand. On the other hand, other people might have a gift for writing beautiful prose but no sense of how to put together an exciting, entertaining story. So they have a lot of work to do, too. (I, for one, would rather read an entertaining, engaging story that is written in inexpert prose than something that's beautifully written but boring.) So, not every writer starts out at the same level of crappiness. Then there's the factor of how hard they work at improving their craft. If you write a lot, you're almost bound to get better at it without even trying. But if you read good books to learn how prose and storytelling work, and seek out good writing advice and really work on applying it, you're going to get better even faster. But even with all these qualifiers, some writers (or me, at least) are curious about how far along they are on that fabled million words or how long ago they passed it by. So, in the spirit of NaNo-ly procrastination, I totaled up my lifetime word count (as an adult; I didn't count the stories and plays I wrote in elementary school :-D). First, for non-writers, numbers of words might not really mean anything. How much is 50,000 words? How much is 1000 words, a million words? Here are some examples to give some idea of scale, of word counts of famous novels (from this site): Harry Potter and the Philospher's/Sorcerer's Stone: 77,325 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 198,227 The Hobbit: 95,022 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: 30,644 Nineteen Eighty-Four: 88,942 To Kill a Mockingbird: 99,121 Fahrenheit 451: 46,118 Lord of the Rings Trilogy: 455,125 A Game of Thrones: 284,000 (from here) Brave New World: 63,766 Methodology: first I looked up how to add columns in a spreadsheet. (More procrastination; plus I'm pretty clueless about spreadsheets.) I only counted the latest version of each work, instead of earlier drafts, so there are a lot of cut scenes that didn't get counted. In cases where I re-wrote something from scratch, I did count both the earlier, abandoned version and the new version. I counted novels, novellas, short stories, and story fragments, but not my handful of poems because writing poetry is a completely different discipline from writing prose fiction. Also, it isn't that many words. And I am most definitely not a poet. :-P So, counting that way, my lifetime word count between 1990 and 2013 is 1,614,156 (counting the novel I wrote in November; I added it in when it was done). Well past the million-word mark, you'll notice. Broken down further: 1990-2000: 444,095 words 2000-2008 (when I began writing fanfiction through the last year before I seriously did NaNoWriMo for the first time): 405,878 2009-2013 (when I got a big creative kick from completing NaNo for the first time through the present): 632,176. If you're adding along with me, you'll notice I passed 1,000,000 words sometime in 2010. As for when my writing graduated from "crap" to "not crap," I like to think it happened (if I say so myself, if it doesn't seem like I'm being arrogant to assume that my writing has made that shift) sometime in the early 2000s, when I was turning out large quantities of fanfiction on a regular basis. Lots of writing in a short period of time with close attention to quality will elevate the level of your writing, no matter where it starts out. This year, 2013, has been my best writing year ever, with 271,303 words. 195,927 of those words are books 2-6 of the Daughter of the Wildings series. I expect to add quite a few words when I revise (I generally tend to "write short" and then fill out details in revision), so my lifetime word count will go up by the time that series is ready for publication. Fanfiction got me back into writing at a time when I had lost heart for writing for a few years, and from 2000-2003 I wrote a great deal of fanfic. 405,878 words of it. I also wrote the original version of Chosen of Azara during this time, about 70,000 words, but I counted that in my 2009-2013 output because I re-wrote it pretty extensively this year and last year and extended it to 81,000 words. My lifetime fanfiction total is 632,176 words and original fiction total is 981,980. All those words of fanfiction were a significant factor in reaching the first million words, and I think I improved a lot as a writer while writing them. My experience with fanfiction is another post for another time, but I will say that, even though I keep my fanfic writer identity separate from my identity here, writing all that fic helped make me the writer I am today. (For whatever that's worth!) Among the pre-2000 output are my first two complete novels; the second one is actually a sequel to the first and I had totally forgotten that I had finished it. So that was an interesting surprise to come across! I plan on evaluating them to see if they're worth revising and publishing; I think they probably are. There are also some fragments of novels set in the same world as Chosen of Azara, that I'm looking forward to developing and completing. Once Daughter of the Wildings is into the final revision stages and being released, sometime next year, I'll start on those. On to two million! (Image credit: Zsuzsanna Kilian, stock.xchng) It's been almost a week since my last post, a couple of weeks since releasing The Lost Book of Anggird, and I'm still a little ways out from my next major release, which will be Sarya's Song. So how am I entertaining myself (and trying to stay out of trouble) in the meantime? First of all, it's November, which means National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or just NaNo). Last year I wrote the draft of Sarya's Song (finally finishing it after a number of false starts), but this year I've returned to my tradition of pounding out a fanfiction during November. I got off to a good start, then took a few days off to finish the draft of Book 6 of Daughter of the Wildings, then just couldn't get motivated to work on the novel I was doing for NaNo. So on Nov. 8, I decided to set aside the novel I'd started and work on an idea I'd been toying with for a few years. Starting over again from zero words more than a week into November means a lot of catching up to do. I set a minimum quota of 2500 words a day, and I'm almost caught up. Things are looking good for my 5th win in a row! (Note for those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, the object is to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. It's a self-challenge rather than a contest where you're competing against other people, and everyone who verifies that they wrote 50,000 words or more is a winner.) Also, as I mentioned, I finished the 6th book of Daughter of the Wildings, which means that the whole series now exists in complete form. The whole series is printed out and sitting in a very large binder, resting for a while until I'm ready to start the revision. So, for those of you who hate waiting years between books of a series, and who wonder if a slow-publishing series is ever going to be finished at all, take heart - Daughter of the Wildings is complete, if still something of a mess. I'm even giving my family instructions that should something happen to prevent me from editing and publishing the whole thing, they're to just put whatever hasn't been published yet online. Not that I plan on anything happening to me, but you never know. (My husband is a wills and estate planning lawyer. That sort of thing kind of rubs off on you when you live with it.) A couple of stories I wrote last March during my pre-Camp NaNo challenge have still been waiting around to be edited. "The Tale of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Tale of Latan the Scholar" (original titles, I know) are linked together and are also loosely related to Chosen of Azara; Haveshi and Latan are mentioned in passing (and not by name) in the novel. I decided it's time to get these fixed up and published, so I'm working on the revision of those after I finish my NaNo quota each day. With some luck and a lot of hard work, they should be ready in a week or so. I'm thinking I'll post them on the site for free for a short time, then put them in the Kindle Select program for 90 days. I'll start on the next revision of Sarya's Song once I'm done with the Haveshi and Latan stories. Finally, The Lost Book of Anggird has been getting some very nice reviews. I installed the Goodreads reviews widget for it on the book page, so you can read the complete reviews there, or check out highlights on the Lost Book reviews page. Back to work! The Lost Book of Anggird has been out for about a week now, and I've been really happy with the response! It's been my most successful novel launch yet, and the feedback from readers has been very positive :) I extended the introductory price of $.99 through this weekend (Nov. 3), so there's still a day or two left to get it at that special low price at Amazon and Smashwords. It's amazing to think that Lost Book is finally finished and available for readers to buy. I started writing it about 15 or 16 years ago, in a spiral notebook in pencil. I have no idea why. I got up to what is now about the 55% mark, and it was just getting weirder and weirder and I really had no idea what I was doing with it. So I stopped writing it. But the characters wouldn't leave me alone, and I finally realized I had them all wrong. In the original version, Roric was truly insufferable, instead of just, um, let's say "idiosyncratic," and Perarre really was in love with the guy back home, which qualified her as TSTL (too stupid to live; one of those technical writing terms :)) And the relationship between them took a *lot* longer to get off the ground. The big breakthrough came when I finally got a handle on Roric and Perarre's true characters. It's funny how it works with characters. For me, and a lot of authors (not saying this is true for all), you don't just assign a name, an age, a gender, and a menu list of phyical characteristics and personality traits. My characters come to me as an already-existing entity, and then it's up to me to discover who they are. So I listened to Roric and Perarre and let them tell me about themselves instead of trying to impose my own ideas on them, and learned that they were very different people from what I thought at first. Especially Roric; when he told me about his past, I was shocked. But it all made perfect sense, and really explained why he was the way he was and why he did the things he did. Oh, and by the way, he and Perarre felt like the relationship needed to move along a little faster. After that, everything started to fall into place. I had to figure out exactly how the magic in the story worked, since that's a major element of the plot, but once I had a clear idea about the characters I could see their world a lot more clearly too. And then it was time to write. At first I had tried typing out my old handwritten version, but quickly gave up on it since 1) it was so eye-gougingly bad and 2) there was very little of it I was going to be able to re-use. So, instead, I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. It took probably 3 or 4 months (slow for me, for a first draft, especially since I started doing NaNoWriMo), and just kept getting longer and longer as I tried to find the right ending. The original ending, with Roric and Perarre returning in triumph after totally #&%$ing up the world's magic, made no sense at all. Finally, though, I found my ending. Then I took my 139,000 word manuscript and started revising. And revising, and revising, and revising. Some of the revising made it much better, and some of it made it worse. I got it down to 105,000 words, then realized I'd taken out a lot of stuff I actually wanted to keep, so I added a bunch back in. Then, when it came back from the test readers, I had another heart-sinking realization - the writing had been "polished" into bland, boring mush. So a couple more rounds of revision, fixing some problems the test readers had pointed out and "un-revising" the prose into something (hopefully) more lively and interesting to read. Then the proofreads (where I was still actually adding in some significant things I'd left out/taken out earlier) and then finally I decided that was it. It was done. The final version is about 130,000 words. The formatting and putting up on Amazon and Smashwords only took a couple of days (the paperback version is now also done and waiting my approval of the proof copy), and now it's done. It's hard to believe, after all those years and all that wrestling with it and all the seemingly-endless rounds of revision, it's done, and out there, and people are buying it and reading it and liking it. So, what's next? I'm getting the feedback on Sarya's Song back from the test readers, so as soon as I finish the draft of Book 6 of Daughter of the Wildings I'll start on that revision. Sarya's Song will be my next novel coming out; I'm aiming for Feb. 2014, though it could be March instead. Overall reaction to the book is positive, but it does need a lot of work. In the meantime, during November I'm also doing National Novel Writing Month. I'm writing fanfiction (another post for another time), which I haven't done in a couple of years. December is when I'll start on the big gigantic revision of Daughter of the Wildings. Also in the meantime, I've got a couple of stories loosely related to Chosen of Azara that are kind of halfway through being revised, that I'll finish and put up for sale. Lots more stories to come! To stay informed of new releases and special offers, sign up for my email alerts. No spam, I promise! I'm working on book 6 of Daughter of the Wildings. Book 5 and this first part of book 6 have been interesting to write. The series has two main characters, Silas and Lainie, and through the first four books I divided up the viewpoint more or less equally between the two of them, maybe leaning more to Silas. He's a fun character to write, and seeing the world through his eyes is an interesting experience. Because of this, even though I was also spending a fair amount of time in Lainie's viewpoint, I hadn't really developed her as much, and most of the quotable quotes from the books were coming from Silas. Starting with book 5, due to circumstances the story has been entirely from Lainie's viewpoint, so it forced me to look deeper into her mind and personality and find out just what she's capable of. And I'll tell you, it's pretty impressive. She may be a Sweet Young Thing, but she's also pretty badass, and smart too. So here, to balance out all the Silas quotes I've posted, are some Lainie-isms: Heading off on a possibly dangerous errand: Lainie didn't like it. This was the perfect setup for an ambush. She checked her gun yet again, then climbed down. "Wait here," she said to the carriage driver. Seeing a ladies' fashion magazine for the first time in her life: Lainie found a seat on a couch just the right size for two people, and picked up an oversize, floppy book--all paper, with no hard covers--with a big picture of an elegantly-dressed lady on the front. 'Ladies' Fashion Monthly,' it said on the cover. Lainie flipped through it; it had lots of colored and black-and-white pictures in it of fancy clothing, fancy houses, fancy children, fancy food, fancy dogs, and short articles--like in a newspaper--about how you could go about achieving all that fanciness. It's a trap! She pushed her gun a little harder into the man's back. "What in all the hells is going on?" Facing off against seven enemy wizards (actually eight, since the one she already shot won't stay down): "I'm not the one who picked this fight," Lainie replied. She drew Silas's gun into her left hand. It was big and heavy, too big and heavy for her, but it made her feel stronger, like Silas himself was fighting at her side. "Show me what you've got." Getting her first good meal in a long time: She made her way to the kitchen, which was just as big and shiny and beautiful as the front parlor. The first thing her eyes alighted on was a pie--apple, she thought, smelling it--set out to cool on the counter. She moved towards it, wondering if Mr. Coltor was rich enough that he could afford to hire someone just to bake pies and cakes and cookies for him, like the people who read that 'Ladies' Fashion Monthly' book she had seen at the hotel in Sandostra. She hoped so, because that pie wasn't long for this world. So, it's been lots of fun getting to know Lainie a little better. Book 6 is coming along; I'm getting to that terrifying point that I've encountered in all the other books of this series, where I know how it's going to end but only have the vaguest idea of how I'm going to get there. I've picked up some good plotting techniques from Holly Lisle's books and courses, which so far have seen me through. (btw, that's my affiliate link for her store. I'm proud to recommend her books, workshops, and courses because they've worked wonders for me.) Once this draft is done, the whole series will go through the first big, deep, major revision as if it was one book, so I can get everything consistent from beginning to end, then it'll go out to the test readers. If you're wondering how long that's going to take, I can't say, but I'm hoping to start releasing the series late spring/early summer 2014. Also if you're wondering, I'm estimating that the whole series is going to come out at around 300,000 words, or approximately the length of one George R.R. Martin book. So I won't be asking you to spend the rest of your life reading big long honkin' books and waiting years for the next installment. Once I've got the series ready to start releasing, it will (hopefully) only be a few months between releases. And a final note, I got a look at the sketch for the cover of book 3 a few weeks ago, and am hoping to get the final version any day now. It's gonna be so cool! Stay tuned for cover art reveal news :D Been working hard; time for a progress update. The Lost Book of Anggird is on the final line/copy editing round. I'm about 1/3 of the way through. After that comes the proofread and formatting, and I anticipate being able to release it sometime during the later part of October. Watch for previews and book extras as the release date draws near! The first major revision of Sarya's Song is a little more than halfway done. I'll start scaring up some test readers for it soon, and plan to be able to send it out to them later in September. It's hard to say for sure this far back, but I'm probably looking at a February release for that one. The draft of Book 5 of Daughter of the Wildings is getting close to finished. I should be able to wrap that up this week, then get right to work on Book 6. As I've said before, the plan with this series is to get all the books written, then revise them all as one unit to get the storyline and everything consistent throughout. When I first wrote Beneath the Canyons, I didn't intend for it to turn into a series; I'd always thought of myself as a writer of stand-alone novels. But at the end of that book, even though the storyline was resolved, Silas and Lainie were in worse trouble than they started out in, so of course the story had to continue! The series has developed in some ways I wasn't expecting - some things I thought were important early on have turned out not to be so important (so far, at least - we'll see how things go in Book 6), while other things I didn't think were important have turned out to be major parts of the overall series storyline. So, there's still a lot of work to do there. Can't say for sure, but I'm hoping to start releasing the series in Spring 2014. At that point all the books will be written and will have been through the first major revision and the test readers, so I'm hoping for no more than a couple of months in between releases of each book in the series. (And yes, if you're counting, I'm working on three novels at once right now. I think I'm probably out of my mind.) Also, I just got a look at a preliminary version of the cover for Daughter of the Wildings Book 3, which is now titled The Rancher's Daughter. Thrilling, I know, but it has more layers of meaning than it looks like. I reserve the right to change it if I think of something better. This cover is going to be super cool. While I'm on the subject, I want to say that of all the fun, awesome, cool things about being an independent author, working with my two amazing cover artists has been one of the funnest, awesomest, coolest things of all! Design by Katt and me-illuminated (Mominur Rahman) have both been great to work with, and I highly recommend them to other authors looking for custom cover art. And a reminder, to be informed of new releases and if I have a sale or free coupon or something, be sure to sign up for my email newsletter! I'm too lazy and too busy to spam; you'll only get emails when I release a new book or am having a special on my books. Something I read recently has led me to musing on Lucie's character development in Chosen of Azara. Lucie was kind of a risky character to write, and very difficult to get right (assuming I got her right). In fantasy, young noblewomen who go off on adventures are usually spunky and rebellious and seize eagerly at the chance to run off somewhere and do exciting and dangerous things. But with Lucie, I wanted to do something different - something that is pretty much the complete opposite of almost every fantasy heroine I've ever heard of. Lucie is pretty happy with the way things are and the life she has. She does have a bit of a free-spirited streak that pushes the bounds of convention and propriety, but she is willing (though somewhat reluctantly so) to accept the reasons why one day she will need to give up the things she enjoys doing. She also has the occasional complaint about her fiance, Estefan, but she understands that in her society, marriage is about a lot more than the whims of the heart. In spite of her "eccentricities," she wants to do what's right and proper and expected of her and to be a credit to her family. She wants the handsome husband, the beautiful house, the fashionable clothes, the social standing. She is looking forward to devoting her life to raising her children and managing her household. And then the dream, the things she wants and that she's always been taught that she should want, starts to fall apart at the same time that she's presented with an alternative that, according to everything she's been raised to believe, is unthinkable, that would cost her her family, her friends, her reputation, and everything that's important to her. Lucie finds herself in a quandary: cling to what she believes is right and important, for the sake of her and her family's name and reputation and her own security, or throw everything away and take a leap into the unknown. Either option requires more courage and resolve than Lucie possesses at the beginning of her story, and a major part of Lucie's story is watching her find the courage to do what her heart insists is, in the end, the right thing to do. I knew I was taking a chance of turning off readers with a character who seems weak, who wants to be proper and conventional, who is not only indecisive but outright offended when the handsome stranger says, "Throw everything away and come on my quest with me," and who wants to cling to the life she has even as it becomes increasingly clear that that life is detrimental to her. But it's a common source of conflict and growth in the real world: the person who hates their boring cubicle job but is afraid to quit because then how will they pay the bills? Or the person who hangs on to the same circle of friends they've known since junior high even though those friends aren't progressing beyond a junior-high mentality and the person wants bigger and better things out of life but they're afraid to leave those friends behind because what if they never make any new friends? Or the woman who can't bring herself to leave a bad relationship because what will she do once she's out on her own? We see spunky, rebellious, and strong-willed all the time in fantasy. With Lucie, I wanted to start with a character who is the opposite of that and show her growth into, not necessarily spunky and rebellious, but strong-willed and courageous enough to do what her heart is telling her is the right thing to do, no matter the pressures on her from other people or the consequences to herself. So that's the character growth part of this post. As for learning curves, that's my part. The great thing about being an independent author is that you're in charge of every aspect of your book, from what you write about in the first place to the final presentation. It's amazing to have that much control, but also involves learning a lot of new things. And one of those things is book covers. Book covers (though with ebooks what you're talking about is an image that represents the book on a website or on your ereader) are a hugely important tool for drawing attention to a book. They need to be eye-catching, attractive, and convey a good sense of what the book is about. For authors who publish with traditional publishing companies, the art/marketing departments take care of all that, and sometimes they do a good job and sometimes they don't. (Caution: any and all of those links may be NSFW. Brain bleach available in aisle 2.) Either way, the author generally has little if any input into or approval over what goes on the front of their book. Independent authors have the opposite problem: It's all up to us. We have to think of the concept and then license or commission the appropriate images. And it isn't easy to think of a single image to represent your whole book. One character? Multiple characters? Just a landscape? An object? A literal representation of a scene in the book or something more general? It's mind-boggling if you aren't used to doing this, and sometimes it takes trial and error. With Chosen of Azara, I wanted something representing one or more of the characters (I very much prefer book covers with pictures of the characters), and something representing the cove of Azara or another aspect of the magic in the book. I fiddled around with pictures of various crystals and necklaces, trying to get the magical talisman that is an important object in the book, but that didn't go anywhere. Finally I settled on a picture of someone who sort of looked like Lucie, and a picture of a rocky ocean cove, and tried putting them together, with results I wasn't entirely happy with. When I went looking for a cover artist for the Daughter of the Wildings series, I came across Design by Katt and fell in love with her fantasy portraits of women. I knew I'd found just the artist I needed to turn my Chosen of Azara cover concept into something wonderful. And she did - she took my original images and concept and did a gorgeous job with them. Her rendition of Lucie captures Lucie perfectly. It's a gorgeous cover and I love it, but I started feeling like maybe my concept doesn't really represent what Chosen of Azara is really about. Lucie is only one main character of three in the book, and the main main character is actually Sevry. So I started thinking he should be on the cover. As well, just having Lucie on the cover doesn't convey the dark, angsty, romantic, adult (as in grownup, not as in porno) nature of the book - it looks more like a Young Adult book, or maybe fantasy with a chick-lit-ish twist. So, reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that my original concept was a misfire. In the meantime, as I saw more of Katt's work and as she did the lucious cover of Sarya's Song, I came to realize what a really skilled and talented artist can do with photomanipulation and digital painting. It was okay if I couldn't find a photo of two people who look exactly like my characters - the main things to look for were the basic physical type and the positioning. Everything else, hair color, hairstyle, even clothing and facial expression, can be altered. So I went browsing for stock images for a new cover and almost instantly came across the PERFECT picture to become Sevry and Lucie. I ran it by Katt and she roughed out an idea of what can be done with it, and oh my, it's going to be amazing! She's working on it even as I write this. :-D So watch this space for the new cover for Chosen of Azara. Once I've revealed it here, I'll start uploading it to the various retailers where the book is available. The old cover isn't going away, though; it will still be around on the site, because I do think it's the perfect picture of Lucie. Update 3/17: Note the new new cover for Chosen of Azara. |
AuthorI am Kyra Halland, author of tales of fantasy, heroism, and romance. Sign up for my email list
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