Blog

Working on a post about Albacon that seems to be growing into a post about cons in general. It’s going to take me a while to get that one done, so in the meantime, here are some more reviews of The Painted Man:

NextRead: This reviewer teased on his site for a few weeks before posting his review. In it, he mentions his thoughts about the sexual/violent content of the book, which lead to some debate in the comments section on whether the book should be considered YA (Young Adult). My opinion? It should not. I never intended the book to be for the YA market, but I can see how people could make that mistake, since it begins with the protagonists as children.

Dominion Post put a very complimentary review here (second review in the article).

Dan Garner bought the book on a lark and wrote a nice little review here.

Livedoor: This one’s in Japanese! Google Translate sucks for Japanese, but it’s good enough to tell that the reviewer is a Japanese housewife who liked it and is eager for the next one. How cool is that?

Courier Mail: This one is somewhat critical, but that’s cool. He still liked the book enough to recommend it, and I’m always interested to see what people didn’t like/believe, even if I don’t always agree.

In other news:

Suvudu is a blog jointly maintained by the folks at Del Rey books. It’s a great idea, letting industry folks take turns gabbing about the stuff they love that got them into the business in the first place, along with a few shameless plugs about what people are actually working on. Google pointed out there was an entry on me last week that amazed me. Apparently, Terry Brooks is recommending me to people!

After the Albacon post, I will start on the one about Scott Meredith’s Writing to Sell, which might also take a while to finish, but which, I think, will be a really great post and discussion forum, because the topic is dear to me, as it is the symbol of my writing epiphany.

Posted on October 18, 2008 at 4:01 pm by PeatB
Filed under Reviews, Writing
2 Comments »

While I was in London, I did a video interview for Amazon.co.uk. I wrote a blog post about it last month. The video is meant to be embedded on the Amazon Page for The Painted Man as a sales tool, but I was also told it would be live on YouTube and that I and my various publishers around the world were free to use it with impunity.

Then a month went by. No video. I guess the editing folks were a little backed up. I kind of forgot about it.

Then, this morning, google alerts pointed me to YouTube, and voila! There it was. After they boiled down 30 minutes of interview into 4 minutes of video, I think I came off pretty lucid. It’s not even up on the Amazon site yet, so check it out here first:

Last week, I wrote a post entitled Words Written vs. Words Used, which was partly a craft discussion and partly a window into my insane obsession with numbers and statistics. I received a comment this morning that included a question I started to reply to, but as my answer grew lengthier, I decided to just make it a full-on post. In the comment, Jonathan asks:

Before you were able to write full time, were your benchmarks different? how much time did you devote to writing while you carried a FT day job?

Here’s the really messed up thing: When I had a full-time day job, my quota was exactly the same. I had to produce 1,000 words a day, no excuses. I wrote on my commute, typing on the tiny keyboard of my smartphone. I wrote at lunch. I got home in the evening, had dinner with my wife and allowed myself an hour of TV, then went back to work. Make no mistake, a novel done right requires countless hours of work and the sacrifice of a lot of personal/social time. If you’re serious about it, you need to commit to it even if it means you’re tired all the time from staying up until 2am writing, or have to tell your friends/family/spouse that you can’t do that thing with them because you need to stay home and write on Sunday.

Of course, like a lot of new authors, I thought I all this would change when I wrote full time. I would produce more and reclaim all that free time I had been forced to give up.

Ah, naivete…

I thought I could calculate my new productivity simply by multiplying the spare hours I had used for writing by the additional hours in the work day, but it doesn’t work like that. I soon discovered two things: One was that being a full time author requires a LOT of paperwork. Sales contracts. Editing. Endless tax forms. Figuring out healthcare. Editing. Doing interviews, con appearances, and promotion. Editing. Debating cover art and copy. Blogging.

Taking care of the business aspects of your career, even when you have a great agent like I do, eats up a good chunk of that newfound free time. But even if it didn’t, the other thing I discovered is that just as important as the writing itself is time spend thinking about what you are going to write later. When I had a full-time day job full of mindless tasks, I had plenty of time to ponder the direction of my story, solve plot problems, and sometimes even craft prose in my head to write down later, so that when I found time to actually write, I had a good roadmap of what I wanted to do and could plow ahead.  Those hours still have to come from somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong. I am overjoyed that I have the opportunity to write full-time, at least for now. It’s especially wonderful since it allows me to be around my 11 week old daughter all the time, but that’s a whole other time sink…

Posted on October 14, 2008 at 11:31 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Writing
5 Comments »

Quick post this morning as I need to be out the door shortly. I’m putting Dani and the baby in the car and taking them to my parents’ house, then my partner in crime/evil twin Jay Franco and I are heading up to Albany, NY for Albacon. I will be on a handful of panels at the convention, talking about worldbuilding, writing strong female characters, and a host of other subjects. If you’re in the Albany area, I suggest you swing by. Should be a fun time. I’ll blog all about it when I get back.

In the meantime, I want to point everyone to an interview I did with Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. Pat contacted my UK editor a few days ago, and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview. I do a lot of trolling around the internet, looking at what people are saying about my work on blogs and forums, and I was interested to see that on the Westeros forum (shame on you if you don’t know what it’s named after) there was a pretty active thread about The Painted Man, which included some comments from Pat himself, who has been really friendly.

I’ve done a half dozen interviews by now, and felt a lot of them were a little stiff, and that I was just regurgitating some of the same answers over and over, so I tried really hard this time to relax into the interview and just be my usual dorky self. It was pretty fun. I need to keep reminding myself that author interviews are not job interviews. I don’t need to wear a shirt & tie.

Anyway, time to bathe and pack up the baby. Have a good weekend, all.

Posted on October 10, 2008 at 9:13 am by PeatB
Filed under Events, Interviews, Reviews, World Traveler, Writing
5 Comments »

I set a writing quota for myself every day: One thousand words. It may sound like a lot, but really, it’s a very modest goal, about three and a half double-spaced pages. Some weeks I don’t even come close, and other weeks I greatly exceed it. I consider >10,000 words a “good” week, and <5,000 a bad one. It balances out, more or less.Your average novel is somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words. Fantasy novels tend to be longer, but theoretically, at that rate, you could still write two 150,00 word books a year, with time left for editing.

Theoretically.

The reality, though, is quite different. First of all, I tend to write more than I use. The Painted Man was around 180,000 words when I first started shopping it around. It took some heavy editing for me to trim it down to it’s sleek final 154,000. Some of the stuff I cut was for pacing and tone, and while much of it is, in my opinion, as good as the rest, the book as a whole is better without it. When my site redesign is done and I have my deleted scene blog, I will discuss some of these in detail and put the text up for people to see and judge for themselves. I also excised thousands of redundant and/or unnecessary sentences and words throughout, tightening up the prose into the clipped, active style that I have settled upon.

But even more than overwriting of prose, I have to take into account the fact that about 70% of what I write is notes.

I am a meticulous planner. I maintain two separate versions of every book or story I write as independent MSWord files. One is the prose version, and the other is the stepsheet or story skeleton. In the stepsheet version, every scene is broken down by section into bulleted lists detailing what the action is, the pertinent worldbuilding information, and copious notes on what the characters are feeling and their motivations. It’s a lot like political talking point lists, but less evil.

More often than not, there is FAR more information in the stepsheet than I need for the scene. I may write several paragraphs on the politics of a situation, or the complex cultural rules guiding the characters’ actions, and then sum it all up in one carefully crafted line of dialogue, or not use it at all, saving the information in my vast archive against future need.

I will usually plot out an entire book thusly before I start writing the prose. Sometimes prose just comes to me in a rush and I go back and reverse engineer the stepsheet, but that is much less common. There are always vague sections in the stepsheet, of course, but all the major story points and motivations are covered.

The problem is, once you start writing the prose, things change. Characters develop their own voices and personalities, and are no longer willing to conform with how the stepsheet tells them to behave, and I need to go into the skeleton and break a few bones to get things smooth again. Kind of like a nose job for my story.

It’s a grinding, exhausting, tedious process that takes up more mental RAM than I really have to spare. I know most writers don’t have my level of OCPD and operate much more freely, but I have settled on this method, and it seems to work for me. My goal is to tell an extremely complex story in as simple a manner as possible, and keeping all that straight requires lists, lists, lists.

There are plenty of writers that just make the story up as they go along, all in prose, and never look back, or even too far forward. They have skilled copyeditors who worry about all those little complexities and straighten them out after the fact, fixing logic flaws in fictional cultures or systems of magic or whatever. That’s fine, I guess, but I could never trust another person with that level of responsibility in MY fictional world, and MY characters. They are far too precious to me.

What does this say in the end? That I can theoretically write about one book a year.

Theoretically.

Posted on October 5, 2008 at 12:33 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
11 Comments »