Mike's comments (member since Aug 19, 2008)

Mike's comments from the Goodreads Sci-Fi/Fantasy Authors group.

I can't find a definitive answer but the Wikipedia article on Dickens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dic...) certainly suggests that they were written as they were published:

"Usually keen to give his readers what they wanted, the monthly or weekly publication of his works in episodes meant that the books could change as the story proceeded at the whim of the public. Good examples of this are the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit which Dickens included in response to lower-than-normal sales of the earlier chapters."

That's not to say he didn't try to have a "buffer", like most modern webcomics artists do, for example, or that he didn't map out the story in outline ahead of time. The blog-novel is taking the serialization approach to the extreme of immediacy - the only more extreme place to go would be the Twitter novel, I suppose. (Not planning on that, but I'm sure someone will try it.)

Oh, and the Wikipedia Serial (literature) article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialized_...) describes one particular novel as "exceptionally, written entire over a year's time in 1894-95 and serialized only after completion, in 1895-96", suggesting that writing and publishing were usually going on simultaneously.

Oh, definitely I'll revise once it's finished. I'm even going to go back during the process and do some small retcons to fix up things where I've changed my mind. But some of the best 19th-century fiction, including some classics by Jules Verne and Charles Dickens, was written as it was serialized in magazines or newspapers, I'm pretty sure.

I look at it as a creative constraint.

Thanks, Marc, I've added that to my to-read shelf.

I'm feeding my blog here (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/125...), which at the moment means that my new YA novel is being serialized onto Goodreads.

I'm writing the novel in the blog. I find blogging is conducive to writing without too much procrastinating revision, and one post per chapter leads to nice punchy chapters.

Spaceships definitely implies SF, Johanna. Though there is a category called "science fantasy" as well (for where you have magic and spaceships in the same story).

My own City of Masks is speculative fiction ("What if there was a city where everyone had to wear a mask and act in character with it?") but there's no technology more advanced than a crossbow, and no magic. It's late-Medieval/early-Renaissance in feel, like a lot of fantasy, but the speculation is sociological. What do you call that? Makes it very difficult to market, by the way - genres are all about marketing.

City of Masks

I think part of the difference between fantasy and SF is often in the feel (I was thinking about this just this morning).

SF as it is usually written (these days, at least) tends to be more rationalistic and even more cynical; fantasy, though it can often be very cruel as well, seems to have more room for innocence and, as Mortimus says, mystery. The characters are often easier for me to empathize with. This is partly why I prefer to read fantasy, and I don't think I'm alone.

It would be easy to cite exceptions to this, of course, in both directions - it's a generalization, and it applies more to current SF than it does to some of the older stuff.

My worst experience as an editor was with a reasonably prominent journalist who was contracted to do a nonfiction series with the publishing house I worked for at the time. She had no idea how commas worked. None. I resorted to stripping out all the commas in her submitted files with find-and-replace and then going through and adding them in where they belonged.

I made the mistake of telling my boss I was doing this, and she for some unfathomable reason passed it on to the author, who flipped out. I was forbidden to do it any more - so I went back to deleting them one at a time.

Some manuscripts you can only improve so much.

Shirley, you're absolutely correct, and even good and well-known writers often need a lot of copy editing. (Nor do traditional publishers always give it to them as they deserve. I've been noticing more and more errors creeping into books from the big publishers, mostly misused words - "make due" instead of "make do" or "discrete" instead of "discreet", that kind of thing. This is what editors are paid to fix.)

I was a book editor myself for a while, and I remember giving a talk to some amateur writers in the early or mid 1990s, when desktop publishing was the new thing and people were starting to self-publish. With regard to editing, I said, somewhat arrogantly, "I'm a trained professional. Don't try this at home." I kind of stand by that, though, the intent if not the exact expression.

I edit my own books because I know how, but it's not a common skill, and it does make a big difference to the perceived quality of the book. David has done exactly the right thing in getting professionals to edit, proof, do layout and design a cover - these are specialized skills and unless you know you possess them to a professional level it is best to find someone else who does and pay them for the value they add.

Folks, please, link to your book on Authonomy in your posts - the search there is terrible and I can't find your books to check them out.

Julianne: Yes, my point was that the author used her own ignorant conception of "old-style" language, which not only wasn't anything to do with the period but wasn't used correctly and didn't add anything. Like Marvel Comics having Thor and Hercules speak Shakespearian English because Shakespearian English is what people who don't know much about history think of as "old-fashioned language".

I do this myself, of course (we usually do ourselves what irritates us in others). In my novel City of Masks, which is set in an approximately late-medieval/early-Renaissance setting rather like Shakespeare's Italy, I have given it a "period feel" by using a very few bits of mostly 18th-century language with the odd medievalism thrown in. It's told as a diary by a civil servant, and I had Pepys' diary overtly in mind. But my aim was to make it feel just slightly "period" while not posing a comprehension barrier to readers, and certainly not trying to reproduce actual language of any particular period. After all, the City of Masks itself isn't any close match to historical Venice either, nor is it supposed to be. The feedback I've had is that people enjoy the feel of the language and don't have trouble understanding it, so mission accomplished.

Now that I think about it, one of my next fiction projects does involve a couple who go through adversity together and, from a rocky start, do fall in love, so my hypocrisy knows no bounds, really. (I have remembered, too, a real-life example of two colleagues who went through this cycle.)

I stand by the moon phases, the bad fantasy names and the tiredness of the Dark Lord/Chosen One plot, though.

Julianne: Since Medieval Welsh would be incomprehensible to a modern reader, it's reasonable to allow leeway to an author who does little more than suggest a generalized archaic flavor of English.

Absolutely true, but the problem was that in this case it was totally unnecessary (since the fact that they were speaking medieval Welsh was completely obvious from context), and poorly, in fact ineptly, done. The modern character (it was a time-travel scenario) spoke the same way - and sometimes used modern idioms in the middle of all the "thee hast", which (as you note) made it even worse.

One thing that annoys me in fantasy novels is multiple, usually multicoloured, moons in the sky at the same time but all showing different phases. To me, this indicates that the author hasn't taken a moment to think about what actually causes the phases of the moon (its position relative to the sun). I mean, sure, it's fantasy, not all laws of physics will be observed, but still, unless you are going for a very surreal world where commonsense rules just don't apply, don't do this. It's sloppy.

Dark Lords and Chosen Ones also bore me, because they've been done so often. Occasionally someone comes along who can still write a good Dark Lord/Chosen One fantasy (the aforementioned J.K. Rowling is one example, and David Zindell's Lightstone series another), but they manage to be good despite the cliche rather than because of it.

I'm also waiting for a book in which the male and female characters who take an instant dislike to each other at the beginning still dislike each other at the end. This happens all the time in real life, but in fiction they inevitably end up in love.

And don't get me started on Bad Fantasy Name Syndrome. (It particularly annoys me when names of Jewish or Christian origin turn up in fantasies where Judaism and Christianity have never existed and everyone is pagan, but any name with an apostrophe in also instantly loses points, unless it's something like O'Reilly.)

And please, please, please, for the love of language, don't do "period dialogue" unless you have a really good ear for it. I read a particularly egregious example a while back in which the author used two words from Renaissance English ("thee" and "hast") to mark that the characters were speaking early medieval Welsh (which they did for the entire first half of the book and most of the rest of the time, and which was obvious from context anyway). To make it worse, the author had no idea how to use them grammatically. They were "thee" and "hast" in all grammatical contexts. I hast, thee hast, he hast. I say to thee, thee hast done this... Just about drove me wild. It's quite a popular book, though, so I know my purist feelings aren't widely shared.

Thanks, Robin, I will check your book out. I just came across Authonomy too and it looks like a great way for the cream to rise to the top - HarperCollins are smart to set something like this up.

My book is City of Masks.

Here's mine - my design, but the beautiful mask is by an artist called Donia. I found it on DeviantArt and she kindly agreed to let me use it in exchange for a credit:



(Can't get the border to display for some reason.)

I have a speculative-fiction title which isn't fantasy (no magic), but doesn't have advanced technology either - the "speculative" part is a societal difference rather than a technological one, and the setting is early Renaissance.

If that falls within the parameters, you can pick up a .pdf at http://city-of-masks.blogspot.com, or contact me (there's an email address there) and I can mail you a physical copy.

We're straying a bit here, but some more name resources:

http://www.20000-names.com/

and Kate Monk's Onomastikon (developed for roleplaying games, but equally applicable to fiction where you need a genuine historical or foreign name):

http://www.gaminggeeks.org/Resources/Kat...

POV is a topic that interests me a lot. I did my first novel, City of Masks, in first person (through journal entries and a few other documents), though switching occasionally to a different person's journal. It was a lot of fun to convey that the person writing the journal was an unreliable narrator and didn't really always have a handle on what was going on. However, I think it also helped to draw the reader into his somewhat innocent moral perspective.

I like a challenge, so I'm writing my current novel (publicly on a blog, http://gu-novel.blogspot.com) in second person. The idea is that it's describing an immersive documentary some years in the future, where you, the reader/viewer/experiencer, experience the story from various people's points of view, though most often that of the documentary maker. What that does, I think, is give a more vivid experience of seeing the issues from different angles. (The documentary is on a disruptive technology.)

Somewhat connected: I came across some material yesterday on the different effects of using first-person and third-person perspectives in therapy (I'm a hypnotherapist), and blogged about it: http://hypno.co.nz/blogs/index.php/2008/... Basically immersion in a first-person view of an emotional experience will bring about a repetition of that emotional experience, but if you view your own past experience from a third-person perspective you are more likely to make rational re-assessments of it.

I agree, Paul, there is definitely such a thing as too much detail, and there is definitely a place for shorter books - for adults as well. I look at some of those thick multi-volume epics and think, "JAFPB - Just another fantasy phone book. Thick, boring, and full of names."

I've had the opposite criticism of my own writing - my critique group told me I needed to bulk City of Masks out a bit, that it was all good stuff but it was packed too tightly together. It needed more lettuce in the sandwich. Even after I took their advice, it still came out as quite a short book. But I marketed it as "a swashbuckling adventure", which creates an expectation that the story will keep moving along.


I suppose in the end it comes down to readers' and writers' taste.