B.E. Sanderson's Blog, page 3

This Edit Round is Deep, Man

I am deep in editing.  This particular round involves me reading the book on my Kindle and making notes in a big 5-subject notebook.  Once I get a page of notes or so, I enter them into the manuscript.  (As opposed to the round when I waited until I was done with the whole book to enter the notes.)  :shrug:  It's my process.  

I use a 5-subject notebook because it's thick enough to be stable on the arm of my recliner.  And college-ruled, so I can fit as much on one page as possible.  But I only write on one side of the page.  

The other day, a writer friend of mine expressed that my way of doing this would drive her nuts.  And that's okay.  Everyone has their own process.  And the process might not necessarily be set in stone.  As I've said before, I'm big on letting people do what they do.  I'm just talking about what works for me.

So, here I am, reading my own book, looking for anything that makes me stumble as a reader - typos, wrong-words, crutch words - as well as taking note of anything that makes me wonder 'WTF?'  Like inconsistencies in the world or the writing or what have you.  There's a whole place where a character's pent-up anger bites him in the ass and afterward they're all wondering whether the same thing is going to happen to any of them, but I hadn't delved into the MC's considerable load of pent-up anger making him a prime candidate for this particular ass-biting event.  So, I was all like WTF? and then I addressed it.  Voila.  

I think all of this work is making a better book.  I hope.  We'll see.  Actually, it is making it a better book.  The question is whether the 'better book than it was' is better than other books on the market.  That's what we'll have to see about.

Anyway, I'm usually hitting this first thing in the morning, after my coffee and web-surfing.  Then throughout the day.  Then after dinner.  Seeing as it takes me about an hour to make a page of notes and then another hour to enter those notes, I'm only 154 pages into what is now a 371 pages book.  It's not a fast process by any means.  It is what it is.  

Now, back to your regularly scheduled and me back to work.

Tangled in Ideas

The brain is a wonderful and terrible thing.  It gives us all these ideas to write.  Then again, it gives us all these ideas to write.

LOL, I know.  That looks weird.  But it's true.  We have all these wonderful and glorious ideas that we can write, but also can have too many ideas of what to write and how to write it.  So many ideas that sometimes we can get tangled up in them all.  

Case in point:  I've written a fantasy novel.  I'm damn near done editing it.  In fact, I'd say I'm less than two months away from it being publishable.  And my brain comes along and says 'what if we expanded on certain things and in certain areas and instead of one book, we turn this into three books?'  Silly brain.

Shut up, silly brain.  I know what you're doing.  You're afraid of sending this out into the world and having it flop, so you're throwing landmines in the way of publication.  

If I listened to my silly brain, I would spend the next few months writing more words and editing more stuff, and still maybe not have a solid thing to show for it.  I have a solid thing NOW.  It's a good book.  The more I read it, the more convinced I am that it is a good book.  Sure, I could expand on stuff, but that's not what this book needs.  It is what it is without further futzing around.  

Sure, I could delve deeper into the whole 'school for mages' aspect, but that isn't what this is about.  This isn't Harry Potter, for pitysakes.  This is about a bunch of kids - teenagers, really - thrown into training to protect the Shroudlands because there is no one else to do it.  And they don't exactly have a lot of time because, like I said, they're it.  Evil stuff is coming out of the shrouds and they need to handle it, whether they're trained or not.  

So, no, I will not be expanding this one book into three.  The book is done.  I'm editing it.  I'm looking ahead to what will happen in the next book.  I have some ideas.  My silly brain needs to focus on that and drop the damn idea of reworking this book.  

Okay, now that I've smacked my silly brain a bit, maybe I can get down to getting it done.  Finish the damn book and let what comes come.

Do you ever have so many ideas you're getting tangled up in them?  

I'm No Ninja

I read a post this morning that said something to the effect of 'Ninja writers pre-sell books'.  Umm... yeah... about that...

I don't pre-sell books.

I had my first book up for pre-order.  For like ten days.  It was finished and could've gone live as soon as I uploaded it.  But I'd heard pre-orders were a thing, so I tried it.  I didn't like it.  I got a few orders that way, but not enough to warrant the waiting.  This post was talking about putting it up for pre-order before you even have the cover or the book finished.  

Wha?

Just the thought of doing that sends me into paroxysms of fear and doubt.  What if I don't get the book finished?  What if I have to delay the release due to reasons and because of stuffs?  What if I do get a bunch of pre-orders and I have to let those readers down?  

The author of the post even went so far as to suggest taking money for books that haven't been printed and offering a discount to those people.  Actual cash in hand for a product that doesn't exist.  :panics at the thought:

Nope, nope, nope.  If you lay down money for one of my books, you will have the book in your hot little hands, inside whatever time it takes to deliver the book to you - immediate for ebooks and however long ship times are for print.  

Perhaps if I was the kind of author who planned her books, this would be closer to possible.  I'd have a general idea of how long a book was and when I'd get the damn thing done, so I could maybe put up a pre-order.  Even then, I'd still be all spastic about it.  What if I break an arm?  What if my arthritic wrists decide not to comply?  Hell, what if my beta-readers/editors are jammed up and can't work me into their schedules?  Or they break an arm?  There are too many variables.  I don't like variables.

Now, if the post-author had been talking about pre-selling in terms of marketing before the book is ready to go, that I can do.  To a certain extent.  I mean, I have a cover.  And I have a general idea of what the book is about now that it's finished (not edited, but written), so I can talk about it.  But to take actual orders?  Ut-uh.  I can whet your appetite with snips and stuff, and let you hunger to buy it when it's available.  But that's it.  

I can hardly even give you a firm date for release until I am way closer to finished than I am now.  I'm shooting for before April Fool's Day, but I'm not promising anything.  I don't like making promises I'm not certain I can keep.  And a pre-sale is a promise.  

So if that means I'm not a Ninja Writer, well, I guess I'm okay with that.  I hope you are, too.

What about you?  Do you pre-sell your books?  If you're a reader, do you do pre-orders?  (I don't do those either, but that's me and a whole 'nother post.)

Cover Reveal

As you may know, I've been going 'round and 'round with both the cover and the title for Untitled Fantasy.  I had several front runners.  I even thought of holding a poll here.  But in the end, I decided for myself like a big girl.  Yay!

And the winner is... :drumroll: 

Shroudlands Book One: SONG OF STORM AND SHROUD

Gah, and now I need a blurb to go with the cover and the title.  It's an epic fantasy with mages and spells and magical creatures.  There's action and adventure, a quest, and death.  And, of course, a dragon.  She's right there on the cover, after all.  

I'm working on editing now.  It's a long haul, but I can see the end.  I'm hoping for a book release no later than April Fool's Day.  I expect earlier.  I'm shooting for under-promise and over-deliver there.

And here's a snap of a snip of the beginning... just to whet your appetite.  (Click on it to make it large enough to read.)

Hope you like it.

The Fun of Being an Author

There are sites where it is, apparently, great fun to publicly poke fun at the covers of books.  I landed on one once with the original cover for Wish In One Hand.  It was humiliating.  Especially considering I'd paid a supposed artist a heaping helping of money to create that cover.  It wasn't what I wanted, but I allowed myself to be bullied into accepting it.  I was backed into a corner, with my release date fast approaching, so I went forth with a cover I was not proud of.  

If you saw it, I apologize.  Once I finished licking my wounds and refilling my coffers, I paid another artist to create the covers you see now for it and it's sequels.  

I create my own covers for the non-fantastic books I write.  They're not bad.  Okay, maybe a couple.  Oddly enough, Accidental Death is the first cover people point to off my bookmarks and say that's the one they're interested in reading.  Doesn't sell well online, but in person, it's da bomb.  It's sequel is also not a great cover.  :shrug:  Maybe someday I'll do new covers for them now that I'm better at it.

Of course, now, I have a fantasy novel in the works.  And I'm trying to do the cover myself.  I made a dragon.  She's pretty cool and I'm proud of the effort.  Unfortunately, every time I try to incorporate her into a cover, she looks like a bad photoshop job.  

I worked on it for about 2 hours last night, so maybe it was staring at it for all that time that finally made me throw my hands up.  I'll try again today.

Oh, I could probably find a cover artist for this.  My other artist, the one I like, is super busy and fantasy ain't her bag anyway.  There are others.  But 1) I'm gun-shy after my encounter with the dude who shall remain nameless (mainly because I'm repressing that and because I do not wish to get sued at this late date). And 2) I want to do this for myself.  

But yeah, the fear is there that I'll end up on another one of those sites that pan bad book covers.  That can't be good for sales.  Nothing like being the target of ridicule.  Woohoo.

Of course, I've also been working on titles.  I'm leaning toward Shroudlands: The Battle for Kingshead, but again, I spent so much time looking at that in various fonts that I now kind of hate it.  Or maybe I just need to rename the city.  Or maybe I should've just spent last night reading a book.

It's so much fun being an author.  Derp.

Play Amongst Yourselves

Oops.  I opened this to write a new post and then I got caught up in working on spreadsheets for the ol' payjob.  And now, two hours later, here I am with no post.  Unfortunately, I need to focus on creating my dragon and on coming up with a title.  Play amongst yourselves.

Oh, and if you're interested, I posted a snippet of this book in the comment section at Silver's place this morning.  Wednesday Words and all that.  Read hers, read mine.  Enjoy yourselves.

Working on It

 I finished that round of edits on Untitled Fantasy on Saturday.  Right now, it's 368 pages long and just a hair under 108K words.  Publication day is getting closer.  Not sure when it will be, but it'll definitely in sight now.  (If you have a good pair of binoculars.  LOL)

So, that means I need to get moving on two things... 1) a cover, and 2) a title.

I started something the other day with regard to the cover.  Spent copious hours on it, then scrapped it.  Yesterday morning, I hit it again with all new images and I've got something.  It's not quite right yet, but I think I'm getting there. 

What I did worked like this... scour Morguefile for free images of lizards, found ones I thought could work as a dragon and saved those.  Open the files, erase all the background around the lizard.  Find wings that were the right size and orientation to fit said lizard.  Find teeth that were the right size and potentially the right orientation.  Take those and erase the backgrounds.  Cobble them together so they look like they actually belong on the same animal.

But wait... in my particular art program, when you save an image as a jpg, it gives the damn thing a white background.  So, I spent some extra time erasing the lizard's background again and then saving it as a mic file (Microsoft Image Composer).  Okay, so now my 'sprites' are happy and I can play with them.  Of course, once I get a beast cobbled together, I'll have to save it as a jpg so the sprites work together as one image, and then I'll have to erase the damn background again.  (Yes, there probably IS an easier way, but I haven't found it yet.  I suspect it lies within software I don't have, don't want to buy, and don't want to learn.)

The super easier, and also more expensive, way is to pay someone else to do this for me.  Umm, yah.  Umm, no.  I love my go-to cover artist, but she is super busy, as in like booking for next year, and I don't think epic fantasy is her bailiwick.  I could look for another artist, but I keep having flashbacks of the first cover for Wish in One Hand.  OMG, that was SOOOOO bad and an incredibly expensive lesson to learn.  Like with getting a haircut, I hate paying for bad service, so I do it myself.  If this cover is going to be bad, at least I didn't pay for it, eh?

Anyway, I think I have the setting image - all tweaked and ready to go - all I need now is a dragon.  I think it's a bearded dragon base with flying fox wings and snake teeth.  Right now, it looks like the weird mating of a gargoyle and that gremlin in Gremlins 2 who grew wings.  But I can work with that.

Oh, yeah, and #2... the title.  I've been playing with stuff in my head, trying to find something that makes me stand up and salute.  I thought up Mageborn... but it's still not right and of course, someone else is using it.  (And yes, I know, finding a title someone else HASN'T used isn't necessary, but I want what I want, so I'll try my damndest.)  Thinking about it now, maybe Mage Against the Shrouds... which could make the next book Mage Within the Shrouds.  That seems interesting...  Has that fantasy ring to it.  And it isn't already used.  Hmm.  Ooo, maybe Twins Against the Shrouds... eh, mage seems better.  

Okay, well, time to toddle off.  Work to do.  Calls to make.  

Anyway, as you can see, I'm working on it.  What are you working on these days?

Can You See Them?

I have a confession to make.  When I write a story, or even when I read one, I can't see the characters.  

I don't think my brain works that way.  Maybe it did before it got crumpled, but it doesn't now.

Oh, I hear them fine.  And I do have a general impression of what they look like.  But I couldn't give their descriptions to a sketch artist and have them draw these people so they'd look like what I think they look like.  I couldn't pick them out of a line-up.  Because I don't think they look like anything more than an amorphous blob.

Looking for models for my book covers was the hardest thing.  My cover artist gave me a link to the site she uses and had me go at it.  I scanned hundreds of photos to find the best approximation of what Jo Mayweather and Jeni Braxxon look like.  I must've scanned hundreds more to find images for Accidental Death and Natural Causes, and those aren't even full face.  All I had to do was find a general shape.  

Once I'm made to go look for a character's face, then they have a face forever after.  Jo will always look like the cover model to me now.  So will Jeni.  Before that?  Not a clue.  Once I went looking for an image of Zeke - because I think someone asked me for it - and Zeke now looks like that dude.  (I'd show you, but the link to that model is broken now.  Oops.)

I have author friends who are all like 'this is what my character looks like' and they'll show a picture they found.  I'm a little jealous of those folks.  I want to see my creations in my head, but I can't.  

Thinking about it now, I can't really hold the images of someone's face in my head either.  Real life people are amorphous blobs, too.  :shrug:

As a result, I'm probably not the best at describing my characters in writing.  At least, I don't feel like I'm the best.  My readers are probably a better judge of that than I am.  The image the reader has in their heads probably isn't anywhere close to what I would have, if, you know, I had an image.  I guess that's okay.  I want the reader to picture the characters as they see them.  I guess what I do write as description is sufficient for that purpose.  

Like in Untitled Fantasy... Captain Vere, the head of the Academy, is tall and wiry with silver hair (not silver as in old, just silver) and a scar running down her cheek.  She's a battle-hardened lady and obviously tough enough to run an academy full of kids learning magic and skills for battle, but there's a sadness to her as she never really had a childhood of her own and her twin was killed in battle.  Can ya picture her?  

But let's take Aryl, the main character.  He's average height/weight for a 15-year-old boy.  He's a farm boy, so he's got some physical strength, but he's also way smaller than his friend, Galin.  Black hair, violet eyes.  And that's all I've got for him.  Can't picture anything else, so there he is.  And I need to go find a model for him so I can do the freakin' cover.  Derp.

His sister, Lyra...  White hair, violet eyes.  Pretty.  Or at least pretty to Galin.  I guess she would have a similar facial structure to Aryl... they are twins, after all, even if it's fraternal and not identical.  Since I can't see him, I can't really give you her either.  She's a wisp of a dream of a drawing of a person.

Galin... Aryl's best friend and sweet on Lyra.  Big dude for his age.  A 'pull the plow when the horses get tired' kind of guy.  

Anyway, I don't want to talk about every character here.  I have the basics, but I can't SEE them.  Wish I could.  Can't.  

What about you?  Can you see the characters you write or read?  Are they fully-formed or just blobs?  Does having a picture help?  Or when you see a pic of the characters do they totally harsh the image you formed on your own?

Wave of the Future or Flash in the Pan?

More and more, I'm seeing stuff that isn't the title in the title of books.  The other morning, I saw 'TITLE: A gripping psychological thriller you do not want to miss' as the title of a book.  

Umm...

This annoys me greatly, as I have said before.  However, I'm beginning to wonder if readers are so used to this, as well as being so 'short attention span theater' these days, that I'm missing the boat.

Seriously.  

Although, at this point, the word gripping really rubs me the wrong way.  If everything is gripping, is anything really gripping?  Nowadays, I'm all like "Oh, yeah... :eyeroll: ...a gripping psychological thriller... ri-ight."

But is this something I should be doing?  I don't mean the gripping thing.  But the adding a descriptive puff after the title.  

Dying Embers: A Flaming Good Suspense with Arson and Murder and a slight tinge of romance
Accidental Death: A Small Town Revenge-filled Romp in the Snow
Wish in One Hand: A Suspense-filled Urban Fantasy with Snarky Genies

Would that really sell more books?  I always figured I said everything that needed to be said in the blurb.  Along with a... pardon me... gripping title and cover.  And, you know, the general GENRE listing.  :heavy sigh:

Maybe it isn't enough anymore.  Maybe readers really don't want to take the time to read a blurb anymore.  Maybe they'd be more inclined to read the blurb if they already saw it what it was in the title.  

Project Hermes: A Thrilling Political Suspense with Techno and Medical Stuff
Blink of an I: A dark, yet suspenseful and thrilling glimpse into the future
Unequal: A dark, thought-provoking suspenseful dystopian with medical stuff

Meh.  I'm really loathe to do this.  It might be the wave of the future.  I hope it's just a flash in the pan.  Because if I have to do this, you saw up there what might happen.  

I have a tough enough time coming up with blurbs and taglines.  You want short title descriptors, too?  

Is it Pertinent to the Story?

Okay, I know I'm probably gonna piss some people off by saying this, but those people probably don't stop by here anyway, so here goes... If your character's sexuality has nothing to do with the story, then you don't need to mention it.  Not in the story.  Not outside the story.  Not after the story's over.  No need to do a big reveal there, JK - it wasn't pertinent to the story.  Ever.

But let's say it is pertinent to your story in some way.  If your character is gay or bi, show them having romantic feelings toward a member of the same sex.  (Although, I'd only really think it was pertinent if you were writing romance - with suspense after or paranormal before or whatever).  Show a dude going out with his boyfriend.  Show a gal checking out another gal.  Make it smooth.  No need to beat your readers over the heads with it.  If you don't feel like you've gotten the point across without being explicit, work on your writing.

Unless, of course, you FEEL THE NEED to beat people over the heads with it.  Then, perhaps, you need to think about why you feel that way and whether you're writing fiction or proselytizing.  Personally, I prefer the fiction.  If I wanted the other thing, I can find it in plenty of other places.  Leave it out of the fiction.

Yeah, I DNF'd a book yesterday where the author came out with a good phrase about the female MC - she found a woman beautiful but the gal wasn't her type, but they'd already said she was living with a man, so I got the point there.  Then a couple pages later, the author actually came out and said the character was 'bi'.  Why?  I didn't miss it before, so why did it need to be explicit?  Because things like that have to be explicit in certain realms or you don't get credit?  :shrug:

That's poor writing, by the way.  If you can show it another way, you don't need to tell it.  Show, don't tell.  How many times have we writers heard or read that?  I couldn't begin to count over the past 18 years how many times I've heard it.  So many times, it's embedded in my head now.  

Personally, I don't care about a character's personal tastes in bed.  Unless I'm reading a romance and then I prefer the sexy bits align with my own preferences.  Same sex romances don't interest me, but more power to ya.  If it's not a romance... whatever floats your boats.  I used to enjoy an urban fantasy series* where the sidekick was gay.  She wove it in rather than tell the reader about it and it was just part of his personality.  Gnarly.  Write on, McDuff.   Actually, thinking about it now, I've read a lot of books where a character was gay and they were written as part of their personality.  It wasn't jammed in there like someone was checking a special box.  That's the way it ought to be done.  

In short, and I know I've said this before, the story is the thing.  Write the story, populate it with the people it requires, and write it to the best of your ability.  Show don't tell.  Etc. etc. etc.

* I say 'used to' because she stopped writing it.  Then I saw on social media where she'd gone full on ACTIVIST, so I didn't bother reading anything else by her**.  I enjoyed the stories but I don't enjoy indoctrination.  K thx bye.

** This has, unfortunately, happened a couple of times.  It makes me sad.