B.E. Sanderson's Blog, page 57

Natural Causes - Cover Art and Blurb Draft

Good morning, All!

I'm kinda brain fried after all that editing, so I thought I'd just share the cover art this morning, along with the initial blurb I've come up with.



As the new police chief in the mountain town of Last Ditch, Colorado, the worse case Dennis Haggarty has investigated dealt with vandalized decorations.  Life is slow and laid back, exactly what he and his new bride, Jillian, need after the debacle in Serenity.  But when a hiker stumbles onto a gruesome sight in a mountain ravine, the calm life he wished for becomes more about uncovering the truth, discovering identities, and tracking a killer. Before they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun.  Again.  
Okay, it's not the best blurb I've ever written (fine, it sucks), but it'll give you an idea of what the book's about in advance of the release.
The release date?  I'm looking at April 14th.  Earlier if I can manage it, but no later than that.

For THAT Matter

I'm at the point in editing where I'm scouring the manuscript for crutch words (overused common words authors sometimes throw down when they're too busy or too lazy to find better words). 

The first thing I do when I start looking for crutch words is make a list of words my editor has pointed out* (know/knew, wonder, took, still, just, 'by the time') and words I know for a fact I rely on too heavily during early drafts (said, thought, even, like, that).  Then I have Word count each of those so I know what I'm up against. 

This time, for some reason, the word THAT was in a 239 page manuscript 568 times.  WTF?  (And the count came after I'd already deleted a few.)  Which equals 2 and a third times per page.  AND I only counted instances of 'that' with a space after it, leaving out 'that's' and 'that.' and probably others. 

I discovered this THAT explosion about 6 last night.  I stopped work for the day at 8:30 (to go to bed) and I wasn't finished killing all the THAT.  Two and a half hours of finding and then deleting or rewording. There were like 12 on ONE PAGE.  (In my defense, it was during a conversation wherein one character dropped a lot of THATs in their dialogue.) 

Anyway, I probably have another hour left of THAT.  (You know, after I throw in the variations, I still have like 300 left.  Shoot me now.)

Ugh.

Not sure exactly how all of THAT ended up in the manuscript this time around.  It's usually way less.  :shrug:  I'll fix it.  I'll fix all of it.  But I probably won't have this back to the editor this morning, that's for damn sure. 

Well, I should get back at it.  I have some life things that need doing this morning before my Wednesday Mom call at 8.  I'll most likely be a raving lunatic by the time I send this up to the editor, but it will be done today.  You can bank on that. 

;o)


*She doesn't point out all the words she knows I know are a problem. She just says 'scour for crutch words' and then gives a few examples she noticed in the manuscript.  Not sure why she didn't pick on me mightily for THAT.  Probably being kind.  Or probably keeping herself from poking me in the eye with a pointy stick over something I should know better.

Editing Insanity

Okay, so I said I would juggle Natural Causes and Wish Hits the Fan.  Umm, yeah, that didn't happen.  Not yet anyway.  But I have been busting my hump editing Natural Causes.  187 pages of line editing done in 4 days.  I should have that done today and jump into the big fixes my editor suggested.  That should take another couple of days.  Which means I could have this back to her like Thursday.  Instead of Sunday. 

Yeah, I knew I could do it if I applied myself.  It's the applying myself thing that hangs me up sometimes. 

Of course, it also means that I haven't done any reading.  And virtually no marketing.  :shrug:  Things get set aside when I'm in deadline mode.

Another side-effect of editing full steam is that I sometimes am not quite right in the head.  Lucky for me, Hubs knows this.  He walked into the office last night, and I started making incoherent noises at him.  He said, "Editing insanity?"  Yup.  He knows.  The next time he came in, I started with the noises again and then we did this whole schtick together.  Nice respite from the editing slog.

Anyway, don't expect deep insights from me this week.  Unless I have a flash of brilliance that makes it past the editing insanity. 

Don't count on it.

Sillypants

Well, my edits came back - on time, as it turns out.  For some reason I had it in my head that when my editor said a month, she meant 30 days.  What she actually meant, and perhaps even said, was that she'd have them back to me on the 1st.  Okay, cool.  Then she reminded me that she is going to be unavailable in May.

Umm, yeah, she told me about that weeks ago.  But I forgot.  So, the schedule I outlined in my last Outside the Box post?  Yeah, Wish Hits the Fan cannot go to the editor in May if she ain't gonna be able to work on it in May.  She, being the awesomeness that she is, offered me a different option.  If I get WHTF* to her by mid-April, she can have the first pass of edits done before she gets unavailable. 

I was all like 'Yay'.

And then I panicked a little.  I was all like "OMG OMG OMG, I have to work on both of these AT THE SAME TIME!!"  And so I sent WHTF to my Kindle and got my notebook and set everything by my chair in the living room.  Meanwhile, I opened NC and started entering the changes.  I was ready to DO THIS.  Except I was panicking, so neither one was getting done.

So, I went fishing.  And I chilled the farque out. 

After I came home and ate dinner, I sat my butt down here and worked on NC.  I'm 10% done with the edits after an hour and a half.  So, that means basically 15 hours of work to have the whole thing done - 20 if I run into some heavy duty stuff.  20 hours of work over 10 days (cause I want to have this back to her on the 12th) and day one is already over.  No sweat.  2 hours a day.  If I get off my lazy ass, 2 hours a day is nothing.

Which leaves me so many other hours to work on WHTF.  So, yeah, I got this.  I might have to :gasp: curtail my fishing time and maybe :shock: watch less TV, but it's all good, baby.

I'm such a sillypants sometimes. 


* Am I the only one who sees WHTF and thinks WHat The F***?  Which actually kind of works for the story and thus amuses me greatly.

The Process

Cross posted from The Writing Spectacle because, duh, I was supposed to post this here and posted there by mistake.  Hey, we had storms in the middle of the night, so I was up from 2am to like 3:15am and then I couldn't get back to sleep because of the coffee, so cut me some slack.  ;o)

Ahem...

The Process
Every writer has their own process.  Correction, every writer has a process and adjusts it as needed.  Or maybe the adjusting is just me.  Anyway, here's how the process is working out for me...

Step One: First draft - write as many words as I can every day so that it takes me about a month to get the first draft done.

Step Two: Set the first draft aside and work on something else for a week or two.

Step Three:  Read the first draft all the way through on the Kindle, taking notes as I go in a big 5-subject notebook of anything I see that needs fixing.  This can be as small as a comma or as big as noting that I need to rewrite an entire chapter.

Step Four: Second draft - Input notes all the way through.

Step Five:  Read through the second draft, taking notes as I go and inputting them when I take breaks.  If I did my job in step three, this should be small to medium things.

Step Six: Repeat Steps 4 and 5 until I know I can't make it any better on my own.

Step Seven:  Send to my editor.  Wait a month.  Work on something else while I'm waiting.

Step Eight: Receive edit notes back from editor and input those.  Takes a week or two depending on how bad it was and how driven I am.

Step Nine: Send the manuscript back to the editor.  Wait 2-3 weeks.  Finalize cover and blurb while I'm waiting and find something else to work on.

Step Ten: Receive final edit notes from the editor.  Input those.  Also takes a week or two depending.

Step Eleven:  Read through the book on the Kindle again, checking for mistakes I made or missed.

Step Twelve: Format book for publication.

Step Thirteen: Publish

There are probably things I missed, but that's the gist.  And it seems to be working for me.

I started this particular process back in November, I think, with Natural Causes.  Step 1 was the month of November, then I jumped into Step 2 almost immediately.  Went through Steps 2-6 from the end of November until February 1st, when it was due at the editor.  Then I spent February doing Step 1 for Wish Hits the Fan.  Step 8 for Natural Causes begins this week. After I send NC back to the editor again, I'll be hitting 2-6 for WHTF and hope to have it ready to send to the editor by May 1st, which will be after the launch of NC in April.  :fingers crossed:  While she has WHTF, I'll be working on finishing the first draft of Early Grave.

Good lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

Now, you may notice I don't have early readers anywhere in there.  Yeah, I don't have any of those.  I have a couple people I could send to if things got really bad and I needed an ear, but those people are also really busy themselves, so they're for emergencies only.  Anyway, I'll talk more about that Friday, I think.  (If I remember.)

Any questions?  Thoughts?  What's your process like?

Means of Execution

There's been a lot of hullabaloo about the death penalty and whether the means the state uses to execute criminals is 'cruel'.  I'm confused by this.  Every day in the US, animals are euthanized humanely.  Watch a few episodes of Dr. Pol and you'll see how humanely these animals are put out of their misery.  A shot of something to make them sleep.  Then a shot directly to the heart to end their pain.  (The animal control officer I used to work for did it the same way.)  It's quick.  It's painless, because they're asleep duh.  And it's probably a helluva a lot cheaper than what they do to execute criminals now.

But let's step away from that for a moment.  Every day, thousands of people are knocked out so that surgeons can cut them open and play around with their insides.  No pain at all.  I know, I've been there.  Once, I had a procedure using a local rather than a general.  The operation took longer than they thought it would, so I started to actually feel what the surgeon was doing.  Not pain.  It just felt like he was touching the inside of my leg.  Gross, but not painful.  I told the anesthesiologist what was happening and he put me all the way out before it reached painful.

Why can't the prison system use those drugs?  They're awesome drugs.  You get sleepy and kind of loopy and everything is wonderful, then you fall asleep and don't feel shit until you wake up.  They just wouldn't get to the 'wake up' part. 

Derp.  It all seems really simple to me. 

But let's step away from that, too.  So, they're worried about violating the 'cruel and unusual' part by drawing out the pain before the death.  It seems to me that beheading was probably way quicker.  Hanging, if done right, was pretty quick.  Unless they screwed up the knot and the prisoner suffocated rather than getting their necks broken.  Firing squad?  Nah.  That one seems like it would take too long.  The electric chair was pretty quick, but I don't know about painless.  Drawing and quartering is flat out. 

But let's step back one more time.  I know we have a law against cruel and unusual punishment.  But who determines what's cruel and unusual.  Personally, I would think sitting on death row for decades would be cruel, if not unusual because there are so many people in that situation right now.  The hope that maybe this next appeal will be the one that will save them from their fate, only to have that hope dashed?  To me, that's cruel. 

And when we consider the cruel and unusual thing, the cruelty of having these criminals kept alive for decades to the actual victims never seems to come into play.  But maybe that's me.

Anyway, it all seems pretty simple to me.  Knock 'em out.  Take 'em out.  And way more humane treatment than they ever gave their victims. 

Jus' sayin'.

Tips for Sprint Writing

Monday I wrote about sprint writing.  Again, it isn't for everyone.  But if it's something you're interested in doing, I'm going to talk a little bit about how to get 'er done.

As you're writing what they refer to as a 'dirty draft', don't worry about getting things perfect.  The point is to get things on the page.  Which brings me to the most important advice I ever received about writing: Give yourself permission to suck.  That's what first drafts are for.  Sucking. 

Which leads to the second important piece of advice: Don't think about how bad what you've already written sucks.  OMG, this first draft of Wish Hits the Fan is a hot mess of epic proportions.  I know that.  And I'm totally not sweating it.  I can't sweat it, because if I do, I will not be able to write another word in this book until I go back and fix everything I know is wrong with it.  Words do not get on the pages that way. 

Next, don't get bogged down with research.  If it only takes a minute or ten, go for it, but we all know that researching one thing can lead you down a warren of rabbit trails that could take hours to get free from.  If it's crucial to your story, stop writing and do the research, so you can move forward.  If it's not crucial, put a note in your work :research X: and then you'll know for when you edit.  I did a boatload of research back in October when I was first working on WHTF, and damned if I didn't forget to write it down, so now I have no clue what I meant when I wrote what I wrote, but I'm not sweating that right now either.  I'll figure it out and give the nameless being a name.  For right now, it's :research this: followed by :nameless thing:. 

Whatever it takes to forge ahead. 

Lastly, if you really want to do this, do it.  Don't tell yourself you can't do it.  If you tell yourself you can't, you're right.  If you tell yourself you can, you're right and you're getting words out.  Don't let anyone else tell you that it's not the right way to write.  What the hell do they know about your writing process?  Now, set your ass down and write.  Spew those words onto a page in some kind of coherent order.  (At least coherent enough so you can figure out what you meant when you go back to edit later.)  Before you know it, you'll have a chapter and then another and another.  As long as you stick to it, 30-60 days down the road, depending on your goals, you'll have a book from Chapter One to THE END. 

And that's that. 

Oh, and if you're like me, keep the Aspercreme handy.  Sprint writing is hard on the old hands.  My fingers are pudgy sausages of ouch this morning.  ;o)

Sprint Writing

I've heard NaNoWriMo, where the goal is to write 50K words in 30 days, compared to a marathon of writing.  Personally, I think it's more like a series of sprints.  Unless you are actually writing all those words in a row without stopping, which I think is damn near impossible. 

A series of sprints that add up to a marathon maybe?  A marathon of sprint writing, perhaps? :shrug:

Anyway, I'm doing something similar this month.  I'm trying to complete the first draft of one book before another book comes back from my editor.   Here's what something like that looks like...
Screenshot from my email where I've mailed the file to myself every night.So, you can see the progression on WHTF (Wish Hits the Fan).  I started out the month with the 4128 words I'd left off on back in October '16, which I'd started back in September.  I sat down on February 3rd - which was when I'd finally decided what book I was going to work on - and was off to the races. 

I started out slow because I wasn't quite certain where I was going, but as I went along, the word counts jumped.  Almost every night, I sat my ass here and wrote something.  (Missed three days, which ain't bad.  The 5th, the 10th, and the 18th?  I'm claiming those as mental health days. LOL)

Sprint writing over a long period of time isn't for everyone, naturally.  Hell, when I first tried it way back in like November of '06, it was freaking hard.  But you can train yourself to it, I think, if you really want to be a faster writer.  Which is why I did it in the first place.  Training for the day when I would be a published novelist with deadlines and junk.  Once I commit to writing, I can now crank out the words.  And they aren't crap words either.  Better and better with every quick manuscript I write.  (I think.  We'll see how much editing I have to do on this sucker when I'm done.)

Now I have to train myself to do this or something like it every month.  Speed editing followed by speed writing followed by speed editing and so on so on so forth.  As you can see from the above pic, I have the speed writing down, but lollygagging from October to February isn't kosher.  (Okay, so I did finish writing and then editing Natural Causes in there, but I want more.)

Anyway, there's what a month in the life of sprint writing looks like. 

The Fourth Book

Last night, I rolled over 30K words in Wish Hits the Fan, which should be about halfway through a typical first draft for me.  Except I feel like I'm coming up on the culmination of everything.  Oh, there's still tons left to write ahead of me, but I'm not feeling like there's 30K words worth.

Oh, I'll add some more words back in through the first 30K.  Like always, there are huge chunks of nothing but dialogue.  And huge chunks where I was rushing to get the scene on paper.  When the fingers are flying, there isn't always time to engage the wordsmith part of the brain.  I mean, I cranked out 2700 words in two hours last night. Loads of stuff but I suspect very little depth of feeling in there.  And I think I need to go back and weave in backstory from the other 4 books.  Plus, I think I need to write that scene instead of giving it a short sentence.  And...

Well, Wish Hits the Fan is a sequel, but it's also the culmination of the story arc.  I'm committed to making this the final book in this arc.  (There may be subsequent djinn books, but the story that began in Wish in One Hand will wrap up here.)  And I have a lot to wrap up. 

It is coming together.  I'm really pleased with the way all the loose ends are weaving the tapestry into a cohesive picture here. 

Not sure what the word total will be on this one.  Wish in One Hand was a behemoth in comparison to say In Deep Wish.  This?  We'll see.  All I know right now is that the writing is coming along fast and I'm feeling good about it.  I know the end.  It's written on a sticky-note beside my ashtray with other stuff on top of it so I won't be focused on writing to the finish line. 

Eleven days left until the end of the month.  Fourteen days until my editor has had Natural Causes for a month.  This close.  Can I write all the words I need to write to get to THE END in 2 weeks?  Stay tuned. 

Talking Covers

It's getting nigh on time to think about cover art again.  Once more, I'll be doing the art for my next book.  I did Accidental Death 's cover, so it's only fitting I do the sequel, Natural Causes.  Right? 

Word on the street from regular folk is that they all seem to be drawn to AD's cover. 


I show them the bookmark with all my covers on it and they invariably point to AD and say 'ooo, that one looks interesting'.  So, I need to try and capture that with the next cover.  I have the background, I think.
Although, I have been playing with finding an old headstone or wooden cross or something.  Or maybe an old cabin in the woods.  :shrug:  It depends on what Morguefile has available. There'll also be a figure standing looking into the scene like with AD, and of course, the title, etc.  They'll have a similar flavor, so it's easy to tell they're from the same series. 

Like these two:
I paid someone to do the cover for Dying Embers, but I did Fertile Ground myself.  I think they have the same flavor.  Dark.  Disturbing.  LOL, maybe that's just me.  (And yes, Dying Embers and Fertile Ground are still on sale.  Thru Saturday.  Snag a copy while you can.)

Anyway, I'll be working on that between now and the middle of next month, so I have something to show when I announce a launch date. 

Speaking of covers, I saw what I think it a horrible one this morning.  All it showed was a man from mid-chest to upper thighs, wearing a business suit, and in the process of unzipping his fly.  I'm like ew.  I know it was supposed to be sexy, but it made me think he was getting ready to take a whiz.  Nothing romantic about that.

What really grabs your attention about a cover?  What turns you off?  Do covers really make that much of a difference for your purchasing choices?