Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 111

Progress report: ow ow ow

So, I’ve been deleting lots of material and I just want to mention that I don’t enjoy that.

It turned out, when I opened up Invictus, the unfinished draft was 98,000 words, not 80,000 words. But 80,000 is closer to the words that needed to be there to fit my revised understanding of the plot.

First task: relatively simple revision of the first 250 pp of the manuscript, with a lot of going back and forth to sort out minor continuity issues (that would look pretty major if not fixed!).

Second task: muse upon a sixty-page section. Decide to cut the whole thing. That took a couple of days because ouch.

Third task: write the new scenes that take the place of that section.

The draft is now 102,000 words, but wow, there have been major changes. A lot more got removed than has been added. A lot.

Fourth task: revise the next eighty page section. That’s where I am now. I don’t know how much of this is going to be useable. I may wind up cutting a heck of a lot of it.

Fifth task, still a misty glow on the horizon: write the last section of the story.

This is simultaneously taking a lot longer / being a lot harder than I’d hoped, yet also staying on track. I gave myself months to do this. It’s going to take months, but I still expect to finish the draft before the end of the semester. Hopefully long before the end of the semester. But if it comes to The End before May, I’ll be satisfied.

Current Reading:

The Liar’s Knot by MA Carrick. I hit a stressful scene and quit for the moment. For me, the most stressful scenes involve tension between characters when I think they ought to be friends, or at least allies, and right now they’re enemies. It’s hard to take. Really well-written series though! Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones. I remembered the recommendation of the great bodyguard in this one and opened it up. I like it a lot, but I didn’t much like seeing the central relationship show signs of shifting from a friendship to a romantic relationship. I was definitely in the mood for a friendship. Again, very well written, superb worldbuilding. The Use of Medieval Weaponry by Eric Lowe. This is a very readable book even if you don’t know much about swords or fighting. Eric Lowe’s Quora answers made it clear that he understands the concept of writing a fight scene as well as how the fight actually works in practice. That’s why I picked up this book, which I hope will prove valuable as well as interesting. In Arcadia by AKH. I opened this up again when I just did not feel like reading anything else. Please Feel Free to Share:

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Valuable tip from a Commenter

You may have noticed the post where I recently said that Amazon was listing McKillip’s The Bell at Sealey Head with the ebook’s price as $13 and the hardcover’s price for $6.

That is true, and if you click through the link that’s what you’ll find right now.

However, Yaron commented:

I wasn’t familiar with the McKillip book you mentioned, so decided to take a look. And… figured I should share an eBook buying tip that, while not useful very often, does sometimes comes in handy, as with this book.

The thing is, Amazon, for eBooks that have/had multiple published versions, sometimes only returns one of them on search results of the title (or author, or series…), even though technically the other(s) is fine and valid and available for sale.

So, check other eBook stores. Even if you want to buy from Amazon. Especially for old books, but this does sometimes happen with brand new ones.
Searching “The Bell at Sealey Head” on Amazon returns just the one 12.99 eBook. Searching on Kobo shows two results, one for 12.39 and one for 5.39 (which is already an improvement if you’re fine with the alternate DRM, but merely comparing prices is sort of obvious, so not my tip).

Now, the tip: For *each* result on Kobo, go to the book page, scroll down, copy the ISBN, and search on Amazon for that ISBN.

In this case, the 12.39 Kobo book is the same one that is 12.99 on Amazon. But the 5.39 one on Kobo is sold on Amazon right now for… 3.38 .
So really worth checking. Note that, as I wrote, check all results, not always the cheapest on the other store will be the cheapest on Amazon.

Now, your mileage may vary. I find, when I look for Bell on Kobo, only the $12.99 edition. I suspect that first, this sort of thing may change rapidly, and second, depending on what country you’re in, you may get different results.

Regardless, this is certainly a strategy worth keeping in mind for ebooks that seem vastly overpriced compared to paper edition prices.

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Keraunani: Paperback

I just hit Publish, so the paperback of Keraunani should be out very soon — possibly by the end of the day, probably by the end of tomorrow, almost certainly before the end of the week.

Hardcover coming up soon. I’m certainly looking forward to putting that up on my own personal display shelves!

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Conclusions about Proofreading

Okay! I can now say with confidence that reading a book carefully, in paper, with a pencil in my hand, twice in quick succession, is NOT ENOUGH to catch errors.

Linda S., with a bit of help from Mike S., caught roughly one zillion more typos and repeated phrases and so forth.

What did work: when I read a book, carefully, in paper, with a pencil, twice — and then waited three weeks and did it again. That’s how I did it with Keraunani, and final proofreaders caught a lot fewer typos. A lot fewer.

It’s just astounding how many typos I missed with two paper-edition read-throughs. I spent two incredibly tedious hours last night fixing all those dratted typos, growing more irritating and disbelieving with every exasperating minute.

I think taking time between one read-through and the next is crucial. Sure seems that way, based on two data points. Next time I’ll do it that way for sure.

Meanwhile, I just loaded the corrected version of the ebook and the paperback and ordered ONE MORE preview copy of the paperback edition, which of course is extremely long because it contains BDSS III and IV. I’m going to very tediously go through it AGAIN, but I sure don’t think there can be a lot left to catch.

Incidentally, there was one typo in Keraunani which none of you have spotted, evidently; and one minor continuity error which again none of you have pointed out. The former I spotted because of the audio version is in progress and I heard it. The latter just leaped out at me for no obvious reason when I was skimming through part of the story not that long ago.

I just fixed both of those errors for each edition. I’m not sure what the holdup is for the paperback cover. I will nudge the artist about that again today.

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Ghost ships

From Crime Reads: A BRIEF HISTORY OF GHOST SHIPS

What a great topic! Who doesn’t love ghost ships, right?

Oh, I see this post differentiates between “ghost ships” — physical vessels that have been found mysteriously deserted — and “phantom ships,” which are ships that don’t physically exist. Well, I was thinking of the latter. Do you remember that wonderful scene in The Dark is Rising series where the phantom ship sails in and over the town? I think that’s in Greenwich, which is no one’s favorite in the series, but that particular scene gave me chills.

There’s also a great ghost ship in McKillip’s The Bell at Sealey Head — although in that case, fictional. What an interesting story that is. That’s the one of McKillips where the main pov characters have no effect on the plot, which I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out to me. I liked it very much. I notice that at the moment, the hardcover is six bucks while the Kindle version is $13, which I’m sure makes perfect sense to someone in Ace’s marketing department.

But back to the linked post:

…the mystery of the Mary Celeste, perhaps the most famous of ghost ships. The Mary Celeste left New York on November 5, 1872 with a crew of seven, along with the captain’s wife and their young daughter. 

Yes, that’s certainly the most famous ghost ship. Here’s one I hadn’t heard of:

One of my favorite ghost ships is the Baychimo. In 1931, the vessel became trapped in the ice—a common theme—and the crew temporarily abandoned it, seeking shelter in a nearby settlement. Eventually, it freed itself and the crew returned, but then it became stuck once more. Then a blizzard struck, and the ship vanished. The crew assumed it had sunk. However, they later learned it was adrift. After boarding the Baychimo, they retrieved their valuable cargo and left the ship behind, assuming it was no longer seaworthy. … But the Baychimo sailed on…for thirty-eight years. The last sighting was in 1969, when the Baychimo was frozen again in the pack ice. However, she hasn’t been seen since. And her wreck has never been found.

You know, this post about ghost ships could be subtitled: Do Not Sail To Antarctica. You’d think the possibility of getting your ship frozen into ice would firmly discourage such voyages, but there are a fair number of examples, apparently.

I still prefer phantom ships! If you can think of a good SFF example, by all means drop it in the comments. Ditto for SF ghost ships, actually, because I’m sure there must be many mysteriously empty and abandoned ships scattered through the space in science fiction.

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Titles: Down to the Wire

Thank you all for weighing in on the difficult title conundrum! I appreciate it. It’s interesting that the two phrases taken from the same poem as the original titles got multiple votes and I may well use one or the other of those. To remind you, those were My Sun Renew and This Hour My Vigil. However, another thought occurred to me about titles in this series which I’ll share with you below, so I’m still not completely sure.

Kim commented that either of these two titles could work depending on the themes of the story. This Hour My Vigil implies more work on the part of the person needing redemption; My Sun Renew implies more external grace/forgiveness.

This is quite true, and the fact is, both of those factors are important and therefore either title could work. Of the two, my personal preference is for This Hour My Vigil. Not only that, but I happened to use the word “vigil” twice in the story. Both of you who have read the story pointed to This Hour My Vigil as one of your top choices, and I’m not surprised because this is clearly a thematically appropriate title.

The four I like best myself are:

My Sun RenewThis Hour My Vigil ‘Tis Late to AskShines Now, and Heretofore

And there is one possible reason to pick Shine Now, and Heretofore rather than any of the others.

It’s occurred to me that if I do eventually go on with this series, any title that doesn’t get used for Kuomat’s story right now will remain available for later books. Here are all the possible titles in an order that sound good to me:

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightShines Now, and HeretoforeThis Hour My Vigil‘Tis Late to AskMy Sun Renew

My Sun Renew sounds to me like a title that could work well as a finale. So that’s yet another consideration, and one that I hadn’t thought of previously.

How likely is it that I’ll actually write another story in this world and therefore need two or three more titles? Hard to say. I have a pretty clear idea of how to go on; several pages of notes with clear plot arcs for important characters; some scenes I like a lot.

On the other other hand, obviously I could come up with different titles if I wanted to, including for the eventual finale.

So, hmm, still thinking. But I have a lot more clarity about this choice than I did a few days ago, and thank you very much for all your comments.

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Titles: You have Persuaded me

That’s it’s ideal to use another phrase of poetry from John Donne if I possibly can, AND that it would be nice if this line fits neatly into a stanza of the preceding titles. Also that while it might be good to imply redemption, I don’t want to give too much away and should not use that word outright.

So here we go: half a dozen possibilities, each time with the first three titles shown so that you can judge how well each line feeds into the next and whether the fourth line seems to fit smoothly into place.

In this first example, the last phrase is in fact from St. Lucy’s Day, which makes it ideal in possibly more than one way.

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightMy Sun Renew

Here’s another:

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightThis Hour My Vigil

In this case, I’ve changed “her” to “my.” What do you think? Is it okay to change a word? I would rather not, but it makes a pretty good line, so I’m not sure.

How about this next one? This time the line is drawn from a different Donne poem called “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” which is a great name, I have to add.

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightArise From Death

Or it could equally be:

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightArise, Arise From Death

Same source for the last line:

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A Light‘Tis Late to Ask

I don’t think that fits as well, but I sort of like it.

Here’s another, this time with the line drawn from “A Hymn to God the Father”

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightShines Now, and Heretofore

One more, this time from “Good Friday 1613”

The Year’s MidnightOf Absence, DarknessAs Shadow, A LightRestore Thine Image

Okay! Please pick your favorite OR condemn all of these and I’ll try again.

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Titles are Hard

Not every title, of course. The Tuyo-series titles are pretty easy! Pick a name from something in the book and there you go, boom!

The Death’s Lady titles are much, much harder.

What should I do with this novella?

a) Give up and call it “Kuomat” after the main character.

b) Call it “Redemption” after the main theme.

c) Find a phrase from some John Donne poem or some other poem so that it matches the trilogy.

d) Make up some poetic sounding phrase.

I’m really not sure! I’ve looked at a fair bit of Donne’s poetry and nothing leaps out at me. Ditto with Milton’s Paradise Regain’d. I would really like a phrase that suggests redemption. Instead, the phrases that have caught my eye are things like “All Dead Years” and “Days Forsaken,” which are not necessarily inapposite, but certainly sound excessively grim. The story itself is not as grim as these titles would make it sound.

The cover is now underway, so … I had better think about this. A lot. Really soon.

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Tuyo-series Sale: Results

I am satisfied with, but not really ecstatic about, the results of this sale. I know some of you are interested in how promotion services stack up against the bottom line, so here’s a breakdown of the sale and results. Obviously skip this post if that’s not your thing.

What I was trying to do was stack up enough promotions on top of each other to hit five thousand free downloads of Tuyo over the course of the five free days. This didn’t happen, which was disappointing. But the sale did make money rather than crashing and burning in an expensive fiasco, so it wasn’t too disappointing.

Given things I’ve read about series promotions, I dropped the prices for the other books in this series. As you may have noticed, I set Nikoles VERY low, to $0.99. I did that to help overcome the reluctance readers have shown to pick up a series title that doesn’t feature Ryo and that attentive readers know is linked to the main series in a somewhat tragic way. I also did it to help encourage readers to download the first free book, buy the second very inexpensive book, and then hopefully go on to buy the next books.

I’m pretty satisfied with the results. Nikoles sold about half as many copies over the five days as it had over its previous lifetime. I used a countdown deal so that I’d get $0.70 per sale rather than $.35.

I hesitated to price Tarashana as low as I did — $2.99 — but wanted to encourage follow through with the series. I released Keraunani at a fairly low price — $3.99 — for the same reason. Those prices seemed okay. The two books sold almost equal numbers of copies during the sale, so I’m not sure it was necessary to put Tarashana down as far as I did.

I meant to leave prices low through the middle of the month because, again, I’ve read that can really help boost KU reads. It turns out that if you lower prices with a countdown deal, you can’t then manually lower prices for two weeks following the countdown deal. Learn something new every day, I guess, because I had not realized that. Therefore all prices went up at the end of the sale period. You CAN manually lower prices after a free-book promotion, so I am keeping Tuyo low for another week or so.

Actual results:

Direct sales paid for the promotion in just over two days, leaving the remaining direct-sales royalties plus the entire KU boost, whatever that turns out to comprise, as profit.

Here are the day-by-day results

1/29 — Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, EReader News Today, Book Rebel, and Book Cave all stacked up on top of each other — a little over 2000 downloads.

This was by far the best day, but still somewhat disappointing. After stacking up all those well-regarded promo services, I’d hoped for better. I’ve hit 2000 per day before with fewer services lined up. But this was still enough to kick Tuyo up to #1 in a bunch of categories and break into the Top 100 in Kindle Store category. Book Cave continued featuring Tuyo for all five days of the promotion, which is unusual; most promotion services are scheduled for just one day. I’m not sure Book Cave did much for the sale, however. By the fifth day, direct sales had fallen tremendously.

1/30 — Book Lover’s Haven — almost 500 downloads, so that wasn’t bad. Book Lover’s Haven is by far the cheapest promotion service I used, so they seem to have had amazingly good bang for the buck, but I’m guessing the Freebooksy promotion may have boosted downloads into the next day. But I would absolutely use BLH again. Tuyo remained #1 in its categories, including Epic Fantasy, and remained in the Top 100 Free Kindle Ebooks all day.

1/31 — Book Runes, Book Sends, Book Raid — approximately 450 downloads, not as good a result as I was hoping. Tuyo remained #1 in all its categories and in the Top 100 Kindle Store all day.

2/1 — Nothing was specifically targeted at 2/1, but Book Cave continued to feature Tuyo. About 200 downloads. To my surprise, Tuyo remained #1 in its categories and in the Top 100 Free Kindle Ebooks for most of the day.

2/2 — Book Dealio, the first time I’d used this service, so I was quite interested in seeing what would happen here. Answer: not much. Again, about 200 downloads. Not sure I would use this service again. This is when Tuyo fell in the rankings.

Meanwhile, KU reads. As a rule, the KU bounce begins a couple days after the sale starts and then ebbs and flows but continues to climb for some time. By February 1, KU pages read had roughly doubled compared to the preceding month. Pages read is continuing to climb, though with plenty of statistical noise. I don’t know how long that will last, but I hope right through this month and hopefully all the way through March. Obviously releasing the Black Dog collection and running a sale on that series will boost things there too, but (history suggests) not nearly as much as running a sale on the Tuyo series.

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Progress Report: Big step forward, big step backward

Okay, well, I’m sure it won’t surprise anybody to know that the weekend my Dora passed away, I got absolutely nothing done. I just couldn’t. Thus we see that there are limits. Rather than doing anything useful, I re-read my Kuomat novella. I tweaked it, but mostly I just read it. I went back and re-read bits of Keraunani too. That was soothing.

Later, I went and found a fanfic Craig recommended and read that. It was also soothing and I hereby recommend it: Fictitious Persons, downloadable here. An eleven-year-old Kara Kent, daughter of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, winds up in a parallel world (probably ours) where everyone recognizes Superman as a comic book character and knows all about Clark Kent and the rest of it. She develops her own set of superpowers shortly after arriving … and, go!

Craig warned me that the supervillain’s plan is lame. This may be true; I hardly noticed. The supervillain behind all this is so unobtrusive a presence that I paid basically no attention to him at all. He, and his nefarious plan, is purely an excuse to drop Kara into this new world and write a story about her and the people who surround her. Virtually everyone in this novel-length story is nice. Some are nice for practical reasons, but they’re all nice. That’s why it was such a soothing reading experience.

After I pretty much recovered, I went to my Suelen novella and revised that into the final first-draft form.

Then we had an ice storm followed by eight inches of the fluffiest possible snow and I stayed home for five days. Once the snow stopped and the sun came out, I took all the dogs for long walks in the snow. Here are the most fantastic tracks I saw:

Isn’t that fantastic? From the full set of tracks, I think it’s pretty clear that the bird — from the size maybe a blue jay — landed in the snow and just sank right in, probably past his head, whoof! I’m sure that was a surprise. Then he had a hard time taking off again. There was the little poofy hole where he sank into the snow and then a series of five wing imprints before he made it up. Next time I bet he’ll be more careful.

I also opened up my SF novel, the one I’d been stuck on, Invictus, and started working on that. The first 220 pages were just tweaking, though I kept going back and forth as I tried to make sure everything is consistent with my new understanding of what is actually going on, and provide hints to the reader about everything. Most things, anyway.

Then I hit the part where a lot needs to change, so yesterday I zapped 6000 words. Ouch! Even though this draft is plenty long enough and going to get longer, that was certainly painful. I renamed the file before I hit delete — that file is now Invictus8 — and the new file post-deletion is InvictusFinal, which I hope is not overly optimistic. I’m sure you notice the “8.” That is an accurate measure of how much trouble I’ve had in the past with this story. I’ve never before had this many versions of a story sitting around. Only Death’s Lady comes close, and that one only had about four, maybe five different versions. I would say that getting each revision actually done was probably harder for that one then this is going to be, but harder in a different way.

It’s hard to measure progress in revision because I’m seldom putting a lot of new words in a row. The next step will be connecting the beginning and early middle up to the middle. I believe — not entirely sure — that we are shortly going to learn a lot more about Ila’s secret plans. But probably not everything. She has a secret about her past too, and I’m not sure when to reveal that either.

So that’s the sort of thing I’m working on now.

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