Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 289

Bob Dylan, really?

I guess I don’t care about the Nobel prize in literature enough to be either pro or con this decision. But I sort of thought the Nobel was for people who wrote, you know, books.

I suppose song lyrics can be considered literary, though. I’m not old enough to have been listening to Dylan in his heyday. I just looked up “literary Bob Dylan song lyrics” and picked this song to listen to. As far as I can remember, I’ve never actually heard it until now. I wouldn’t say I exactly like it, but I do admire some of the imagery.

Jokerman:

Standing on the waters casting your bread

While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing

Distant ships sailing into the mist,

You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing

Freedom just around the corner for you

But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,

Bird fly high by the light of the moon,

Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

So swiftly the sun sets in the sky,

You rise up and say goodbye to no one

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,

Both of their futures, so full of dread, you don’t show why

Shedding off one more layer of skin,

Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,

Bird fly high by the light of the moon,

Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds,

Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister

You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah

But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister

Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame,

You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,

Bird fly high by the light of the moon,

Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,

The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers

In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed,

Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features

Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space,

Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,

Bird fly high by the light of the moon,

Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame,

Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain

Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks,

Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain,

False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin,

Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,

Bird fly high by the light of the moon,

Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray,

A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet

He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat,

Take the motherless children off the street

And place them at the feet of a harlot

Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants,

Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,

Bird fly high by the light of the moon,

Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

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Well, this is a surprise

From Author Earnings:

After two and a half years of quarter-over-quarter growth, Indie eBook market share shrinks significantly

•Indie ebook market share drops all the way back to early 2015 levels.

•Traditional publishers regain a little lost ebook ground.

•Amazon publishing imprints grow a lot.

More:

In consumer spending terms, the May-to-October drop in indie title dollar market share parallels the drop in their share of unit sales. For the first time since Q1 2015, readers are spending more money on ebooks by Small/Medium Publishers than they are spending on indie ebooks. Despite the Big Five’s slight uptick in unit-sales market share, their share of consumer ebook dollars has continued to drop–albeit less steeply than in previous quarters. …

The share of overall Kindle author earnings going to the Big Five has finally gone up a little. Although at 23% it still remains below its January 2016 level, Big Five authors have regained a little of the ground they lost between January and May. But the biggest recent winners seem to be the Small/Medium publisher authors, whose share of total Kindle author earnings has surpassed 20% for the first time. …

But for us, it’s the drop in indie author earnings that triggers the most questions.

Several possible reasons for this observation are discussed, with another emerging from the extensive comments on this post. The drop in Indie market share certainly isn’t because the Big Five have re-thought their strategy of pricing ebooks waaay too high (unfortunately). The Author Earnings post mentions possible changes in how aggressively publishers are handling ebook marketing, and also possible changes to Amazon’s algorithms that might be starting to favor traditionally published authors, and also possible declines in how far Amazon is discounting print editions.

In the comments, lots of people mention a sudden vast drop in pages read (a payment criteria for ebooks enrolled in KU). Something screwy is evidently going on with Amazon’s measurement of pages read, which is just killing Indie authors’ income. It sounds like this factor might be big enough to explain some (maybe not all?) of the drop in Indie market share.

Incidentally, it sounds like the position of debut traditionally published authors is absolutely dire right now. Pricing their ebooks so high is destroying their discoverability by killing both their ebook sales, and their print sales are not making up for it. Seriously not good. In a few years I expect things will be different, but ouch.

Makes me wonder whether it’s possible for your agent to argue a Big Five publisher into putting a ceiling on your ebook editions: No more than $7.99, say. That would probably be tremendously beneficial, not just to debut authors, but to authors like me.

Anyway, very interesting post, which I found via The Passive Voice.

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“Complex” is definitely better than “strong”

Here’s a post by Sam Maggs at tor.com that caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

a) The title is “Five Books About Kick-Ass Chicks in Space,” but

b) Maggs immediately shifts from “kick-ass” and “strong” to “complex.”

What’s better than a book with a complex female protagonist? I’ll tell you what’s better: a book with a complex female protagonist in space.

I am actually perfectly fine with any complex, well-written protagonist — female, male, or something else — but I definitely do prefer the term “complex” when applied to protagonists, versus “strong” or “kick-ass.” Not every female (or male!) protagonist needs to be great at physical battle! It’s fine if they’re not!

Ahem, well, anyway, that’s a fine topic for a post, but what particularly made me want to mention this post is this bit:

Easily my favorite book of 2015, Chambers’ debut novel [A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet] is equal parts Firefly and Mass Effect, a perfect combination. On the run from her past, Rosemary joins a rag-tag space crew on their wormhole-tunneling ship as their on-board accountant – but life catches up quick in the darkness. With a diverse cast of fully-realized characters (human, alien, and robot alike), it’s hard to not fall in love with every single member of the Wayfarer. The follow-up, A Closed and Common Orbit, is out this month, and it will break your heart. I know you’re into that.

See there? A sequel. Yay! I knew Chambers had a sequel coming along, but I had no idea it was coming out so soon.

It probably won’t surprise any of you that this sequel focuses on Lovelace:

Lovelace was once merely a ship’s artificial intelligence. When she wakes up in a new body, following a total system shut-down and reboot, she has no memory of what came before. As Lovelace learns to negotiate the universe and discover who she is, she makes friends with Pepper, an excitable engineer, who’s determined to help her learn and grow.

Together, Pepper and Lovey will discover that no matter how vast space is, two people can fill it together.

Sounds good — well, at least, I doubt this would sound like my kind of thing except I really loved the first book. I’m looking forward to this sequel.

Some of the other books mentioned in the post sound good too, especially Gilman’s Dark Orbit: “…a fascinating look at how a truly alien culture might evolve, both sociologically and biologically.” Doesn’t that sound promising?

Okay, while we’re on the subject of SF featuring female protagonists in space: Off the top of my head, I think my pick for this category might be Hunting Party by Elizabeth Moon.

How about you all? Got a pick for a novel with spaceships and a woman protagonist?

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Recent Listening: Strands of Bronze and Gold by Jane Nickerson

Okay, I just finished listening to Strands of Bronze and Gold — nice title, btw, evocative and poetic, though I will say neither bronze nor gold makes me think of red hair. Copper, maybe, but not bronze or gold. Still, I like the title anyway. This book got a nice cover, too.

Now, as you may know, this is a Gothic retelling of the Bluebeard story. I actually looked up Bluebeard on Wikipedia when I was halfway through the book because I couldn’t remember if Sophie was supposed to survive or not and was getting a little tense about it. (She does, as you no doubt recollect from the actual Bluebeard story.)

Two things seemed potentially problematic about this novel going in:

1) I was listening to it, and as I’ve mentioned before, any problems with the writing are going to be substantially magnified by the audio format.

2) Gothic heroines can be so ridiculously stupid and/or ineffectual, thus rendering the book unreadable.

However, I didn’t find either of these things to be a problem.

First, the writing is very good – atmospheric and creepy, with good rhythm and a good pace through each sentence and paragraph. The narrator was good, too, vanishing into the story. It must have been fairly demanding, since a couple of the characters had French accents and one a British accent. The narrator handled all that well, making for a really enjoyable listening experience.

Second, somewhat to my astonishment, despite her situation Sophie did not strike me as stupid. Nickerson has her realize (over and over) that something might be wrong, that her Godfather may not be as wonderful as he seems at first, that his intentions might not be exactly proper, and so on. But every time she talks herself out of her doubts and fears it seemed believable. After all, she doesn’t know she’s in a Gothic novel, and the doubts that niggle around the edges of her acceptance of her new life at the Abbey seem so incredible . . . and not only that, but Bernard, Monsieur de Crussac is extremely good (practiced, you might say) at saying or doing just the right things to make Sophie believe she’s being too sensitive or too imaginative or too unsympathetic. Then by the time Sophie finds out what he’s like, she’s wound up in his web pretty tight. I actually found myself believing in and sympathizing with Sophie’s situation all the way through. You can see the sorts of psychological manipulation that can keep a woman under the thumb of an overly jealous, controlling man, even disregarding the extreme limitations imposed by the time period (mid-1800s), the place (the middle of Mississippi), and Sophie’s peculiarly isolated and powerless situation at the Abbey.

Given the way Nickerson handles the story, it’s actually believable that Sophie stays at the Abbey even after she falls out of . . . not love . . . infatuation with Bernard. Even after she realizes she can’t handle his moods and tempers as well as she at first hoped. Even after she’s afraid of him. Granted, in her place, I would eventually have begun thinking coldly and rationally about dropping poison in Bernard’s tea. But after all, unlike Sophie, I already knew about the murdered wives.

The Setting:

The Abbey is wonderfully Gothic. Brought over from the old world and rebuilt stone by stone in 1850s Mississippi, parts of it are magnificent and parts terribly creepy. The surrounding lands are also well drawn. The feeling of isolation is very well done.

Because of the Booksmugglers’ review, which I read years ago and dimly remembered, I was keeping a very close eye on the slaves and their relationship to Sophie and their roles in the story. Honestly, I thought Nickerson basically handled the problems of race and slavery rather well. Given their situation, the house servants shouldn’t trust Sophie – and they don’t. Never. Sophie is actually not important to them at all. She isn’t the one arranging Underground Railroad things; she isn’t the one directing Talitha’s escape with Charles; she has no power – only Bernard has power. She is completely tangential to their lives, to which she is not privy. The relationships between Sophie and the servants are minimal all the way through, echoing and adding to Sophie’s almost complete isolation. I don’t see the “white savior” thing at all. In fact, Sophie is as powerless herself as the slaves, which makes me wonder if that’s one important reason for choosing this setting in the first place – to draw that exact parallel. Various reviewers comment about Sophie’s strength and her skill in manipulating Bernard, but actually for at least the latter third of the story, she is almost completely unable to anticipate Bernard’s moods or soothe his temper.

The one aspect I found problematic was the wise freedwoman who lives in a cabin in the woods. I thought she was a bit much, not to mention unnecessary for the plot, but not direly offensive. YMMV, obviously, but this woman plainly has her own motivations, which are not ones Sophie anticipates or even agrees with. Of course she is not a deeply developed character, but then this story focuses entirely on Sophie and Bernard; no other character has much depth, not even the eventual love interest.

Pacing:

Entertainingly, two of the people I follow on Goodreads have opposite views on the pacing through this story. Khahn declares emphatically that the story dragged terribly toward the second half and she had to force herself to keep going. Heidi says, in her review which I think first brought this book to my attention: “Laying the setting for this retelling is slow in the extreme … the first half of this book was a struggle to get through.”

As a writer, this total disagreement pleases me. It’s this kind of thing that frees you to write for yourself since plainly there’s no way you can make everyone happy.

Well, I thought the pacing was fine all the way through. A bit slow, yes, but audiobooks often seem slow to me. I was never tempted to skip ahead. In contrast, the last audiobook I listened to, I got bored and skipped way forward and basically just listened to the first third and the last couple chapters with nothing in between. I think the quality of the sentence- and paragraph-level writing is what made the difference.

The Plotting:

The story’s basic outline is set by the original Bluebeard tale, obviously. This retelling stuck rather closely to the original, though it departed in keeping Sophie so isolated from her siblings for most of the book. At the end, she isn’t rescued by her brothers – I thought the man she falls in love with might rescue her, but he remains a very minor character all the way through. In the end, Sophie almost rescues herself, though not quite. I might have preferred it if she had, but it was all right the way it worked out.

A scattering of loose threads: the tapestry is surprisingly unimportant for something that seems set to play a bigger role. Some characters are introduced but then go nowhere, especially the Chinese butler. Though she did not generally strike me as stupid, I did think Sophie was a bit dense about Odette. So there are a few details that made me wonder what Nickerson was thinking. Basically, though a solid retelling if you’re in the mood for a Gothic story.

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eBook Pricing Resembles 3-D Chess

Here’s a recent post from Mike Shatzkin on a topic of perennial interest: eBook pricing resembles three dimensional chess

Mike explains why we’re seeing ebook prices that are higher than prices for the physical books, sometimes higher than the hardcover. I had wondered about that.

Of course, high ebook prices concern me because, as Mike points out:

The fact that this is reducing publisher revenue and each title’s unit sales is concerning. But it is also making it much more difficult to establish new authors at the same time because lots of competing indies are still being launched with low price points that encourage readers to sample them.

High ebook prices — and high means “high relative to lots of other ebooks available in the market” — will only work with the consumer when the book is “highly branded”, meaning already a bestseller or by an author that is well-known. And word-of-mouth, the mysterious phenomenon that every publisher counts on to make books big, is lubricated by low prices and seriously handicapped by high prices. If a friend says “read this” and the price is low, it can be an automatic purchase. Not so much if the price makes you stop and think.

Yes, and since I still consider myself a new author, this is Bad.

Let me just check . . . yes, Amazon still shows MOUNTAIN with a hardcover price over $25, but an ebook price of only $7.99. Good.

Here’s Mike Shatzkin’s take-home summation:

An unpleasant underlying reality seems inescapable: revenues for publishers and authors will be going down on a per-unit basis.

In that sentence, in my opinion, the five key words are “on a per-unit basis.” My personal revenues can totally go up if sales go up a lot as prices come down a lot. So can my readership and discoverability. Have I mentioned lately how glad I am that Saga is keeping their ebooks under $10? Because I totally am. They could drop the price still lower and that would be fine with me!

Just a month till MOUNTAIN is out, btw! You totally NEED a secondary world fantasy to take you away from this year’s political season, right? Here you go:

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On Writing as Theft

Here is an interesting and thought provoking post by EA Durden: Writing as Theft.

You get immersed in this thievery; you prowl and you pick, and if you’re really graceful, and lucky, you disappear. You are like Michael Ondaatje’s thief, who sneaks his way through in the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. In the first, he is caught, imprisoned, and assigned work detail, forced to paint the jail’s roof the same color blue as the sky. After hours of tedious, dangerous work, he comes to a realization: if he, too, is painted blue, the guards will not see him. Ondaatje writes:

And that was how he escaped … Buck and Patrick painted him, covering his hands and boots and hair with blue. They daubed his clothes and then, laying a strip of handkerchief over his eyes, painted his face blue, so he was gone — to the guards who looked up and saw nothing there.

Like the thief Caravaggio, we fiction writers must disguise ourselves; we must suit ourselves with stolen goods, in order to vanish into the lives of the characters we create. We do this not for the stereotypical reasons—because writers are screwy, or mentally ill—but because we seek a truth that can only be found through individual stories. And the more we disappear, the more of our story’s “blue” we soak ourselves in, the more likely we are to escape the cliché, the expected, and arrive at the sort of wild, unvarnished truths that really make up our world.

It’s a short and poetically written post. If you have a moment, you should click through and read the whole thing.

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She got the which of the what-she-did,

Well, now, speaking of older books that ought to be put back into general circulation. Here’s a post about Cordwainer Smith at tor.com.

What a peculiar body of work Cordwainer Smith left us. If he was writing those books today, they would be exactly as far from the main currents of SFF as they were in the fifties.

She got the which of the what-she-did,

Hid the bell with a blot, she did,

But she fell in love with a hominid.

Where is the which of the what-she-did?

This cryptic verse opens “The Ballad of Lost C’mell,” by Cordwainer Smith, and may serve as emblematic both of some of the author’s persistent themes and his own rich and distinct strangeness. Smith was one of the Great Peculiars of science fiction, producing strong, intricate, highly-wrought, highly weird stories that will never be mistaken for the works of anyone else. No one else had a mind like Smith.

So true. If you’ve never read anything by Cordwainer Smith, you so should.

This post — by Walter John Williams, btw — goes on to explain a little about Cordwainer Smith’s / Paul Linebarger’s life, which as you may know was nearly as peculiar as his fiction. Some of this I knew, some I didn’t.

The story “Scanners Live in Vain” suffered five years of rejection by all the major science fiction magazines until it was published in 1950 by Fantasy Book, a minor market. There it came to the attention of editor and writer Frederik Pohl, who saw its virtues and published it in his widely-read anthology Beyond the End of Time, where it was immediately recognized as thematically and stylistically revolutionary.

Interesting! I, never much of a short story fan, still have a hard time believing that “Scanners Live in Vain” got rejected so much. Rather a grim story, but still.

Williams goes on:

…Beyond the sort of neologisms to which all science fiction is prone, the writing is accessible to any literate reader.

But the straightforward sentences reference characters and a world that are often completely strange. Extreme emotions are displayed, and so is extreme cruelty. The stories take place in a distant time and place, and many are narrated from an even more distant future by a hieratic voice that may or may not belong to Smith, and which seems to ring down the ages from an impossibly remote and alien epoch.

Remarkable stories. Well worth revisiting today. I’m pleased to see, now that I check, that Smith’s work is available on Amazon, some in ebook form.

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Let’s bring some of the best old books back into the spotlight

Okay, we all know that new releases get the buzz. How else could it be? Also, they need the buzz. I certainly hope my upcoming release gets its share – incidentally, Mountain has been picked up by the SFBC for its big November holiday mailing, so yay!

On the other hand, I’m sure we all agree that it’s a shame when really outstanding books fade out of sight. So, with that in mind, I wanted to highlight a book that I first read a long time ago … a book I have re-read at least half a dozen times … a book that has by chance pinged my radar a couple of times recently, so it’s been on my mind.

I am referring, as you may have guessed, to Lord of the Two Lands by Judith Tarr. This book first came out in 1993. Twenty-three years ago. Wow. How time flies.

Anyway:

Great cover, too.

Now, what does Lord of the Two Lands offer the reader? Let’s see:

In 336 BC, Egypt lay under the yoke of Persia … but from the north, a spirit of fire was moving across the world. A great general, the king of Macedonia, had risen to challenge the might of Persia. He was called Alexander, and the priests of Amon in Egypt saw that he was born to rule their ancient land. So they sent Meriamon, daughter of Pharaoh, Singer and Priestess … to find Alexander and persuade him to turn from the straight Eastward road and come south, to where the double crown of Egypt awaits him.

Yes, yes, all that is accurate enough. “Firmly based in the history of Alexander the Great,” it says, which seems true to me, though I’m no historian to judge the details. The story certainly feels true, the way great historical fiction should. This is also the kind of book which has an author’s note in the back to explain the real history. I always appreciate that in any historical novel.

Also, the cover copy says, “Steeped in the rich, sun-drenched magic of ancient Egypt.” Very promising. I mean, I like straight historicals just fine, but I have always liked historical fantasy even better.

But none of that tells you the important thing, which is that Meriamon is a wonderful protagonist, that she is surrounded by wonderful supporting characters, that not all the magic is exactly sun-drenched – Meriamon’s shadow is also wonderful, if scary – and that all the way through the story, you soak up both the historical period and the magic until you have to believe it’s all true, that Alexander’s taking Egypt from the Persians happened just like that.

Though younger, Meriamon is something like Maskelle in Martha Wells’ The Wheel of Time — a woman who, right from the beginning, is confident of her skills, her strength, and her choices. You don’t see this all that often, partly because so many stories, even when nominally adult, draw on YA-style characters and character arcs. You don’t generally get to start off with an already-competent protagonist. Actually, this is something I struggled with a bit in Mountain because even though she’s just twenty, Oressa is already a pretty confident, competent person. Her character arc had to do something that didn’t involve moving from tentative to confident. (Oressa moves more from secretive to open, in case you wonder).

So because of her inner confidence and hidden skills, Meriamon never, or hardly ever, has to worry about her personal safety. She can thus focus on her goals. She’s a very goal-centered woman, and she can be quite ruthless in working to get what she wants – Alexander to drive the Persians out of Egypt and take its throne himself. Actually, this reminds me of Tremaine in Martha Wells’ Ile-Rien trilogy. I’m guessing that if you like Martha Wells, you are likely to love Lord of the Two Lands; I’m only now seeing how both Tarr and Wells have created some of my favorite protagonists, and in similar ways.

The supporting characters surrounding Meriamon are also excellent. We get Alexander himself, of course – arrogant and determined and ruthless and clever. And Ptolemy, who of course went on to found the line of Greek pharaohs after Alexander’s death; and Thaïs, a Greek courtesan, also a real historical figure; and a whole bunch of others. Not least Sehkmet the cat. Also not least, Meriamon’s jackal-headed shadow.

I suppose this book – and Tarr’s other historicals, though this is my favorite – probably played a role in developing my taste for historicals set somewhere around the Classical period. Also my taste for stories where you practically drown in the sensuous, detailed setting. If you share those tastes, or are looking for a confident female protagonist, this is definitely one you should pick up.

Now. What is one book, over twenty years old, that you think particularly ought to be returned to the forefront of readers’ attention?

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Commas definitely matter

Via The Passive Voice, here’s an article by Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post: Do Commas Still Matter?

She has phrased this as a question, so here’s the answer: YES.

This is the answer Parker offers as well, thankfully.

Quality is in the details — and attention to commas, semicolons, dangling participles, gerunds and the proper placement of quotation marks says to the reader that this person is careful, considerate (because bad grammar is painful to the discerning eye), and (there’s that Oxford comma) competent.

“Grammar is credibility,” says Amanda Sturgill, an associate professor of communications at Elon University, where I recently spoke. “If you’re not taking care of the small things, people assume you’re not taking care of the big things.”

Exactly.

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Rescuing your first novel from under your bed

So, I was on the “Rescuing your ‘trunk novel'” panel at Archon, where I was somewhat surprised to find that the three other panelists — Elizabeth Donald, Henry Melton, and “Tex” Thompson — have also successfully rescued, revised, re-polished, and published some of their very early work. I thought that was fairly rare, but I guess it’s far from unheard of.

Tex Thompson evidently writes weird westerns, btw, plus she was hilarious as a co-panelist and did a particularly good job moderating, so I expect I will check out something of hers.

Anyway, as might be expected, we were all quite different in just exactly how we conceptualize “rescuing” a “trunk novel.” For example, Elizabeth described how she expanded an early short story that didn’t work into a novel that did work. Hah, totally the opposite of me cutting down a massive 1500 pp trilogy into first one and then another standalone novel.

I want to talk more about that here, including a detailed summary of just what went where. It was tricky to think how to talk about this; after all I don’t want to hand you a lot of spoilers for both the resultant books. Here is a list of important characters and elements from the original manuscript, in nonspecific trope form:

Important Elements of the Original 1500 pp Trilogy

The Village Girl

The Dog

The Mysterious Sorcerer

The Ghost Boy

The Best Friend

The Nice Boy from a Good Family

The Retired Soldier

Witches

Ghosts

The Responsible Princess

Her Brother, a Prince

Her Father, a King

Her Best Friend

The Wolf Duke

His Seneschal

The Evil Nobleman

The Prince Who Never Expected to be Heir

His Father, the Mad King

His Sister (deceased, a ghost)

The Clever Nobleman

The Lord of Thieves

The Fortunate God and the Quiet God

The Blue Priests and the White Priests

The Genii Locorum (spirits of places)

The Antagonist

A Basically Coherent Plot (With Significant Flaws)

Conveniently, that is 25 elements plus a plot. Twenty-five is such an nice, easy number to work with and remember. I didn’t do that on purpose, though. The above is just a list of all the important elements I could think of, sorted out in groups by which of the three protagonists they were particularly associated with. Now, on the panel, we discussed our various reclamation processes, and of course handled this in different ways.

Mine was basically … look, you know how sculptors sometimes say they carve away the part of the stone that isn’t part of the statue? Well, I started by deleting huge swathes of text that weren’t part of the new book I had in mind. Remember the idea was to turn an overlong trilogy into a single book. So this part was all about deciding which of the three protagonists was going to be THE protagonist, and then choosing the elements that would stay in her story. This was a fun destructive take-an-ax-to-it kind of process, the sort of thing that doesn’t take very long initially, so you can do it without actually committing to a real revision. (Less fun was carving away the pieces I thought were part of the story, that turned out not to be. But that came (much) later.)

So, taking the resulting books in publication order, here is —

The White Road of the Moon, coming out March 2017:

The Village Girl

The Dog

The Mysterious Sorcerer

The Ghost Boy

The Best Friend

The Retired Soldier

Witches

Ghosts

The prince who never expected to be heir was retained, though in vastly changed form.

So was his sister, the ghost, somewhat less altered.

A handful of new elements were naturally added, including a pretty snazzy horse (okay, sort of a horse) and a new antagonist.

And the plot started off looking the same but rapidly went off in a different direction.

That’s it. If you count, you will find that roughly 40% of the elements from the original trilogy were conserved in this story. Everything else was stripped away, mostly in the very early stages of the revision process, but some much later. I practically cried when I carved away the gods and the priests. I *really* liked those aspects of the story. They were there for a long time. But the story was too long and too complicated and finally I sent it to my agent saying Please help me cut this. And she said, I love some of these characters and I’m sure you can use them elsewhere, but this one and that one can vanish entirely from this story and then you can go straight from point B to point G without passing through C-F in between.

She was right. This cut was dreadful, but it worked.

In the end, about 1/3 of the resulting standalone novel was taken from the original trilogy. The first 150 pp or so are almost unchanged, just lightly revised. A few other extended scenes were retained, though with the pov character changing and other quite substantial revisions.

The climactic scenes changed a lot (after all, different antagonist), but a lot of my favorite sentences and paragraphs were conserved.

Okay, next:

The Dark Turn of Winter (title may change), an adult fantasy now set in quite a different world, due out November 2017

The Responsible Princess

Her Brother, a Prince

Her Father, a King

Her Best Friend

The Wolf Duke

His Seneschal

The Evil Nobleman

The Mad King

The Genii Locorum, now called Immanent Powers

The Antagonist

The Basic Plot, revised, including a different take on the gods. Also, much of the original geography.

Various new elements, including really scary dragons.

Okay, so how about that? That’s again about 40% of the original elements. I would estimate that for this book, close to 2/3 of the final story was taken from the original trilogy. A whole lot of pov scenes were added for The Brother and especially for The Wolf Duke, but the Responsible Princess’s plotline and most of her scenes are very closely based on the original trilogy. However, for this one, there was fairly extensive revisions and additions to practically everything.

The Antagonist and basic plot were heavily revised, but conserved.

How much trouble was all this revision? Enough that it is pretty comparable to writing two brand-new books. But writing these two was fun, a different kind of fun than I normally enjoy when writing. Seeing some of what I’d done badly in the original trilogy was educational. Seeing that my sentences and paragraphs were already good and worth lifting into a new story was actually very satisfying. Pulling coherent new plots together was interesting, and since plotting is hard for me, it was a relief to have so much of that already done, especially for the latter book.

The most painful part was cutting the important Blue Priest and everything associated with him. I’m now wondering if he might not be an important supporting character in a new project in the next year or two. Also the Thief Lord, who was a great favorite of mine. I’ve always had a really soft spot for thieves in fantasy. Well, we’ll see what I can do with them later.

Next up! Well, or sometime in the not too distant future, maybe. I would like to try rescuing my very first science fiction novel, actually a huge unwieldy duology that honestly I don’t think is all that well-written but has some great elements in it. A lot of it could be conserved, including all the important characters and some of the basic plot. I think.

Anyway, I certainly am happy that I never threw away that original fantasy trilogy. YMMV, but I suggest just tossing your early work in a drawer (or the virtual equivalent) and coming back to it in ten years, just in case you also find a rescue project worthwhile.

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