Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 344

Gender weighting in fiction

So, Andrea K Höst has a really interesting post up about gender in fiction, starting with a note about how, when in groups, men perceive that there are equal numbers of men and women in the room when in fact the group is comprised of 4/5 men, and so on.

She then describes her experience when she tried to weight PYRAMIDS OF LONDON the other way, putting in twice as many female characters as male. She was curious to see how the book would “read” to people who didn’t know what she was doing. I should add that she also deliberately exaggerated the potential effect by making a lot of current-day characters female and historical characters male. While that is interesting, and I gather readers are noticing, here is the most interesting bit of the post: “…in this book where I’d set out to achieve a 70/30 skew in favour of women, I created 82 female-presenting characters and 83 male-presenting characters.”

How about that?

Now, I personally do not think it’s necessary or even desirable for every single book out there have gender parity in its character list. It doesn’t bother me that LORD OF THE RINGS has so few female characters, any more than it bothers me that LOST GIRLS by Ann Kelly has essentially no on-stage male characters. There is room for books of both sorts and everything in between. What bothers me in any book ever, from the time it first dawned on me that this was a phenomenon, is when:

a) All the female characters are just there to be emotional idiots and have things explained to them by the competent manly hero. Gordon Dickson tended to be guilty of this, and he’s not the only one.

b) All the male characters are just there to be incompetent, selfish, or evil, thus making the female characters look great in comparison. Marion Zimmer Bradley tended to be guilty of this, and she’s not the only one.

That aside, it is of course just strange when an author fills his book up with ten million completely unimportant male characters while seeming to forget that that women exist, or at least to forget that women exist in-and-of-themselves, not just to be eye candy for men. Marie Brennen’s post, to which Andrea Höst links, is a very good analysis of one instance of this phenomenon and I definitely recommend you click through and read it.

Now! Having been inspired by Andrea’s count-em-up exercise, I couldn’t resist counting the male and female characters in one of my books just to see how close it came to gender parity.

But which?

Well, not BLACK DOG, because good heavens. Natividad, her (deceased) mother. Her deceased aunts, at least two. Keziah and Amira. DeAnn. Sheriff Pearson’s daughter, Cassie. An unnamed woman in Newport; an unnamed woman in the town of Lewis; and Grayson’s unnamed wife, deceased. Uh, am I out? That may be pretty close to the complete list. This is what happens when you set out to use modern werewolf tropes, because one of those tropes is not-a-lot-of-female-werewolves. Also, this story is rather tightly contained, with a smaller cast than most others. Anyway, not a good choice.

So I thought, shoot, I’d go right back to my first book. Especially because CITY is the shortest book I’ve ever written, making it easier to go through than, say, HOUSE OF SHADOWS.

Here we go:

Primary characters, male: Neill and Jonas.

Primary characters, female: Timou

Important secondary characters, male: Cassiel, Drustan (the king), Markos, Kapoen, Galef, and the Hunter.

Important secondary characters, female: Ellis (the queen), Lilianne

Moderately important secondary characters, male: Trevennen, Jesse

Moderately important secondary characters, female: Taene, Ness, Manet, Sime, Jenne, and Russe

Stopping here for a count of the important characters, we get 10 male and 9 female, for a pretty good approach to parity. This does require counting all of Timou’s friends. Some of them are more important than others, but it was hard to see where to draw the line. I think they each have enough of a distinct personality to count? It’s hard to be sure, though, and I expect others might draw the lines elsewhere. Anyway, moving on to less important characters:

Historical characters, named, male: Deserisien, the sorcerer. Irinore, a mage.

Historical characters, named, female: Simoure, a mage.

Unimportant characters with a speaking part, male: Renn, the magistrate, Manet’s father; Nerril, the apothecary, Taene’s father; the dark young man in the carriage.

Unimportant characters with a speaking part, female: Enith, the midwife; Taene’s mother; Anith and Erith, in the inn; the woman in the carriage.

Extremely unimportant characters, male: Ponns and Sebes and Esel (Cassiel’s friends); Nod; Chais (Taene’s young man); Pol (Manet’s young man); Tair (Taene’s brother); Ness’ father; Jenne’s father; Chais’ father; Nod’s brothers; the dyer; the dyer’s son; Jonas’ father (in memory); Jonas’ sergeant (in memory); Enith’s husband; a farmer; Pineu, an elderly servant.

Extremely unimportant characters, female: Sime’s mother, Nod’s mother, Ness’ mother, Nod’s sisters, Jonas’ mother (in memory).

Just part of the setting, male: Various courtiers. Various guardsmen. Galef’s lieutenant. Galef’s young guard who was burned by Lilianne. “A multitude of young men.” A dozen boys. A boy hanging off the back of a carriage. A young man in the village. Another young man in the village. Two servants. An attendant. The furniture-maker in the village. “Several young men.” The innkeeper. A man selling cakes.

Just part of the setting, female: Various court ladies. A woman. Another woman. A pair of women. A woman carrying towels. A young guard’s mother. “A scattering of ladies.”

Pausing again to count, we have about 24 lesser male characters and about 11 lesser female characters. And as part of the setting, we get about 15 times when male characters are part of the setting and about 7 times when female characters are part of the setting. So for less important characters and just in and around the world, this is the more apparently typical two to one count.

Figuring I probably missed a couple, that’s close to parity for important characters and about twice as many male as female characters in the background. Interesting! I really am tempted to count the characters in HOUSE OF SHADOWS just to see. All those sisters, plus all those keiso and deisa, I wonder if that one would come out with more minor named female characters than male?

I don’t know that I would ever sit down and attempt to bias the sex ratio in a particular way. I think I am probably too organic a writer for that. I would be afraid that if I thought too much about it, I would freeze up. But: very interesting experiment of Andrea Höst’s, and I hope she will compile statistics about reader reactions to PYRAMIDS and share them later.

A not-entirely-perfect author survey: What do authors think of their publishers?

It seems that Jane Friedman, whose blog I sometimes check in on, and Harry Bingham, an author and founder of Agent Hunter, recently put together a survey of authors. They were specifically looking at authors’ attitudes toward their publishers. Now they are presenting the results.

They had over 800 respondents, nearly all American or from the UK. About half have had over 6 books published, about 80% have had one published in the last year, a majority of those with Big Five publishers. A majority, but a smaller majority than I would have expected, had agents.

Some of the questions were just fine: “How would you rate your publisher’s editorial input?”

But many of the questions, including the above, had iffy choices for answers, requiring respondents to choose Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, Nonexistent.

The problem here that leaps out at me is the use of the category “average.” Surely it would have been better to use the word “adequate.”

I mean, what if you think that your publisher did a horrible job but that you think that in general all publishers do a horrible job? Boom, your publisher is “average.”

Also, how the blazes are you supposed to tell whether your publisher is “average” or not? I have at this point worked with three of the Big Five publishers and with one smaller press, and I would hardly say that I know what is typical in the industry. My Knopf editor, Michelle Frey, is far from the only editor working in the Random House / Penguin giant. I have no idea how many imprints are covered by that umbrella, nor whether Michelle’s editorial skills (which I greatly admire) are typical. How would I possibly know that?

“Keeping in mind that marketing budgets are limited, do you feel that your publisher’s marketing campaign did a (excellent, good, average, etc) job of utilizing your skills, passion, contacts and digital presence?”

This is very difficult to answer. What if I think they would have, but also think that my personal skills, contacts, and digital presence are below average? Or at any rate, insufficient to really make a difference? I mean, I hardly have a Facebook presence at all because life is too short to figure out how to use every possible digital platform, and for some reason that one doesn’t draw me. Oh, and I have trouble getting to it during the summer when my home connection vanishes. Isn’t there something called pinterest? Well, whatever, tomorrow there will be something else and more than likely I just will not have the time or interest to get into it.

It’s true that none of my publishers have done much marketing that was visible to me, and it’s also true that I did not ask what they might be doing behind the scenes that I wouldn’t necessarily know about. There is a question in the survey: “Were you consulted and involved in your publisher’s marketing plans?” That one is much simpler: no. But I can see that since the typical author is NOT going to be THE marketing priority for his or her publisher, maybe those kinds of discussions would have something of a tendency to be . . . fraught.

In fact, I can see quite a lot of discussions between publishers and authors getting fraught. I can kind of see why publishers do not necessarily solicit a lot of authorial input. I see a lot of potential for bad feeling developing. If I had a problem, I would tell my agent and she would take it up with my publisher. That way problems can be worked out by someone a lot more familiar with the people and the publishing house than I am, and without so much potential for trouble between my editor and me.

Also! The biggest problem with the survey — which IS interesting, I just think it is hard to interpret — is that it specifically asked authors to limit themselves to considering their most recent books when answering the questions. Since my most recent traditionally published book was BLACK DOG, which came out from a smaller press, and particularly since Strange Chemistry folded, that experience was obviously very different from any of my other traditionally-published books. If I’d been answering that survey, I would have been EXTREMELY tempted to simply disregard BLACK DOG and step back to my most-recent-but-one traditionally published title. Frankly, I think it would have been much better to allow respondents to list their publishers and answer the questions separately for each.

Here’s my favorite questions: “If you were to self-publish, you would have control over every aspect of publication. How would you feel about that prospect?”

About a quarter of respondents: Excited / Positive

Just under 40%: Neutral

About 35%: Horrified / Negative

I enjoy the use of the word “horrified” in that answer.

Me, I can now say with considerable assurance that I feel excited / positive / horrified by self-publishing — all at once. Ah, fun times, fun times! I can’t help but notice that if someone asked me at this moment whether, with total control, I feel I am using *my own* skills, passion, contacts and digital presence to an “excellent” degree, I would probably say No.

I am arranging for some bloggers to review PURE MAGIC, and of course I’m pointing to the short stories and to PURE MAGIC on Twitter (trying hard not to be a nuisance about it, of course). It is super useful that for some reason whoever is in charge of these things is currently holding BLACK DOG at $1.99 on Kindle. I really could not say why; it is a normal price on Barnes and Noble, I see.

Anyway, blogging . . . Twitter . . . arranging for reviews, that part is still in progress, I’m working my way down a list, but I didn’t want to start until I could see the short stories published adequately. Shoot, I’m still not 100% sure that the epub and mobi files generated by Draft to Digital work if I send them to someone else as review copies. (I should know about that soon, but it complicates asking for reviews when I’m not even sure about something as simple as that).

When I have more experience with self-publishing, hopefully I will at least be able to answer “adequate” to that particular question.

Oh, one more thing I can think of to do as far as marketing:

PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW AT GOODREADS OR AMAZON. Or Barnes and Noble, or Library Thing, or all of the above.

There, that’s done.

Recent Reading: TRACKER by CJ Cherryh

Okay, first new-to-me book of April! Also a book I read almost exactly on its release date. That sure doesn’t happen very often. It was a good choice: TRACKER is a very good installment in the Foreigner series.

For the first time I can remember, the scene on the cover does not match anything in the book. Yes, sure, Bren has breakfast with the dowager a couple of times, and yes, on the balcony. But it a balcony overlooking the city, not a swirly cave overlooking forest and a distant town. What is with that? Also, I just don’t like how Bren is pictured here. This is by Todd Lockwood, and I must say, I have liked some of his other covers for this series much better.

On the other hand, the story is fine. The first generous third is calm day-to-day life, at Najida, which is very standard for the Foreigner series, of course. I am so pleased that Jase finally got his fishing trip. Anway, we open when the human kids and Jase are finishing up their visit. Then the humans go back to the station. Cajeiri is, of course, very upset to lose his guests, especially since he has no idea whether he’ll ever get to have them visit again. I really enjoy Cajeiri’s pov. He gets quite a bit of pov time in this novel, and I’m glad.

So, the kids and Jase leave, the paidhi starts dealing with a backlog of ordinary business, and then the kyo ship arrives and wham! Crisis.

I’m quite pleased about how Cherryh handled the political situation. One can see that there’s going to be trouble, but at the moment Shawn is still firmly president of Mospheira and of course Tabini is VERY firmly aiji, so no problem there. This means that Bren is able to operate at his best, representing both the mainland and Mospheira, with plenty of authority. When a particular troublesome individual makes trouble on the station and declares that Bren doesn’t have authority on the station, the reader just about laughs, because even though Bren is having to finesse the situation in some ways, this is so not true. I really enjoy getting to see Bren act as the top-level diplomat he is.

Of course you know that this is the first book of the new trilogy-subset in the series. Of course you know that the thing with the kyo and the broader political situation is the Big Issue. But Cherryh puts in a subplot involving Cajeiri and the human kids that is exciting, faster paced, and most of all resolved in this book. It is perfectly okay to read this one before the next comes out; there is no dire cliffhanger waiting to skewer you.

There, that should make you feel better as you approach the end and start to wonder how Cherryh can resolve that situation in so few pages. It’s fine. I didn’t even think it seemed horribly rushed.

My new favorite character, not at all to my surprise, is Irene. I already liked her very much just from the glimpses we’ve had of her so far. She has Future Paidhi written all over her. I will be absolutely stunned if that is not where she’s heading. I can hardly imagine that Cherryh will keep the series going so that we actually see Irene succeed Bren — I would sort of expect Cherryh to wrap up the series with this trilogy — but at this point, who knows?

Listen, we HAVE to create a major award for series, for which series become eligible the year their last book is published and maybe stay eligible for a couple years after that to let people catch up if they want to. Maybe a couple different categories, one for trilogies, one for series of four or five books, one for longer series? Then the Foreigner series should simply blow away the competition. At least, it would if I got to be a judge for the award.

Out now: Black Dog Short Stories

Okay! I believe I have successfully completed the publication process for Black Dog Short Stories, which I hope will prove to be the first of several short story collections. I would like to put out a short story collection between each novel, and in fact I do have one story finished that is set between PURE MAGIC and the (unwritten) third book. Uh, maybe I should mention here that my intention is to write five books in this series and bring one out every year. There are no guarantees that that will happen, because I guess stuff could happen that would derail that plan. In particular, if I have CONTRACTS that have DUE DATES and I have to choose between meeting a due date and working on a Black Dog title, well, you can see how it has to be. But as I say, I hope to bring another novel out every spring for the next few years, with short stories in between.

Anyway:

I used Amazon’s Kindle publishing platform for Amazon and Draft To Digital for everything else.

FAQS —

1. So when will the story collection actually be available?

It went live really fast at Kobo and then the same day at Barnes and Noble and a few other venders. I was still fiddling with the Amazon version this morning, because we had deluges of rain and violent weather yesterday and I could not get an internet connection to work from my house for 24 hours. However, I think the story collection is live nearly everywhere now.

UPDATE: Okay, Amazon says the corrected version is now live. I’m going to download a copy myself just to check and see how everything works. I would also like to know, if you downloaded the earlier version before the ToC and so on were added, DO you get a notice that changes were made and a chance to download the corrected version? I believe that is supposed to happen automatically, but I’ve never seen that function in action.

2. Print or ebook?

Sorry, this one is ebook only. I will do a print version of PURE MAGIC, of course.

3. What’s actually in this book?

Four short stories, an essay on black dog genetics, and the first chapter of PURE MAGIC. The total length is 115 pages for epub versions; on Kindle it says it’s about 2100 units, or 133 pp. The first three stories take place between BLACK DOG and PURE MAGIC and they are in chronological order. The last story is a prequel story that takes place well before BLAC DOG. I actually think the stories are best read in the order I put them in the book, but hey, if you buy the collection, you can certainly read the prequel story first if that suits you.

4. Uh, why does it say “volume 2″ on it?

Because I wanted to indicate that it’s part of a series and I couldn’t put in a half number. So I’m treating BLACK DOG as volume 1, the short story collection as 2, and PURE MAGIC as 3.

5. What’s the price?

I’m putting the price in at the lowest level for which you get 70% royalties, which is $2.99.

6. How will you price PURE MAGIC?

I haven’t decided, but more than $2.99. I may start it off with a low price and then raise it? Not sure.

7. What platform did you use to publish this?

I used Amazon Direct Publishing for, well, Amazon. I used Draft to Digital for everything else. Draft To Digital is a service that both converts manuscripts to ebook formats and distributes them to different vendors. I decided it was important to me to use a service that included distribution. Draft to Digital also collects royalties and sends them to you. For doing all this, they skim off 10%.

I was a bit reluctant to use a service that takes a cut, but on the other hand, I was VERY unwilling to spend any time learning to do everything myself. Having a service that hits most of the vendors other than Amazon is just very helpful. Plus, they have a good reputation. Plus, they charge no up-front fee. Book Baby does the same kind of service and does not take a cut of royalties, but first, their fees seem awfully high, especially to use for a short story collection. Short stories do have the reputation of selling in very low numbers, you know. Feel free to prove that wrong in this case. Second, Book Baby sends you A LOT of emails if they think you’re interested in them. I don’t know how they even got my email address, but it is annoying and a fairly serious turnoff from wanting to get involved with them, even though they also have a good reputation.

I don’t know for sure that I will use Draft to Digital for PURE MAGIC because of the takes-a-cut-of-royalties thing. On the other hand, if they are super-easy to use, I may decide to just go with them.

At the moment I am in fact finding Draft to Digital very easy to use. I did have to download programs in order to preview different versions, and that was a pain in the neck with my slow connection, but at least they provided easy-to-find links for the necessary programs.

Draft to Digital puts in the title page, copyright page, and table of contents for you, with live links. Amazon does not, so I went through their process, but then had to go back and add those things to the file and load it again.

Kindle Direct seems less intuitive in some ways. It was easier getting in and out of stuff in Draft to Digital. BUT I am pretty sure KDP will also seem easy as soon as I get used to it.

8. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much trouble has it been to self-publish a title (so far)?

Maybe a three? I hate figuring out how to do new things on the computer. But this hasn’t seemed too awful.

9. Are you pleased with the quality of the conversion?

It turns out that all conversion processes seem perfectly able to handle normal things like italics, and also less normal things like superscripts. However, no conversion process could handle formatting the table of genotypes that used to be in there. Rather than fussing about it, I just took it out. If you feel you really NEED a complete list of all possible black dog and Pure gentoypes, let me know.

10. What if we find typos in the short stories? Or an actual mistake?

Please let me know about typos and I will fix them all at once in a few weeks and update the versions. If you tell me what the sentence was, I don’t need any other info; it will be easy to find typos just based on the surrounding sentence.

If you notice mistakes in the genetics or the history, you can let me know, but really there are only so many ways to define “heterozygous.” I hope you find the genetics part interesting. I enjoyed writing it.

Oh, good, Brontosaurus was always the better name

Over at tor.com, a post noting that new data suggests that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were two distinct species.

This pleases me partly because I like the name “thunder lizard” and partly because it gives me a chance to post this picture, also up at tor.com, because it is just a great picture:

Isn’t that simply amazing? While I wouldn’t care to have dinosaurs wandering through modern-day Missouri, it IS a shame that we don’t have a lost continent where that whole array of animals and plants still exists.

Incidentally, the stupidest line in “Jurassic Park” was “Don’t worry, honey. It’s a herbivore. It won’t hurt you.” I charitably assume that he was just trying to be reassuring and wouldn’t actually encourage a child to try to pat a Cape buffalo, a zebra stallion, a rhino, a hippo or one of the other EXTREMELY DANGEROUS herbivores that actually exist.

Ghost writing . . . fiction?

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff has a post up at Book View Cafe about being a ghost writer.

I must admit I never imagined ghost writing fiction.

In my ten years of being a full time freelancer, my fiction clients have run the gamut from people who thought of themselves as writers, but who didn’t have the time to write, people who knew they weren’t writers but had an idea they wanted to see realized, people who knew how to write a screenplay but had no idea what to do with 300 blank pages of a book, people who had natural talent and wanted someone to write them through the process of crafting a novel so they could learn how it was done.

How about that? Would you ever have guessed that this phenomenon existed?

I think that last reason actually makes a lot of sense. I think the idea of wanting to think of yourself as a writer and so paying someone to write a book for you is . . . uh . . . well . . . perhaps a trifle delusional. Would you every consider declaring that you are a skydiver and publishing pictures of “yourself” skydiving and writing blog posts about how great a time you had skydiving last week, while actually paying someone to jump out of planes as your stunt double? Could you actually manage to think of yourself as a real skydiver if you did that? How? Also: why?

Some of those ghostwrites and edits have never seen print, others have been self-published by the “author”, or picked up by a small press, and one of them went to a major publisher of science fiction (no, I can’t tell you any more than that). Some of the ghostwrites were screenplays for which I was paid handsomely, and which may or may not have been filmed.

And how about this? Honestly, it kind of looks to me like the publisher would have a legal case against the “author” for fraud. I would assume Bohnhoff looked into relevant law, though, so maybe not.

Anyway, count me amazed.

How are you doing now? Checking in with your favorite characters.

Brandy at Random Musings has a post up today on characters that she’d like to just check in with. What a great topic! I totally agree that there are ANY NUMBER of books where you get really attached to the characters and you’d really like to know how it all worked out for them, even after the series has ended.

In fact, I suppose that is probably a pretty universal desire, if the series is good.

Of Brandy’s choices, the ones I most agree with are the Melina Marchetta titles. Her characters go through A LOT, and sure, they wind up in a better place than they started, but it would be great to be able to check on them in a year or a decade and make sure their lives actually turned out well.

But this also made me think about series were we DO get to check in with our characters. Two books spring to mind, very different titles:

1. The Touchstone trilogy. The “Gratuitous Epilogue” is a fantastic bonus. It is all about getting to see how everyone’s life works out. I love it. Everyone should do a long epilogue like that.

Well, except me, I guess, since I never have been inclined to let anybody know what happened with Timou and Jonas and everybody in CITY. Not that I even know. You have to make you your own mind about where that was going. Or Bertaud in the Griffin Mage trilogy. I wanted to get his life in order, maybe hand him a romance that would work out well for him, but it never happened on screen. Though he was in an okay place at the end, I think. But still. I’ve always felt a little bad about that.

Anyway,

2. I’ve been re-reading books recently because if I pick the right books to re-read, I can just dip into them now and then and they don’t interfere with my own work. So I just re-read Regenesis by CJ Cherryh. As far as I’m concerned, the whole POINT of the book is to watch Justin, Grant, and even Ari get their lives into shape. Frankly, I do not care about the broader political plot, which I just skim. Although the vote at the end when all the Councillors wind up at Reseune is exciting, I guess. But my favorite part by a mile is watching Ari walk through the new apartment complex while it’s under construction, and then watching Justin and Grant move into their new apartment when it’s finished. It’s so satisfying just to see them get set to have good lives. It’s a bit like the housebuilding scenes in the Gratuitous Epilogue. It’s just a pleasure to read about that kind of thing.

Are there any other titles you can think of where we get to go back into a world simply (or mostly) to peek in on the happily-ever-after part of the story?

Well, that’s interesting: The 2015 Hugos

I’m a couple days behind, what with detaching from the internet for the past week, but I see tor.com has a post up about the Hugo nominees. So does everyone else, apparently. Wow.

My first take:

A) YAY THE GOBLIN EMPEROR MADE THE LIST. Now I guess I will buy a voting membership so I can vote for it. Also, I guess I’ll find out whether Skin Games stands alone at all well, because I sure as blazes do not plan to read the first 13 volumes in the series, or however many there are. I’m virtually certain I will put The Goblin Emporer first, Ancillary Sword second, and then sort out the others. My brother tells me that the one by Anderson has 14 pov characters in the first 16 chapters, so . . . probably that will not work for me terribly well. I read Kloos’ first book and liked it quite a bit, so this will be the time to read the sequel.

B) Yeah, I am NOT PLEASED to see six entries by a single author in the short forms. I really did not like to see that kind of single-author dominance when Seanan McGuire had five works on the nomination list, and I don’t like to see it here. It doesn’t matter how good an author is, how productive, whether I like their writing or like them as a person. It doesn’t matter to me whether this dominance is produced by slate voting or by a cohesive fan club voting. I hate it with a passion. No one ever has or ever will write one-fifth of all the award-worthy stories in one year and it is outrageous to see that implication with a nominee list of this kind.

C) What I expect to happen now is that A LOT MORE fan clubs and dedicated author-bloggers and who knows who all will make a very serious effort to plug slates in the future, since it evidently works very well. I hope this will happen fairly soon — like next year — thus producing vastly more involvement from all directions and a much larger number of nominations fighting it out. I don’t expect to be able to move the needle personally, but next year I will definitely be plugging 2015 books that I think deserve nomination. I would especially like to see something that is purely self-published make the final cut (as long as it deserves to, obviously).

D) But I am very disappointed that none of the short works I nominated made the list. Very disappointed. I put a lot of time into reading short work, and I liked my choices a lot, far better than most of the stories I see on those list. So speaking personally, that’s too bad.

Finished! Nearly.

It turns out that Eastery things happen during the Easter weekend, thus interrupting my obsessive focus on finishing the HOUSE OF SHADOWS sequel. But I will finish it tonight! I’m almost 100% positive it will only take another five to ten pages, and I say that accounting for the unbreakable rule that Everything Takes Longer.

I have been waiting to write this scene for the whole time. I mean, THIS is the scene that I had in my head from the beginning — the scene that made me want to write the book in the first place. I would like one more uninterrupted day to enjoy writing it, but FINE. I didn’t even call in sick this morning, and believe me I was tempted.

So, you know, one question I do get asked from time to time is “How long does it take you to write a book?” The answer is, of course, “It depends.” But I have a clear record of my progress for this particular book and it is interesting, because the answer is:

A) Four years, or

B) Twelve weeks.

It depends on how you look at it, right? I was surprised to find, when I looked, that I actually started this book back in 2012. That is the same year that HOUSE OF SHADOWS was actually published, which means a year or more after it was written. I wrote 18,000 words (about 54 pp) in May and June of that year — in 18 days total. That would have been starting in spring break and continuing a bit into the summer semester. I’m very likely to work on something during actual breaks and also during the summer, so the timing makes perfect sense.

Then in 2013, I wrote 44,000 words (about 132 pp), starting on January 1st (which means during Christmas Break) and then again starting in November and going straight to Christmas Eve. I worked on this book for a total of about 4 weeks that year, obviously at widely separated times.

In 2014, I once again hit this project starting on January 1st and going till the semester started — so that was really all part of the same effort, the 2013-2014 Christmas Break. I wrote 23,000 words in the first 11 days of 2014, bringing the total to 85,000 words or 287 pp. Then I set it aside for the rest of the year, unsurprisingly, since I was very involved with other projects all during 2014. Still, I felt that I was *almost* finished with this book and that I had a good idea of what to do with it. It was in the back of my mind all year.

So, this year, when I realized I did have time to work on it, I thought great, I could finish it over the nine days of spring break.

Well, THAT was overoptimistic. Remember the *unbreakable* rule that Everything Takes Longer? It was at least as true as usual. Nevertheless, since March 3rd, I have written 57,000 words (about 172 pp). First I re-read most of HOUSE OF SHADOWS (this was prior to March 3rd). Then I rearranged the chapters I already had, wrote two chapters, rearranged everything again, rinse & repeat. The total as of this morning is a bit over 140,000 words, or actually 437 pp. I am pretty sure that the whole thing will come in very close to 145,000 words, 445 pp. I know almost every word of this little bit remaining; as I say, this scene has been in my head from the start; so honestly I think I’m going to be very close in my estimates. Tonight should tell the tale.

Anyway, if you add the whole thing up, then I wrote the book in about 12 weeks.

Next question: is this about typical for how long it takes me to write a book?

Yes, it is. This comes out as approximately 1600 words per day, or very nearly 5 pp per day. These are very typical numbers for when I am working seriously on a book but don’t have a Looming Deadline, which is, of course, exactly the situation here.

Next question: am I done-done?

No. I have some trivial but annoying things to fix, like I finally realized that the solstice is in JUNE and therefore I need to shift the whole story out of early spring into early summer. AARGH. This will be SO ANNOYING. Also, I am certain I will need to cut some of chapter 18. I don’t like chapter 18. It was a pain. I need to cut some of the beginning and very likely switch the second half to someone else’s point of view.

I have 20 notes to myself about stuff to check on and fix, some very minor and some quite important. This is also extremely typical.

But after typing THE END, I will set it aside for at least a week or two. I will read other peoples’ books for a week, tweak MOUNTAIN, send MOUNTAIN to Navah at Saga, read other peoples’ books for a week or so, and then come back and revise the HOUSE OF SHADOWS sequel and send it to Caitlin.

At the moment, incidentally, the working title is not “THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS SEQUEL.” It is THE DOOR OF STEPPING INTO AIR. I like this title, but I don’t think it actually works very well. It is not parallel in form to the title of the first book. I will probably wind up with some version of DOOR OF ______ or THE DOOR OF ______, but I don’t know.

So, tonight: Finish this book, whatever its title.

Tomorrow: Take a stab at actually releasing the Black Dog short story collection, imaginatively titled BLACK DOG SHORT STORIES, btw. I swear I will do that tomorrow without fail. I think it’s supposed to take a bit for a book to appear? I will let you all know when it is actually available, of course.

Wednesday: Start the blasted eggplants and peppers before it’s REALLY MASSIVELY TOO LATE rather than just late. It’s ridiculous. March totally got away from me. I don’t want to be stuck with only ordinary black eggplants and whatever peppers are in the store. I want slender Japanese eggplants and Thai bird chilies. I may go on and start the petunias and stuff, too, which normally I don’t like to do too early because they grow faster than you’d think. But shoot, I don’t think it IS early for them anymore. I also need to direct-sow peas and parsnips if that’s going to get done.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: I’m taking a break. Really. Except for early spring weeding. That’s going to take over my life for a bit. I’ll have to pick an audiobook for that. Choices, choices.

Happy Easter!

I’m pushing to finish the HOUSE OF SHADOWS sequel this weekend — and, then, you know, it’s Easter. So I’m signing off the Internets for the weekend.

See you Monday!