K.A. Wiggins's Blog, page 16
October 13, 2017
Goodreads Exclusive Post! Help me choose back cover copy!
Which version would you rather read?
1.
In a world where hope kills and dreams are deadly, obedience is the only way to survive.
Cole would do anything to shake her reputation as a failure. Isolated, haunted by a pestering amnesiac ghost and desperate to earn enough status in Refuge to avoid being abandoned to the nightmarish Mara, the last thing she needs is a charismatic stranger undermining her best efforts at obedience.
But when she indulges her forbidden fascination with the dead, Cole discovers Refuge's absolute control and guarantee of safety are both illusions, and risks her hard-won status, her home and her life to expose its lies.
A not-quite alive girl and her not-quite dead ghost discover trusted authorities lie, allies have their own agendas and even the monsters wear masks.
*OR*
2.
When hope kills and dreams are deadly, your only chance for survival is to shut it all down.
Cole would do anything to shake her reputation as a failure. In Refuge, the only way to survive the nightmarish Mara is absolute obedience, and she’s down to her last chance. So when a stranger shows up offering a fresh start in a place where nothing is forbidden, she knows better than to give into temptation.
But when she learns hers isn’t the only life at stake, Cole goes on the run to escape execution by nightmare and expose the threat. Too bad her only allies are a charismatic rebel, a childish ghost, a secretive stylist and an imaginary friend with a penchant for monster-hunting.
With enforcers in pursuit and the dead haunting her dreams, Cole must figure out who to trust and stop the dying before the nightmares eat her alive.
Thanks for reading & sound off in the comments! :)
Blind the Eyes
September 20, 2017
Almost there
I should get the next newsletter out in a couple weeks, but since I���m past due for an update, thought I���d pop in and share the progress!
BLIND THE EYES is out for query with a number of literary agents. For the uninitiated, to get a book published in the traditional manner, you send a sort of formal application letter to literary agents, who ask for more information on your book (or decline). If they love the story and think they can sell it to a publisher, they offer to represent you. Then they contact editors and try to sell the manuscript. Then a publishing house responds with an offer (and if you���re really lucky, you get a few of these to choose from). Then you get assigned an editor and work with that publisher and editor to adapt the book, which can mean more editing, rewrites, proofreading, cover designs etc. Then the book comes out in stores, 1-3 years later. And at every step of the process, it���s super competitive and subject to both market demand and the relevant professionals falling in love with your work.
I���ve had some really encouraging responses from agents, but nothing to tempt me away from indie publishing so far. That said, the publishing world moves super slowly, so I���ve only heard back from a quarter of the queries I���ve sent out so far.
So here���s the plan: there���s only a couple steps left to produce BLIND THE EYES as an independent publisher. It still needs a final proofread, final back cover copy and interior layout/design. I���m getting in touch with a proofreader this week to line that up for late October - it���s a minor cost and worth risking to set up. My cover artist can do interior design, but I still need to talk to her about a schedule. If she���s available, I think everything could be done for as early as the middle of November. So��� no promises guys, but I���m thinking a holiday release could be a great idea!
Keep an eye out for preorders, and I���ve already had some enquiries from book bloggers and ARC reviewers, so feel free to get in touch at any time if you���d like to be added to that list. We���re nearly there!
In other news, I���m looking at local jobs, overseas jobs and more long-term remote/freelance work, so another round of travel may or may not be in my future. More news on that soon!
September 3, 2017
Preview ch1 Updated
Chapter 1
It was the dead man���s expression that drew me, the depth of feeling on it, bare and exposed and unashamed. Horror. Terror. Longing. Anguish. It called to me.
That���s a lie.
It was his stillness, the blue-grey cast of his skin, shamefully exposed where his mask had slipped in the night.
That���s also a lie.
It was the distorted blur of my own face, an impossible smudge of light reflected in the haze of his blown pupils.
That might be closest to the truth.
It might have been why I reached out with gloved fingers, forgetting the danger. It might be what draws me back, over and over again. It might be what starts the tingling at the base of my skull that spreads and prickles across my scalp whenever I think of the dead, the fluttering itch in my fingers that sets them tapping and twisting.
But it���s not the truth.
I don���t know what possessed me to slip out from under the covers and pad across the crumbling tiles that night, ignoring just how many rules I was breaking. I remember waking, peering across the rows of swaddled failures. It should have been dark, but in my memory, a spotlight lights the inert form of the dead man, a silvery-white glow cast by an invisible lamp. I remember the terrible thrill, the certainty one of us had been taken by the Mara, just like we���d been warned, punished for failing to conform, to obey.
What I don���t remember is fear. Until the dead man, I���d felt fear at the thought of death. Fear when I was dragged away from the other trainees and abandoned to Corrections. But when I saw my first corpse, it wasn���t fear I felt. Not for him, or for me.
I ignored the indecency of getting so close to his shameful nakedness, the line of his jaw and the ridge of his nose uncovered. I further violated benevolent regulation by reaching out to touch the dense roughness of his night-stubbled face. Surrendered to the sparkling, tingling fascination, I must have stood like that for hours before I got caught, one hand pressed to the dead man���s twisted face as if, touching him, I could know what he knew, feel what he felt.
This is the truth of it: I don���t know why I broke the rules so spectacularly.
But the Mara haven���t come for me yet. I learned to hide my reactions. Instead of reaching out to the dead, I���d clamp my hands together in my lap or under my arms, rocking to keep the energy in. It took much longer to train myself not to look.
But I learned. I suppressed the wanting, denied it, obedient. After all, Refuge only exists to keep us safe, from the protective gold threaded through the walls and spun into the ward that haloes the hoods of good Refuge workers, to the careful drilling in how to turn over all desire and wanting to the Mara before the temptation to dream gets us killed. But on Floor 6, Corrections, there���s no gold in the walls and no wards to remind the Mara we���re not food. They only keep the proven failures there. The resisters, the ones who can���t focus, won���t obey. And then they take away everything that protects us and see who survives. Most don���t make it, but I was determined. I learned to face forward and ignore the draw of the dead, to focus on stilling the wilful twisting, reaching dance of my fingers by pinching them bloodless into submission.
They weren���t all like that first corpse, the dead of Floor 6. They weren���t all warped and twisted in torment. The peaceful faces drew me just as much as the anguished ones. It was the depth of feeling, the calm, accepting stillness, just as dramatic in its own way as faces distorted by agony. Just as foreign to me. I wondered what they saw, what they felt in those final moments before the Mara took them.
So few trainees get sent to Corrections. They said I made it out because I was still young enough to learn and change. Maybe they���re right. Maybe I was able to push my failures so far inside because I didn���t have as far to push.
But here���s what I know: I can never mess up again. All I have to do is keep obeying, pass probation, and stop thinking about the dead.
Which would be a lot easier if I wasn���t haunted.
End, CH1 (updated version Sept. 4, 2017)
Want more? Sign up for my mailing list for bonus content including a free ebook and audiobook preview of the first five chapters, preview scenes and other bonus content!
For longer-running fans, the full first beta readers edition is being serialized on Wattpad as BTE Beta1
August 26, 2017
Confessions, retractions and other wafflings
���I know I���ve been babbling about it all over the place lately and I���ve only just finished switching over graphics and web presence to the new subgenre, but I���m seriously considering changing everything back to the previous (non) subgenre for BLIND THE EYES of ���dystopian dark fantasy���. Which isn���t an official thing, and I know you���re not supposed to genre-blend, but��� it just kind of is. The setting���s pretty dystopian. And it���s definitely future and sort of post-apocalyptic. And dark. And there���s fantasy and supernatural stuff going on. It���s also not a bad fit for urban fantasy, other than the future setting. So I dunno. Waffle waffle waffle. Angst angst angst. lol.
On thing in its favour, the freebie preview ebooks on Amazon got quite a bit stronger downloads when listed as dystopian. So I figure for querying, it should read urban fantasy, and if I end up going indie, dystopian dark fantasy.
But don���t hold me to that, because apparently continuously changing my mind and making work for myself is what I do���
August 25, 2017
On Monsters, Boundaries and Inspiration
While I love research in a general sense, I more or less refuse to do it while drafting a book. I���m too addicted to that archaeological sense of uncovering another world to allow this one to consciously intrude. However, at some point I generally do have to pull out the books (hi Google) and go hunting for real world equivalencies, or at least reference points.
Enter the Mara. The story that has become BLIND THE EYES emerged out of an image or a scene wherein a girl is saved from monster attack by a hero. And diverged dramatically from there - the Wattpad story-in-progress THINGS GOT OUT OF HAND is closer to the original intent. All that to say, my sense of what the monsters in question were was vague to say the least.
But successive drafts did serve to nudge things along. Fairly early on, I knew the monsters were a waking nightmare, a concrete manifestation of a victim���s fears, though I intended this literally as depicted in TGOOH. Later, with the addition of THE FIRST DREAM (BTE Chapter 8), the nightmare-monsters were found inhabiting a separate plane of consciousness, killing victims in a sort of dreamscape, with only gradual crossover into the waking world.
Around the same time, I realized the monsters, the dream-eaters, had their source in the paranormal world of ghosts or malevolent spirits. Obsessed with mist, fog and boundaries, I envisioned them as hungry spirits of the dead, trapped within a closed city and cannibalizing the living inhabitants. Amorphously inhabiting and twisting victims��� desires or longings to attack, they manifest in the real world with considerably less clarity, little more than a sickly yellow mist.
But dancing around their identity, both named and visual, was adding confusion to an already vague and dreamy draft, and I hated every time I had to write ���dream-death��� or ���nightmare���, feeling it too clunky.
More drafts, more careful excavating of a story world that I could envision but wasn���t making plain enough for readers. My monsters were hemmed in by a literal boundary, a city cut off by environmental as well as spiritual damage. The ocean had risen, flooding the edges of the city, and opening up identities for the monsters in the pantheon of water-monsters that I was most familiar with from Celtic legend. Time to pull out the books.
I started with a survey of aquatic monsters, with a quick turn through dream-eating and nightmare beasts, scanning through familiar Celtic sources as well as Japanese monsters and a brief, not particularly successful survey of Canadian and American First Nations spirits, legends and monsters, and came up with surprising results.
As it turns out, there wasn���t a single likely culprit that blended aquatic and dream attributes, but a Japanese dream-eating monster called the baku came awfully close to meeting my dream-eater needs. It seems to function in a mostly positive way, eating nightmares, but it has a darker side where it can go too far and eat the hopes and desires of a dreamer as well, leaving them hollowed out and empty���
���which as I write this, brings up some interesting implications for a historical angle on the story world���s current troubles. I chose to integrate the aquatic or marine element of BTE���s dream-eating monsters by calling them the Mara. In various Celtic/European languages, this ties in nicely to night���mares��� or nightmara, with, at least in my mind, some shadings of Kelpie and other water horses as well, but functions more like the Japanese Baku.
And there you have it, the not-so-well-researched anatomy of a monster, in which my imaginary demons turned out to have surprisingly connected real-world counterparts, confirming once again that human imagination has its limits. I think I���ll do a feature on the world monsters and their traits in my next newsletter (October) - keep an eye out for it!
August 19, 2017
Fresh Newsletter and New Freebies
The August newsletter is out! Musings on the finer points of genre, book reviews (still debating whether to add that as a website feature - thoughts?) and a fresh downloadable for this round.
If you haven���t already, sign up for access to the freebie content, which is currently an extended preview ebook or audiobook of the first five chapters of BLIND THE EYES and an ebook-format downloadable preview of THE FIRST DREAM (currently chapter 8 of the manuscript), which is the first instance of supernatural goings-on in the draft and also the bit where I realized I was writing horror and not just fantasy, lol. I do newsletters roughly every two months with updates, insider content and book reviews. I promise not to spam your inbox endlessly!
In other news, I���ve been dreadfully sick for the last week and therefore have gotten a bit behind again, but I���m planning to pick up with the final nitpicky little changes next week and start the querying process. There���ll probably be an update to the preview freebies following this round, as the first chapters continue to tighten up bit by bit; keep an eye out for it! Also, enjoy the Instagram feed I finally figured out how to embed! Turned out to be way less complicated that posting journal entries with individual IG shots, and innit pretty? ;D
August 4, 2017
Book Geek Time - Queries Round 3
Last query round for now. For the super publishing geeks in the audience, here���s the final Query I went with for Pitch Wars! If any of the mentors send back notes, I���ll be sure to post them for reference!
Dear Mentor,
I���m pleased to introduce my YA novel, BLIND THE EYES, in which a not-quite alive girl and her not-quite dead ghost discover that authorities lie, allies have their own agendas and all monsters wear masks.
In a world where hope kills and dreams are deadly, obedience is the only way to survive. But when one girl learns her society���s absolute control and guarantee of safety are both illusions, she must figure out who to trust to bring down the state and stop the dying before the nightmares eat her alive.
BLIND THE EYES is a stand-alone YA urban fantasy novel for ages 14 and up, complete at 100,000 words, with series potential. A dark and dangerous journey of discovery fraught with monsters both traditional and of the human persuasion, BLIND THE EYES evokes STRANGE THE DREAMER and THIS SAVAGE SONG with the flawed, challenging voices of PLACES NO ONE KNOWS.
Thanks for your consideration.
K.A. Wiggins
[+contact deets!]
August 3, 2017
Book Geek Time - Queries Round 2
I may have used up all my luck before the submission window launched, but I was fortunate enough to win a query and first chapter critique from the awesome Lindsey Frydman. I���ve included the query with her markup/revisions for the writing/publishing geeks out there plus anyone thinking of subbing to Lindsey who really wants to do their research!
Lindsey���s the author of YA contemporary romances with a twist THE HEARTBEAT HYPOTHESIS, TO WHATEVER END, and PROJECT A.I.D.E.N..
Find her on Twitter or online.
Lindsey���s comments are marked ( LF ).
In a world where hope kills and dreams are deadly, obedience is the only way to survive. (LF: A query really should start with the character, so I���d put her name in the sentence. ���obedience is the only way for Cole to survive. When she learns her������ ) But when one girl learns her society���s absolute control and guarantee of safety are both illusions, she must figure out who to trust to bring down the state and stop the dying before the nightmares eat her alive. (LF: I think this should actually go at the end���after reading the whole query a couple times, I think it definitely belongs down there. )
All desires and distractions are forbidden in authoritarian tower-state Refuge. That doesn���t stop 17-year-old failed trainee (LF: Trainee for what? I think you should add that in here. Round it all out. ) Cole from longing to be accepted as a full worker. But, secretly obsessed with the dead and haunted by the ghost of a child, Cole���s one step away from being abandoned to the Mara, nightmares that devour souls. (LF: This should come after your very first sentence ��� in my opinion. Tell us about her, who she is, what she wants. ���� I do love the creepy feel to this story! )
A surprise assignment offers Cole a shot at promotion, but when she succumbs to temptation and reaches out to a corpse, she learns her world is a lie and obedience to the state is no guarantee of survival. Shocked and angry at Refuge���s (LF: I don���t know who this is. It sort of pops up out of nowhere, so maybe a short explanation of them here? ) betrayal and the futility of trying to live up to its rules, Cole vows to expose its lies and sets off to find the allies she needs to take revenge and end the suffering.
BLIND THE EYES is a YA Urban Fantasy complete at 113,000 words. STRANGE THE DREAMER meets THIS SAVAGE SONG with the flawed, challenging voices of PLACES NO ONE KNOWS. It is one girl���s journey through a world of dreams and ghosts, monsters and magic as she learns to own her choices and transform weaknesses into power. BLIND THE EYES is a standalone with series potential.
I���ve been a crusader against the evils of corporate entropy, a mercenary word-weaver and a guardian of empty spaces. I convinced my classmates there were witches in the back wood of our elementary and my sister that faeries lived in the snow melt (���cause they do���) and dreamed of growing up to be Martin of Redwall (because small animals with swords and battlecries), Frodo of the Shire (because heroes can be small and still do great things), a Fantasy or Manga Editor (because languages are magic), and a rock star (done). Still waiting for a wardrobe to open, but in the meantime I create my own magical worlds at http://kaie.space (LF: As awesome as I think all this information is, I think you should cut it from your query. It���s just not relevant enough. And you really don���t need a bio if you have no credentials. Not unless an agent specifically states it on his/her submission rules. )
(LF insertion: Thank you for your time and consideration.)
Best,
K.A. Wiggins
July 28, 2017
Switching features
I���m switching formats a bit to end the Journal segment and hopefully bring in Instagram and Goodreads feeds. When I started the journal, it was a great solution. It helped me frame my writing time, keep consistent records, continuously update with new content and hopefully provide value for writers and publishing geeks by chronicling in exhaustive detail the long slog of writing. Turns out I suck at updating the website and there���s more actual news these days, plus spending more time on Twitter lately has reminded me that transparency, while an important and meaningful value, is not good policy in today���s climate. So instead I���m planning to feature more pretty books. Journal archives are here for now.
July 22, 2017
Pitch Wars Pimp My Bio
So this is apparently a tradition within Pitch Wars, which if you don���t already know about, is an awesome online contest to connect with publishing industry peeps and get a manuscript query-ready.
I���ve been resisting making one of these because, really, who likes talking about themselves? But then I had to write an author paragraph for my query anyways, and��� Here goes:
I���ve been a crusader against the evils of corporate entropy, a mercenary word-weaver and a guardian of empty spaces. I convinced my classmates there were witches in the back wood of our elementary and my sister that faeries lived in the snow melt (���cause they do���) and dreamed of growing up to be Martin of Redwall (because small animals with swords and battlecries), Frodo of the Shire (because heroes can be small and still do great things), a Fantasy or Manga Editor (because languages are magic), and a rock star (done).
Still waiting for a wardrobe to open, but in the meantime I create my own magical worlds as (mostly) YA fiction and journal about it here.
I read an insane amount and post to Goodreads & Instagram. Spectacular books I���ve read recently that I can���t shut up about are:
Laini Taylor���s STRANGE THE DREAMER. Seriously, there���s nothing closer to a perfect book.
Unless it���s Brianna Yovanoff���s equally amazing but totally different PLACES NO ONE KNOWS. Her MC is me, basically. SO, so jealous I didn���t write it first.
& Kendare Blake���s work is amazing, particularly the masterpiece that is THREE DARK CROWNS���
���and I could go on like this all day, but to summarize, I wish I wrote thrillers as tight and creepy as Kelley Armstrong, dark fantasy as twisty as Holly Black and Melissa Marr, and worlds as big as Cassandra Clare and Scott Westerfeld. But instead I write like me, which means a lot of stuff about edges and boundaries and borders and about being not quite one thing or the other.
I write Pacific Northwest stories. And Canadian stories. And magical crossover stories, because where I���m from, most people aren���t that clear about where they���ve come from or where they���re going. And sometimes moving forward is less about understanding it all, and more about just accepting it.
So BLIND THE EYES is a Canadian story, and a Pacific Northwestern story, and a Vancouver story, and a blended-people-with-missing-identities story and a dark, broken future Urban Fantasy story that doesn���t know it���s any of these things (yet.)
And at the heart of it is Cole, who still hasn���t really learned who she is or what she needs to do, but is scared to death of getting it all wrong. She���s part of a generation who have been taught not to want, instead of being taught how to understand what they want. She���s not a great hero, or even a strong female protagonist, because she���s more about avoiding difficult things and hiding from herself and everything around her than she is about confronting injustice and defeating evil. But she���s not alone, and she���s not as helpless as she thinks she is, and she���s about to find out that her fears and flaws and failure don���t define her, they fuel her.
BLIND THE EYES has been about three years in the making, and for at least two of those I planned to release it as an indie publication, so it���s been through three rounds of editing and painful, painful rewrites to date. It���s not the first book I���ve written, but it is the first I���ve written properly and produced completely.
