Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 16

What happens when you deviate from the process: Collector’s edition edition.

Not the catchiest title, I admit. But I’m here to share how a royal screw up of mine added a gloriously horrific typo to my book AFTER it had been laboriously proofread and judged error free. And I did it as part of the process, not on a whim. Well, okay, there were whims involved, …

Continue reading What happens when you deviate from the process: Collector’s edition edition.

Changes in Perspective

In the month since I released my second book I have realised something.

I was afraid of hard work after releasing my first book.

I know why, it was because I read advice online, watched videos that said and repeated the message that a book on its own is nothing, that an author must have a brand, must have multiple novels out under their name before they try to launch a “media barrage” (my term) into the universe.

I’m not saying that’s a crock of shit, but I did buy into it because I’m inherently lazy, and the idea of having to work at selling myself online seemed unseemly to me. It may be a surprise to some who know me personally, but I hate talking about myself publicly, and the idea of selling my work, and by extension myself, was essentially abhorrent to me.

Despite my feelings on the matter I have blogged for a number of years, because it was supposed to help. New research indicates that may not be the case. You may imagine I’d heave a huge sigh of relief. I’m a contradictory soul, so I was sad. I’ve acquired a certain level of comfort with this level of self-exposure. I will continue to blog, but it will stop being the focus of this site. Eventually.

The real change in perspective with The Killer and The Dead’s release is that writing, and the business of writing, has become my second job. I don’t want writing to be a hobby. It has never felt like a hobby, it has always been a necessity, oftentimes neglected to my own detriment. I never wanted it to be a job, because jobs suck, and writing let me soar away from the mundane.

But the new truth is that having two books to manage, to sell and advertise, is a job. I’m not doing a great job at that right now, because I am finally, and reluctantly, learning how to do that better. With one book out I did look like a hobbyist. With two out I have to shed that image, because I want to write three and four and five books more, to release old books with merit, to experiment with short form for mailing lists and potential collections. In short, I want to be what I have always yearned to be. A professional writer.

I’ve always been a writer. Professional is the difference. It has been a long road for me to come to this realisation, to acknowledge that dreams can coexist with hard work. For a long time I just wanted writing to be a first draft. Then I learned about the publishing process. Then I learned about editing a text to death. Now I am learning that writing is only a fraction of what I must do. I’m not a fan of this new (again reluctantly) aquired knowldege, but I cannot ignore it.

So, changes are coming to this site, and to my output. This is now a work in progress. I thank everyone who has stopped in over the years, I will still blog for you, and myself, but changes need to be made, and I need to learn how to make them. I hope to see you down the road.

Release Day Is Here! Buy now! (Or later…)

The Killer and The Dead is live on Amazon – go check it out! Paperback and hardback to follow. Though this is officially part of the World Belt series, it is a stand alone novel and can be enjoyed without reading The Thief and The Demon, though if you have you will enjoy some Easter eggs as they arrive. (This book takes place approximately 2 months after the events of TTATD.)

The Killer and The Dead eBook Release

Coming to Amazon on Saturday November 13th 2021, paperback and hardback to follow!

I am proud to announce the arrival of The Killer and The Dead eBook.

Check it out!

One small step at a time.

It is a hard thing to finish a book. Not the hardest thing in the world by a long chalk, but, if you’ve tried writing a book, and then got feedback, edited, re-edited and then polished beyond editing into obsession, well then maybe you’ve a small idea of how hard it is to finish a book, one you care about, at least.

No apologies for the comma abuse in the above paragraph. I meant them all.

This blog was originally called The Long Road, and as a subtitle those words in that order remain. I think when I first coined the phrase it was a nod to the first line of a book I wrote that has yet to be released, and to the idea of the long road to publication. I think, when you are trying to do a thing that expresses your creativity, and it takes months and years of your life to achieve, that it can truly seem to be a long and lonely road you are traversing, with no hope of a destination, or even of meeting fellow travellers who understand why you are taking those small steps each day, and why you bother to take more each day after that.

All I can say is that I have trod that long and lonely road, one small step at a time. If you persist you can reach an ending, of one idea, one beautiful expression, and it can be a good moment. I had one of those a few years ago. But the road goes on, there are more ideas, more expressions of beauty to share. I think I have reached another moment where I can pause and look back over the terrain I have crossed, and be pleased.

My next book is ready, but for one word I will change. One word. A long road to a destination already made, but one word can change everything for me. Perhaps for my readers, perhaps not. I leave that to them, and that is why I almost left the word untouched. Until I remembered that I am the author, and I am not dead. And that word, that small step, mattered.

The Killer and The Dead is almost here. It is one word away.

A walk in the rain.

I walked in the rain this evening. It reminded me of Scotland: a bracing cold, but invigorating, my memory choosing to omit the reality of Scottish rain, pissing relentlessly down, soaking you through when walks in the rain weren’t for pleasure, but a miserable necessity.

I grew up in the rain. I wonder now why the Scots language doesn’t have five hundred words for rain, for the types of it, the size of the drops, the density of them in the air, the amount of wind involved, the stages of getting soaked to the skin, from the first wetness upon your jacket, to that feeling of your coat getting heavier with water, to the telltale touch of cold saturated fabric upon your shoulder that tells you you’re in for a miserable time, with three miles to go until home. There should be Scots words for after-rain: the dream of tea, of soup by a hearth, the peeling off of sodden trousers that pulled on your skin, tightening as you walked. Words for the strange way you can get soaked on one side when the wind throws buckets in one direction, and you realize one leg is cold, and the other still has a not exactly dry covering, but one that feels dry in comparison. And what about a word for the rain that doesn’t feel like rain anymore, when you’ve survived a downpour, the skies have lifted, but, it being Scotland, a little rain persists, just because, but it feels like nothing after what went before? What about words for the way your shoes get waterlogged, the double wet of rain falling, then splashing up off the pavement to soak your feet, ankles, and the clothes that cover them first? Why isn’t there a word for that? And let’s not get started on the ways the rain changes the substance of the ground we walk upon, from yielding to treacherous, from bright green and alive to brown sludge that wants to send you slithering onto your backside if you’re unwary, to be coated in a new and more miserable wetness.

I loved the rain. When I had hair I liked the way rain soaked through it – there would be a word for when your scalp gets wet – and then rainwater gathered to run and drip from the curls around my face, those that weren’t plastered to it already. There should be words there too, for the first feeling of rain upon your dry cheek to the chill slick of a fully coated face, a rain-mask as it were, to slide off and run down your neck to worm its way past any scarf, if you had one, to dampen your shirt. The shirt soaked through, wet at top and bottom with a strange dry band just above the waist, that should have a name. The dreich day shirt. But dreich doesn’t always mean rain, just gloomy – so in Scotland that means mostly rain.

Anyway. Today, in Colorado, where the sun shines 300 days a year, I went out walking in the rain. A luxury now, a chance to be nostalgic, perhaps a little maudlin, to feel the wet element upon me, and remember the times I had no choice but to face much worse conditions, and be glad now I don’t have to. I drink my tea by this electronic hearth, and bid you a fair evening.

The Writing Life: The Pudding has been Proofed.

Hello folks, more time has passed than expected once again. Between blog posts I mean. The standard flow of time has otherwise been maintained, at least in my vicinty, as far as I can tell. Observational bias and all that.

Anyway, updates. The Long Road to publication continues. Strangely enough my proofreads turned into another one-last-edit-no-this-time-I-mean-it! experience. Which was completed a couple of weeks ago. The final proof has been returned to me now, with some corrections for me to work through. That will be done this week. As people always say in their acknowledgements page, any and all mistakes that remain in the published text are mine and mine alone. My most profound thanks go to the friends, readers, editors, and proofers who have helped me get this far!

Proofing round 3 will of course be me checking the formatting on the book. There is always more proofing, right up to the moment you press “Publish” and be damned. However, I think I have crossed the Rubicon of diminishing returns at long last, and no more editorial activity is required or desired. This story has at last been mentally set aside as an active topic, and I have engaged with new and old projects instead to keep the creative fires burning – projects that I’ll discuss in future blogs.

What remains for The Killer and The Dead is the business of becoming a book from a manuscript. Decisions remain to be made, and marketing and advertising should be done, which I freely admit I shall not do enough of, in common with many authors who do not do as much as they perhaps should to promote themselves or their brand. I am currently okay with that, as two books is a beginning, not a brand, and I’m prepared to be patient, having experienced the high of first book publication and then the realization that my book is just one of millions, and that finding an audience is probably harder than writing the book in the first place. The writing, while difficult in places, is still preferable to me than the act of courting an audience, so in pride and timidity I shall languish in obscurity. I am at ease with this, for now. There shall come a day when I am not, and hopefully by then it will not be too late for me to finally work harder on the business side of books!

The SPFBO I mentioned in my last entry has reached its climax, so go here to see the final standings. Congratulations to Justin Lee Anderson and The Lost War! Looks like it was a nailbiter at the finish!

The Writing Life: SPFBO 2020 and an update or three.

Good evening, whatever timezone you may be in.

Quick updates: Proofing run one is done. I have made some minor corrections based on feedback, and then, jaunting down a word-search rabbit hole, I noticed a thing. I’m fixing the thing, (and it is a small thing) before proofing run two begins. I have finalised the book’s blurb. The appendices are go, and I have written (many many versions later) a small connecting letter that introduces the apprentice’s reports and provides a necessary space between them and the main text. My recommendation would be to finish the book, take a beat, or a day, even a week, and then go back to read the reports. That way the story and its ending has a chance to settle before you read any fictional analysis of it. My two cents there. Or: binge away and blast on through – the choice is yours!

So that’s good.

In the spirit of burying the lede I get to paragraph four before exhorting any among you who are avid readers of fantasy literature to check out the ten worthy finalists in this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) competition. You can find them here. On Facebook you can see the discussion around these books and the other two hundred and ninety entrants here. SPFBO represents a treasured opportunity for often unknown writers to put themselves in front of an audience, at the low low cost of being judged, publicly. But hey, if you’re writing for the public you can’t sweat a little public discussion, right? The quality is excellent, and the judges well read and experienced. By the time you get to the final ten, you have a good crop of stories, authors, viewpoints to choose from.

So, if you are a reader, want to try something new, to give the unexpected a chance, then go and have a look at the novels on offer, and if one sounds intriguing, give it a go. You might find your new favourite in there. All are available on amazon, so you can peek inside for free and get a feel for each and every one if you wish, see what tickles your fancy. On social media the call frequently goes out to support independent creators of content. New or undiscovered writers, especially the self-published, are, in my highly biased opinion, the ultimate independent content creators. I ask you to go and give them some love, and maybe some small amounts of cash, and you’ll get a whole lot back in return – new worlds, people, and adventures to share. What a grand bargain that is.

I’ll see you all in SPFBO 2021.

The Writing Life: Missed Updates

No blogs since August? I knew it had been a while, but it is a surprise to see so much time has elapsed, when almost every weekend I have considered writing an update. You know, I finished the verbal read-through, I finished the resolution of my last notes (hahahaha!) on continuity, I finished a proof read and discovered, not continuity errors exactly, more a question that had never occurred to me before, and once the question is asked, well, it has to be answered. Then I finished answering that question, and a couple of side fixes that popped up along the way. Heck, I also wrote and edited up seven appendices which may or may not appear at the end of the book, or perhaps here as digital canon. I’m leaning toward book, with more examples appearing here, but we’ll see.

So now I’m finished with editing. Really. This time two years ago I thought I was in with an outside chance of publishing by the end of the year. Then I decided to have “a quick look” at the book and “tidy up” anything that struck me as being a little clumsy or rushed, as I had, with my editor’s help, blasted through the writing process that year. Obviously my quick look turned into a lengthly overhaul, mostly of the small stuff, nuts and bolts tightening, linguistic tweaks to smooth out the prose. (And continuity, continuity, continuity, of character, event, theme.) I must stress this has nothing to do with the great work my editor did – he was following my direction, and did an excellent job for me – I just changed the plan after we were done. Writers: fickle swine. Anyway, my overhaul did eventually lead to every page, every paragraph, almost every sentence being revisited. Funny how a book can look so much the same after having had so much done to it, but I know the difference, and I know where I made a thousand small improvements.

Was it worth it? I have no idea, and just laughed at that. It is what it is, I could do no other. I’m satisfied with it now, plus I have edited myself into surrender/exhaustion. A good thing, I think, but nothing I ever want to do again. My next book will be an experiment in maintaining no GAF and barrelling through to the end and hurling the story at the world before I start second guessing anything. Rough and ready will be the name of the game. I’m hoping to have learned enough over the past two books to keep the third one in pretty good technical shape. I have it started already, and possess a burgeoning set of notes and yet more ideas floating around in my head to be fleshed out as I write – which I am hugely looking forward to. We shall see how it goes – but that’s the point of experiments, isn’t it?

So here we are: proofing time has arrived. The book is out to proof reader #1, then on to #2 and #3 in due course. Then formatting which leads to guess what? Me reading the entire book again, to proof the formatting, and make sure it does not introduce any errors. Last time out I caught a handful of things even then. How many times have I read this book from start to finish? Formally? Many tens of times. Trawling back and forth checking for continuity or cutting down on excessive repetitions? Hundreds of times easily, probably thousands given some word searches.

Was that too much? I didn’t think it too many. But it will be up to you, the readers to decide. I look forward to that day – I can’t put a date to it, but wheels are now in motion that will end the creation of the book, and usher in the business of production. I will keep you updated.

The Writing Life: The Power of the Spoken Word

This is an update.

After losing/significantly depleting my GAF as previously described, I decided to do my usual (i.e. done once before) final step of reading my book out loud to myself as a way to interrogate each sentence and catch egregious typos.

This is now done. Yay. I fixed some sentences here and there, a paragraph or two, and felt glad to have done the work. Genuine improvements were made.

The problem is I discovered not one, but two significant (but not book-breaking) issues that somehow slid by me in the previous I am now guessing hundreds of times I have worked my way through this manuscript. That is not an exaggeration, oh how I wish it were. There are some 70 odd minor notes to deal with in addition, but maybe half of them are allied or involved with the two major issues I identified.

So I’m going to make fixes. But I can’t lie – making fixes at this late stage, even if they are valid and necessary, is a PITA. It puts an ache in my soul. Because I want to be done, but can’t be. I have to move the protagonist’s brother’s house. Have to. Because where he is now makes a mockery of his motivation, and who he is. I did not realise it until I read the words aloud. The meanings didn’t change, the context did not change, but reading it aloud made different bells ring in my mind, and I realised that there was a problem. Other readers did not catch it. My editor did not catch it. Reading aloud, to myself, caught it.

It is an easy(ish) fix. Hopefully I will execute it tomorrow. But it is just one more thing, one more swing at a tree I’ve been trying to fell for years, and seems to have developed an iron core.

The other issue is also resolvable, but it is like a lace spread throughout the text, touched on here and there, never obvious, just some background detail that yelled at me when I spoke it aloud, and told me I had to fix it in many places across 390 pages of double spaced text. Fix and leave no new inconsistencies. Anywhere.

Argh.

But I will persevere. The changes needed are necessary to make an antagonist more unique and powerful, and will also help to inform and enrich the societies of both the living and the dead in the book. What I have now is a shade too simplistic (done as a writer’s shorthand in the first draft and never gone back to later, I now suspect, not addressed when larger structural and thematic issues were to the forefront, but now visible), and could create awkward questions in the reader’s mind – and why risk that? So I have to fix it. That means multiple small changes, and then another read-through once I’m done to make sure everything now hangs correctly. A-rgh again.

No doubt then I’ll spot something else.

This is why, dear readers, some authors take years to release their next book. It isn’t because they’re blowing off their audience, it’s because they care about them. And perhaps because they are discovering they are a little OCD. Or a lot OCD. I never imagined I’d care that much about details when I fantasised about being a writer when I was twelve. Now I’m consumed by them. I hope this is not a case of wood for trees, or shrubs for grass, at this stage, but I trust myself on this, because these are details that add depth and resonance to the world, that line up with my larger plan for that universe, which I have spent a long time putting together. I have trust in what my spoken word revealed to me.

If you write, and do not read your book, painstakingly word for word to yourself, I strongly advise you to do so. You may be surprised and grateful at what you find, and can correct, through that process.

I cannot wait to continue writing The Red Palace, and publishing what will be a proofed first draft, because I want to capture the initial energy of creation, and see how it is received. The liberation of it will be intense. The recriminations afterwards… I’ll have to deal with. My fellow writers out there will understand what I’m talking about!

I will update further as I draw closer to concluding my work on The Killer and The Dead. (I’ve had great ideas for a couple of the appendices/apprentice’s reports!) I thank you for your patience. Stay safe, and keep reading and writing!