Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 17

The Writing Life: SPFBO Time

Hello everyone,

This time last year I didn’t pay attention and missed out on entering The Thief and The Demon into the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. This year I did. As of time of writing there are 163 entries into the competition, so if you have a self-published fantasy novel out there for sale which is first in a series or a stand-alone, you still have time to enter. The rules of the competition are here.

My thanks to Mark Lawrence for dreaming up this idea, and for supporting it now for 5 years.

One of the things I love is that it doesn’t matter how old the book is: I was desperate to get The Killer and The Dead out early this year so I could enter it into competitions that are limited to entrants from this calendar year only, now that I’m looking at it not coming out for many more months I find myself wondering if I should delay release to next January for that reason, so I can enter any and all 2020 competitions without any problems. That seems a strange rationale to use to delay a book launch, but I can’t deny it is factoring into my thinking.

There is still time, and 137 spots remaining! If you have a fantasy novel you want to share, do it now!

Best of luck to all my fellow entrants, much appreciation to the intrepid reviewers, and a huge thank you again to Mark Lawrence for making this happen.

 

The Writing Life: Chopsticks and Dust

Sometimes you just have to start writing in order to get anywhere. This is another made up as I go along blog – welcome to spontaneity land!

I am still editing. That basement full of dust covered tables? I’m working on them with chopsticks, one tiny clump at a time. I can’t say it’s ideal, but difficult progress is being made: more notes accumulated for small scale revisions, more touches to make the book read a little better every time, both on the outside, in terms of the way it meets the reader’s eye and mind, and on the inside by virtue of improved internal structure and consistency.

Upgrading a book is like polishing a ship’s hull while at the same time rearranging the cargo and refitting the engine – all greatly improve the vessel’s performance, but most of it stays entirely hidden from the passengers who just want to enjoy their time on deck, taking in the view. A lot of work happens below the waterline in the writer’s life.

I used to read articles where novelists discussed all the hard work of writing a book, and I thought they were making it up. Writing a story wasn’t that tough, thought the youthful I, and it still isn’t, in many ways – the difficulty comes in deciding when you have done justice to your story in the word choices you have made to best express your ideas, and the emotions you seek to convey, and perhaps create in others. Boy, that part is tough.

Anyway, the work continues. I have not as much time, or energy as I’d like to pursue it, but life is compromises, bargains even, and just as my characters do, I have to make mine and live with them.

I thank you for your patience. More anon.

There’s a sale on…

Hey folks,

Just to let you know the kindle versions of my book are on sale in the UK and US for 99p and 99c respectively until this Sunday and Saturday, again, respectively. My apologies to the rest of the world to whom I cannot offer a discount!

Of course the book is free to all Kindle Unlimited readers.

And if you’ve read it – don’t be shy, leave a review!

I return to The Killer and The Dead edits. See you all anon.

The Writing Life: 107 & 1/2 steps to go…

Yep, I’m not making it up. In the two weeks since I last posted a blog I have managed to get just over halfway through step 1 of my intended 108+ steps to victory and final completion of The Killer and The Dead.

I’m rethinking some of the steps.

This is the rabbit hole folks.

This can be a form of debilitating hell. But, for me, this is the necessary price of admission if I want to put my name on a book. I just can’t not do these things.

Of course, I have been doing more than just my half-step so far, many other steps have been partially addressed as I have progressed through my manuscript.

I have been finding and fixing word patterns and placements that would have made me cringe if I’d published and been damned already. So, as much as I hate to have to trawl through my book again and again, it is paying dividends.

Could my editor have done this for me? I don’t think so – the blizzard of red ink would have been overwhelming. Some dead wood darlings need to be cut out by the author, and that’s all there is to it.

So that’s what I’m up to. This is taking a long time. Too long. But as long as it feels necessary, and improves and tightens the text, the voice, and the story, I’m sticking with it. I know I’ll get to a point of completion, and that whenever I do publish, I will still be able to open the book at any page and want to make changes. That is the nature of the beast. The trick is to make those desired changes as superficial as possible.

I don’t think this is perfectionism. I like to think of it as professional pride. But is this just editing madness talking? You decide!

 

 

The Writing Life: 108+ Steps from Victory (Or – Keyword Search Hell Awaits!)

You know, I really wanted to be done with The Killer and The Dead by now.

I haven’t fallen victim to perfectionism, honest.

What has happened is I have realized in the course of reading the book again, that in addition to making semi-final additions to the manuscript for clarity, plot, and theme advancement, and possibly my own amusement, I have also been, in passing, fixing random pieces of flabby writing as they catch my eye. Double verbs or nouns that aren’t serving any significant purpose, unwanted repetitions, unnecessary extra words that add nothing to the sentence and so are the author’s equivalent of leaving an “um” in the text. (There are a couple at least in that last sentence, but I’m not being wildly anal here, thank you very much!) These are the words that for one reason or another were buying me time as I worked out what I was doing in that sequence of the long-ago first draft, and have, through dint of unobtrusive passivity, hung around through many layers of editing to almost make it into the final version.

It is word-winnowing time. I knew it was when I randomly started doing word searches “just to see how many” are in the text – and found too many, and a bunch all clustered together that my eye and voice have passed over too many times already. I winnowed one from 44 iterations down to 16. Then searched for its similar pals, then for other words I spotted while winnowing those down, then I stopped myself and went back to fixing something else.

I didn’t want to do this. I had convinced myself that I had internalized lots of editing lessons after doing endless word searches when tidying up The Thief and The Demon’s manuscript. And I did internalize a great deal, but there is always more, verbal tics or unwanted crutches can find ways to sneak into your writing at any time. Some are new to this book that weren’t there in the last: or maybe I just didn’t notice them… aaagh! I’m not going to go check, I’m not, I’m not!

So anyway, I have at minimum 108 word searches to do of the entire manuscript. Probably more as I seek out extra words that are specific to this setting that I don’t want to batter to death. It will make the text tighter, easier to read, more engaging. That’s the point. And there is a certain pleasure to be gained from winnowing out the bogus words that have lurked for so long in the hope of not being noticed by the editor, and seeing how even small changes can reap big rewards in terms of sentence construction, presentation of meaning, strength of setting and voice.

So that’s this weekend accounted for. And probably the next. There are rabbit holes out there, and word searches reveal a lot of them. I shall have to take care not to fall down too many!

The Writing Life: It’s just 30 minutes…

I’m tired. I’d rather go to bed, but I’ve bargained with myself and asked for thirty minutes of writing, just thirty minutes and then bed. See what I can produce now (Wednesday night) to make it easier to get my blog out on time tomorrow, after another long day.

I realized yesterday that I have lost sight of a simple job I should have worked harder at for the entirety of the last year, and something I can probably profitably expend thirty minutes on, here and there, to great effect. I’ve talked about it before, but because it is always just a thirty minute job, I put if off for another day, thinking how easy it will be to find the time later.

But 30 minutes can be quite elusive, don’t you know. And yes I’m not being consistent with my numerals vs. letters. I’ll let that go tonight, see if I choose to fix it tomorrow.

My friend Jesper Schmidt reminded me, via his Facebook group, of the need to run effective Amazon ads. I’ve known this for the last year and a half. At various times I have had multiple ads running. I think for the last 6 months I’ve maybe had one, and it really needs freshening up/some allies in the field. I mean, I got my Kirkus review months ago, and half the point was to use it to season a new batch of ads, and I’ve just always found other uses for the thirty minutes or so required to get something started, or write some ad copy, or edit the ad copy I have mouldering in a file somewhere. Can the electronic moulder effectively, I wonder? I think not: no black spots across curling pages, that grow fat and fuzzy, or brittle and flaking along their exposed edges. Or welded together with dust. In Venice, I saw in various palace walk-throughs, the ledgers of storied antiquity, most often and importantly of lineage, all gummed up with years, pages indistinct behind a ribbed wall of dust and damp accretion. Looked beautiful, in their own decayed way, and so difficult to open, to peruse the history without breaking or marring it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but tonight I lack the wit to trace it. I did once play with well preserved medieval manuscripts, golden with illuminations, rich in cobalt blue, the price of diamonds in its era. That was a rare privilege, for which I am now grateful: I took it entirely for granted then, callow swine that I was!

But anyway: advertising. I need to do that. Another thirty minutes (maybe multiples thereof, I can’t be sure) should be spent learning how to employ KDP Rocket or some similar tool to find effective keywords for my ads. All things I should have done forever ago (a different multiple of 30), and I should have been experimenting with different keywords, different bid points per click, the whole shebang. I have been quite remiss to not have done so as much as I should this past year. But I was writing the next book, you see, and so lacked the bandwidth. In the writing life you can’t afford to lack the bandwidth for multiple activities if you intend to manage those activities yourself.

So a pre-Valentine’s resolution, which I hope shall last longer that the ones typical of New Year: I’m going to spend some time, maybe even thirty minutes or so, working on my advertising copy, strategy, output every other day (every day is way too much to ask) for the next month. If I spend hours on one day, that may buy me some days off. I’ll give myself that.

And lookee here! I’m at the bottom of a page, and maybe only twenty minutes have passed since I started this ramble. 25 tops. Score. I shall to bed now, and dream of typos, links and corrections. Thirty minutes tomorrow and I might just gather them all up. (I may not have, I’m similarly zoned out today (Thursday – Happy Valentine’s day folks!), and bed almost beckoned me away from getting this disjointed effort out – but I persevered!)

Keep moving everyone, keep striving and pushing, even little bursts of activity can sometimes go a long way. Au revoir, mes amis!

Why I Write Fantasy: To Explore the Meta

To be honest, in writing The Killer and The Dead I didn’t set out to explore aspects of metafiction, which I define as fiction that interrogates itself, and that can operate in a separate space in the reader’s mind beyond merely the ingestion and understanding of the narrative: it just kind of happened. In meta fiction the subject matter can highlight, among other things, its artificiality, cast doubt on its veracity, ask the reader what they want to, or choose to believe in the narrative. A meta-fictional superstructure comes into being, a frame, or frames of reference from which to view the core story, and these frames of reference can conflict with each other, be knowing or subconscious, be obviously accessible to the reader, or shrouded and hidden in the text as an Easter egg for the discerning.

The Killer and The Dead has significant metafictional aspects. It is a first person narrative told by a prisoner (the Killer) to his unseen audience of apprentice wizards, in which he tells the story of how he came to be a prisoner in the first place. Beyond that, the listeners have been informed by their master that they must write a report based on what the prisoner tells them, and the three worst reports will result in the writers being ‘culled’. The prisoner assumes this to mean killed. Thus throughout the book the prisoner, in addition to telling/being forced to tell his tale, is using it as an audition to his captor, to justify why he should be allowed to live at the tale’s end, and he is also trying to undermine, mislead, and trap the listeners into writing reports that will be clumsy enough to get them killed. Yes, it is somewhat ambitious, but I believe in aiming high, and in trying to stretch myself and do something new with each project. The book thus has a frame story – the killer telling his tale to his audience (and of course by extension the unseen audience is also the reader), and the actual narrative of his adventures and misdeeds that got him to the point of being captured.

The story is set in a world of paranoid misery, where everyone, including the killer, lies to get by. Everyone wears false-faces, masks, in order to survive. (Not literally though!) The narrative, which has interjections and speculations by the killer sprinkled through it aimed directly at his fictional audience (never at the reader directly, I did not want to break the 4th wall: that was a meta too far for me!), thus already exists on a few different levels – the simple narrative, and the expression of the Killer’s goals, his interrogator’s goals, and the presumed lessons the apprentices will choose to highlight in their reports, and how then those reports will be used by their master to judge their fitness to avoid being culled.

So that is fairly meta already. I am trying to channel Philip K. Dick into a fantasy novel. I look forward to seeing how successful you guys think I have been!

Where I go full force into the meta, I think, is in my idea to write a bunch of the apprentices’ reports. These will be fictional commentaries about my fictional tale, told by a desperate killer to a group of people threatened with death if they poorly analyze what he has to say. A few will be put in appendices at the end of the book. More will appear here, on this site. I intend to use each report to highlight both the character of the apprentice writing it, and different threads of the story: what each apprentice will decide is the main point of the narrative, be it psychological, socioeconomic, political, or magical, among many others – I have at least thirteen outlined already.

Here is my question to you: Is that a bridge too far? Are you intrigued by these commentaries, or do they turn you off? I like the idea, in the future, of inviting readers to write their own commentaries, imagining themselves as an apprentice. There shall be prizes, and the best shall be admitted into canon with the ones I write.

Does that sound like a good idea, or is it all far too meta for words?

Have a good evening everyone, and remember to keep seeing the wood for the trees!

The Writing Life: Imagining Success

Hi there folks! I did finally finish my vocalization of The Killer and The Dead today, and many improvements have been made, and a mere thirty two notes to self generated. You know, changes, continuity checks, questions for proofers and beta readers, that kind of thing.

I’m still a few steps away from hitting the publish button, but I do wonder now what success means to me in writing. It keeps evolving. In my youth I craved fortune and fame, now, I clearly see the pitfalls of fame, and fortune, well it would be nice to make more money from writing, but my targets are not as vast as once they were!

Writing for public consumption is an ego flaying thing, even before anyone reads a word, because you have to be ready for the worst responses, even as you crave the best. You also have to be prepared for vast, indifferent, silence. That’s a tough one, and the only way to deal with it, in my experience, is to keep working, take steps forward in your craft. The simple path to sanity is not to read any reviews, once you start getting them. It is hard though. It’s a funny thing – writers are advised to have a social media presence, to reach out to readers, to be available and enthusiastic, and yet not respond to reviews, a primary piece of evidence of reader engagement. I know why, (it’s a sanity shredding road to hell) but it does strike me as an interesting conundrum, and makes me wonder about all the other forms of author-reader engagement. The primary interface, for me, should be the book. The thing I wrote, that I hope you’ll enjoy reading.

So now my imagining of success is a smaller, simpler thing than once it was. It is having books I’m proud of, that are as good as I can make them in a reasonable span of time. Writing as many of them as I can in the years left to me, as long as I believe in the story, and the quality of their telling. I want to better myself each time out, improve the reading experience with each publication. I was in a mad rush to crank out books every year, to build a brand, to become a thing. I’m not so sure about that anymore. I think it is more important for me, right now, to build a sure foundation for myself as a writer, have ideas and stories I believe in. The Killer and The Dead is something I am very proud of, and look forward to sharing, when it is ready. Which will be soon, just like its cover, hahahaha!

Keep writing everyone, and pursue your ideas of success, whatever shape they may take!

 

Why I Write Fantasy: To try to Touch the Unknown.

The adventure of a blank page is the infinite possibilities it represents. Each word written at first narrows the choices left for those to follow, words determining their most likely successors, options being lost due to the rules of grammar, the syntax of language. But, after a time a magical thing can happen: the groups of words, obeying some rules, perhaps daring to break others, become more than the sum of their parts, and even careworn old collections of letters can shine in a way that is novel.

I write fantasy because it is freeing, the lack of initial constraints, no need for faithfulness to known geography, period, technology, or language. I admire writers of contemporary fiction – it is no easy task to capture parts of our world faithfully, present what many people are familiar with as new, and not trip up over some detail that has pedants howling at the author for getting ‘it’ wrong. I wrote something set in what might have ended up being a version of Denver a few years ago, though I intentionally kept it vague because tying myself to modern landmarks felt stifling. Already so much of the technology mentioned in passing in that story is obsolete. I doubt the Devil will use messenger to communicate in today’s stories! And I couldn’t even begin to keep up with the landscape of phone apps and interfaces, it seems each year has its own fad, a next big thing that is so two years ago to those in the know, and which flames out or gets bought by the tech giants just in time for the next sensation to appear.

So, intimidated by the thought of keeping such modern details accurate, fantasy appeals as a place in which you are in command of the rules, at least at first. I’ve talked about that a little elsewhere, and maybe I’ll go into more depth about the attractions of, and my approach to world building in another blog. The other thing I like about fantasy is that it is easier, I think, in this medium to push characters and ideas into new hypothetical positions, to explore quandaries and conflicts that the contemporary writer cannot easily access. I mean, all of human experience can be described in contemporary realism, every emotion, every conflict, overt and internal can be explored, the shape of life and how the sublime can exist in even the most apparently mundane circumstances, but you’re never going to get to pit your characters against blood spirits, or explore what thousands of years of life does to the perspective of someone who was once merely human. For me fantasy offers those chances (and so many more!), frames of reference that cannot exist in contemporary realistic literature, but can share the same aims, namely to find novel ways to explore what it is that makes us human, what characteristics we share, what responses we might have to the unknown.

And in fantasy, big metaphysical ideas can be given form and flesh, personified and played with in ways that cannot be done in other genres, and because the situations can be so varied, so new, very strange hypotheticals can be born, yet still have an impact beyond their novelty, can still trace their way back to our world, our experience. Dark, bright, or distorted versions of our world can slide through fantasy, even as the tale simply stands on its own as an adventure worth reading.

That is another lure for me in writing fantasy, this urge to not only capture new conflicts, new ideas, new demonstrations of strength and frailty, but to do it whilst telling a rousing tale filled with old familiar things: love, hatred, family, friendships, betrayal, and to have the old and new coexist, perhaps complement each other, while never getting in the way of the story, the magical journey our minds share as we turn pages, or swipe screens, the incredible human experience of words allowing one mind to touch another even if oh so very indirectly, and maybe, through fiction, share something real.

When I said aim high in another blog, I meant it. I also know that reach exceeding grasp is a very real thing, but dammit, I have to try.

The Writing Life : Speed Bumps

You get yourself a little momentum going. You think “Yeah, my voice is a little scratchy because I’ve beeen reading my book out loud, and some tricky parts of it repeatedly, for hours.”

Nope, you’ve got that seasonal cold thingy. A brain of snot. Dawesomb.

It happens. That strange lightheaded inability to focus because no damn reason at all. Or sinus pressure that you remember old people talking about when you were younger and laughed incredulously at, because you’d had a runny nose your entire life but had never experienced pressure up there.

Incredibly, it will be February tomorrow.

I really thought, back in November, that The Killer and The Dead would absolutely be published by now.

I recognise it won’t be for 2 months minimum. I don’t want to admit that, but I’m going to finish the out-loud in cigar-croak voice section maybe tomorrow, certainly on Saturday. But this run through has revealed to me how many simple fixes need to be made to my prose, the nut and bolt tightenings that I wanted to disregard a few months ago in order to hit my schedule.

They cannot be disregarded. I think I have something special in this next book, and it would be foolish to sabotage it by not doing my due diligence. I have caught enough things this read through, improved enough sentences and paragraphs, to know that being more systematic will yield more rewards.

I just didn’t want to in November. I wanted to hurl the book out there, as raw as its narrator and imagine the two things would excuse each other. Maybe they would have, I’ll not know now.

Now I know I need to control my overuse of words like ‘now’. Along with many others. I just edited three nows out of this blog.

It is funny – this blog is in many ways an inescapable advertisement for my writing, and it is written by me, in what can only ever be my written style*. So my writing is on display in every blog, eternal exemplar. But I do not edit these blogs very much at all, in comparison to my novels. If I did I’d be lucky to publish one a month. Most I write in Word first, the last three, not so much. I’m trying to close the gap in my hasty writings, to remember the rules I cleave to when writing more formally, but the truth is I often forget.

So yeah, I got sick this week. Bummer.

 

 

 

 

 

*I believe that a writer can write in many styles, and yet still have a style all of their own that might haunt them, should they try too hard to shake it off. Break it down, try to understand how it works, yes, indulge it other times, sure, but not too hard, or it becomes boated and useless. Deny it and try to eradicate it at your peril. Your style, your way, is you. Took me a long time to stop being self-conscious about the way I am in writing. But I still use the word now far too often. And still. Dammit.