Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 19

The Writing Life: Thinking about Analogy

Today, when not drowning in work, I was thinking about analogies and metaphors and dusty tables.

That is all.

I also decided that I would set myself a small goal, and if I met it, I’d write a blog saying I had met a small goal.

Because that is the kind of thrilling hi-jinks people come here to experience.

My goal was to make at least ten decisions in copy editing my text. A mere ten. I figured that if I managed ten a night, and then wrote scintillating blogs saying I had achieved this feat, well, before I’d know it I’d have made more than ten changes to my book, and be advancing (at a curious pace) down the avenue of Eventual Victory.

Oh yeah.

So I set my goal of just ten. I’m going to brag and say I made more than twenty. Big overachiever, me.

But you know what? It feels pretty good. A q-tip cleaning a smudge at the corner of a glass table perhaps, but progress between long days was made.

I stopped because I got to a thinky change that would require me to concentrate on the contents of more than a paragraph or two to analyse the effects of the possible change my editor had asked me to consider. That can wait until I have more mental energy.

Ten more tomorrow. Tonight, a small win.

See you again soon!

The Writing Life: The Dusty Road to Copy Edit Completion

I’ve been gone a while.

In this period of absence I’d like to say I’ve been finishing off the edits to The Killer and The Dead.

Nope.

I’ve been working, dieting (dieting takes a whole lot of my mental energy, it turns out – I really have to focus on not eating, hahaha!), and doing festive things.

I also had the Georgetown Book Nook to prepare for and then participate in.

It was awesome.

My thanks to the organizers, my fellow authors, the visiting public, and especially to those adventurous souls who bought a book from a sweaty man in a kilt!

I learned a lot from the experience, like it would be a good idea to have an easy to read blurb for your book available. And maybe a sign clearly indicating what genre you write. I also discovered I need to work out how to stand to have my picture taken without fidgeting and feeling as photogenic as a rotting potato. It’s a thing.

But really, I did have a lot of fun, and did take mental (and some actual) notes on what to improve for next time out. I don’t know when that will be, but it shall happen again!

So around all that not a lot of copy editing has taken place. There is one big reason for this I think, and it feeds into a bunch of other reasons that can happily explain why writers can get lost in this stage of editing, crying and screaming and never, ever finishing.

Copy editing is like cleaning hundreds of glass tables in a very dusty room with no ventilation.

You (I, really) think that you are just going to whizz in, wipe down each table quickly, and everything will be done, hundreds of tables sparkly clean just like that.

No. You start cleaning one corner of one table, and it raises a huge cloud of dust, that causes you to sneeze, and send dust and mucous flying in unlovely concert to spatter across other tables. So you put a mask on, and start again. You clean that same corner, fix the grammar, make sure of tenses, (yes, I’m still wrangling with them, and now it is very annoying because I don’t want to have tense choice give away story decisions, or even hint in a way that could make a reader feel cheated later. That. Is. A. Headache.) clean up word repetitions, apart from the ones you want to leave in as a stylistic choice/maintenance of your narrator’s voice, and then maybe read that paragraph aloud to see how it sounds to ensure there are no lingering issues with phrasing.

You have one shiny corner, of one table, in a room full of them. The dust you raised slowly settles, and some of it lands back on your cleaned corner, dirtying it once again. You look at your ‘completed’ section and notice new flaws, realize a fix or two you made created new problems, both there, and maybe later – have you just set up difficulties further into the text – added to the dust on other tables already thick with it?

You don’t want to despair. Not yet. So in addition to your mask, you get a damp cloth, so you don’t raise dust to scatter it elsewhere, not this time.

You know where I’m going with this by now, I hope. Different “you” that time. It gets confusing, this writing business, when you look at it closely. Anyway, back to the other you, the one living in the metaphor…

You reclean your corner, maybe extend it a bit, feel like you are making progress, the damp cloth holding the dust to it, not throwing it up into the air. This pass you decide not to get lost in the minutiae, deal with the most obvious issues, tell yourself most readers will not care about the things you are agonizing over, even as you recall your certainty that it is taking this care over your writing is what can help set it apart. Can both of these statements be true? The demon Doubt dustily laughs his question from over in the inevitably darkened corner where he had been lurking. (I believe both statements can be true, but that’s a chat for another time.)

You look down at your cleaned glass table. Your damp cloth has left great streaks across it, wet smears of dirt marring the surface. And Doubt’s laughter has raised more dust to settle over the scene, leaving your polished glass looking like a rutted field covered in ash.

Now, you despair.

I didn’t say what the one big reason is. I went all metaphorical instead.

And I’m not despairing. I’m gathering my strength, and readying a very powerful metaphorical vacuum cleaner.

Baby steps, multiple passes, each time reducing the dust in the room, punching holes in the walls for ventilation, emptying the vacuum over and over again, but elsewhere, where the dust cannot return to interfere with the next pass.

Eventually the tables will be clean, and maybe that will be enough. Or perhaps you will want them to shine, all of them. So another pass. And another. But you have to be careful not to polish so hard you start breaking the glass…

I’m really torturing the metaphor now, so I’ll stop here.

At some point in copy editing you have to do the same.

That is a ways off for me at present, but the journey has been started. It is a long road, but I know I can do it, I’ve done it before. Writing this has helped galvanize me. How cool is that?

See you again soon!

Why I Write Fantasy: The Self-employed Edition

When I was a young lad, imagining I’d have five novels published by twenty one and be as successful as David Eddings because I was going to write the same number of books (this was Belgariad era Eddings), I never put any thought to the business side of writing. I was going to write, get published (again, I didn’t bother thinking about the mechanics of that step) and then have an awesome time writing five part epics and the odd trilogy, because that’s what my favourite authors did. I envisaged sunshine and roses all the way, and smiled my way through physics classes I mostly ignored.

Reality, as was once said, bites.

This weekend I will be up in Georgetown at the Book Nook, and am very excited to meet my fellow authors and hopefully some of you, the fabulous reading public, without whom we writers would all be lost, our lives entirely without purpose. At Thanksgiving I was grateful for readers, of every size and shape, among many other blessings I try not to take for granted in this world of light and heat and endless fresh water that I miraculously enjoy.

But unlike my youthful imaginings, stuff doesn’t just magically happen when you get published. The work goes on. This is my first sale to the public. So I’ve had to check out sales tax rules. Get a Square account so I can process plastic upon demand, though I will offer a discount to my fellow luddites who still think exchanges of pieces of paper are a fine basis for financial transactions. We are a dying breed, but I will cater to you!

I am taking my first small steps down the road to being a business person as well as a writer. If you are going to do it yourself, this is an inevitability, so be ready for form filling and the beginnings of a tension headache as the stuff you never really wanted to do sits on your desk waiting to be done. When I finally tackled it (after a delay or two), it really wasn’t that bad. So I suspect I missed something, hahaha! Live and learn, that’s all we can do.

And then there is the whole display aspect. This is my first ‘booth’, even if it is more table shaped. My first table, dammit! I have a table cloth. They invented those a while back, so I have that covered. Yes, I went there. Being something of an epic procrastinator I am, again, wildly indebted to my wife for creating posters, bookmarks, bidness cards, even a special treasure chest of goodies to share with visitors to my booth/table. And other stuff that you’ll just have to come up to Georgetown to see!

So this is it, the part of writing that is a business. I’m road-testing this booth/table experience, and if it is as fun as I anticipate, well, then it may become a thing for me to do (paperwork and taxes permitting) of a weekend or three at various wonderful locations around this great state of Colorado. Once you have the display items you might as well make use of them! (Sunk costs and all!) This will of course entail me doing more business type activity I never imagined as a lad, like calling bookshops, contacting the organizers of events, and generally demonstrating a willingness to put myself out there. I’ll tell you, it was much easier just imagining world literary domination as a fourteen year old!

I look forward to seeing you this coming Saturday. I’ll be the one in the kilt.

Why I Write Fantasy: To go to a School and try to Explain Why I Write Fantasy

I would like to thank Steven Craig and Parker Performing Arts School for inviting myself and the ever excellent Cheryl Carpinello in for a sequence of Q&A sessions with four classes of engaged and enthusiastic pupils today. I really enjoyed meeting the students and burbling on at length about many aspects of writing and fantasy fiction. You guys were awesome, thank you for the warm welcome, and the difficult questions!

I learned a lot today. From Steven, from Cheryl, and most of all from the students. In trying to answer some questions: on how to maintain character consistency, on voice, on how to get past creative blocks and stay committed to a work in process I found myself articulating some ideas for the first time, or thinking hard about how I approach problems, and why I build my books the way I do. It was fascinating, because in discussing my processes with an audience I found myself having to investigate what I take for granted, and in the end was explaining it both to the students and to myself. I was kind of surprised a few times, and in a very good way!

It is also always rewarding and informative to hear about how other writers approach their work: their characters, plot construction, elements of style, and process of revision and completion, which Cheryl (and Steven, when he stepped out of his role as teacher and joined in as a writer) did with great clarity, and was much appreciated. There are many ways to write a novel, even if there are apparently only six types of arc in storytelling, but there are as many stories as there are writers, and every one of them can teach you something new, if you are attentive. The origin of our stories was a frequent question today – where did we get our ideas from and how do we turn them into books? Some writers start from characters, some from plot, or situation, others with a compelling theme they want to explore and from there create both plot and characters to exemplify their ideas in action. It is fascinating to hear other writers talk about how they tackle the universal issues in writing – how to make characters relatable, how to maintain tension in a work, how to deal with needed changes in a manuscript you thought was completed, because hearing about how other people have met those challenges helps you to become a better writer.

At present for me everything starts from an idea of “what if?” and then “what next?”, even the time I daydreamed a conversation for months it eventually boiled down to what was happening around the conversation, and why two people who liked nothing more than to insult each other were stuck in a room talking in the first place when it was clear that in any other circumstance they’d kill each other or leave at the first possible opportunity. So the conversation for me was the inciting conflict, the “what if two people are stuck in a room spitting insults at each other?” spark that I then built a situation around, discovered a plot that could generate the “what then would they do?” purpose that allowed the voices to become characters, their insults part of a shared and tempestuous history. And no, it’s not a romance novel, though it could be!

The classes are all reading The Hobbit. And of course, The Hobbit is why I write fantasy. It created a world I desperately wanted to participate in, and when after ten billion rereads I realized I couldn’t get any further into the words and the world, I knew I’d have to write my own stories to get that same feeling, and hopefully help someone else have the fun of discovering a strange new world filled with interesting (sometimes horrible) people they could enjoy spending some time with (see come to a sticky end!).

So for this week folks, that is why I write fantasy. Thanks again to the pupils and staff of Parker Performing Arts School for the fun day of sharing ideas and excitement over the books I’ve loved to read, and the books I love to write.

(And no kids, I did not outline, write, rewrite, edit, and then proof this article. They kind of just fall out like this, I fuss at them a bit, and then hit publish. Frequently after that point I spot typos and other glaring errors, and sometimes I clean them up before going to bed, other times, they just stay there a while!)

The Writing Life: Patience

Sometimes in the grind of writing, editing, marketing, and then selling your work it is easy to get lost. You forget the vibrancy of first ideas, the thrill of plot creation, the joy of characters growing beyond their first sketches and pushing against the boundaries of their originally envisaged roles. The slog of to do lists can occasionally obscure the thing that all those lists are meant to augment, to promote, to share: the writing, the imagining, the creative heart of all your efforts. The fun. The sheer fun of writing. And you can’t allow yourself to forget that, because if it stops being fun, then the game is over, and writing has become another dreary job that people like to read books to escape from.

I think that a lot of writing is being patient with yourself. Sometimes it’s when you can’t write fast enough to keep up with your ideas. That is a good problem. Other times it’s when you need to let it go that you can’t face a keyboard that night. Not a good problem. I’ve found that self-flagellation doesn’t particularly help – you can’t write any faster than full-speed, and facing the keyboard when you’d rather just space out in front of the TV just produces flat prose. Unless you get lucky and something unexpectedly purple rolls along, puffing and pickwickian, unashamed of its exuberance and in desperate need of being edited into better shape, but jolly all the same!

I’m trying to wear a lot of hats right now, and I only have one head. Patience helps me remember that I can do one task at a time. Patience tells me to do what I can when I can, and not to sweat the other stuff waiting. It will still be there in the morning, but with some patience, and its firm ally determination, the stuff that waited will also be gotten through, in time.

Strange to be a writer in a rush. It isn’t a profession that lends itself to speed, though some of my colleagues out there do have prodigious output. In a rush, yet with not enough time to do everything desired seems to be my current dilemma. So: prioritise, do what you can, and leave the rest. Easy to type, harder to do.

I got my copy edits back last night. A new mountain to reduce to a molehill. I also received my first draft of the cover for The Killer and The Dead. It looks amazing – I can’t wait to share it with you, but details, always details to be worked on first. Another week closer to my Georgetown Book Nook appearance, which can be as simple or as complex as I want it to be. There is a choice there, and with patience and its pal determination, I’ll find my way to the best spot for me, at that time and in that place.

Behind all of this activity, beyond all the plans, is a simple thing I like to remind myself of from time to time.

I love writing stories. They make me giddy, and giggle, and dance and sing (badly, both), they make me enjoy life and everything in it. When I write stories, I am where and when I should be, and it is good.

So be patient with yourselves, writers, and remember these two things amidst the myriad tasks you may have set yourself in order to ‘succeed’: the reason you write, and the reward you derive from it. Then go watch TV.

Happy Thursday everyone!

Meet the Author… and buy Christmas presents for the readers in your life!

This December I will be a vendor up in Georgetown CO, at the Christmas Market Book Nook. It runs over the first two weekends in December and showcases a great deal of Coloradan writing talent! Fiction, non-fiction, genres of every flavour, there is something for everyone, and all wrapped up with a bow of getting to meet the author! How can you possibly resist? I make my appearance with twenty four other writers of quality and charm on Saturday December the 8th from 10am to 4pm, and will be available to talk books and writing. (Or the weather, I can do weather talk all day – benefit of a Scottish upbringing!) I will also be selling copies of The Thief and The Demon, and will have some promotional material for The Killer and The Dead, which will be closer, but not yet at the cigar stage by then, I suspect!

So come on up and meet some Colorado’s authors in historic Georgetown! We are jolly purveyors of Christmas presents for the happy readers in your lives!

I will also shortly let you know when pre-orders open for The Killer and The Dead, and will be sharing a first look at the cover art! Stay tuned folks!

Here endeth my latest foray into exclamation mark abuse. I truly apologise to those scarred by this grotesque display.

Why I Write Fantasy: Hamster Wheel Edition

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to crank out a blog of an evening. I completed the line edit in double time, missing deadline by a day, but I’ll take it, and my editor is a forgiving soul, for which I am grateful.

The essential truth of why I write fantasy – to carve an escape for others like and yet different from the many wondrous portals I took as a child and young adult – does not rest easily alongside the work required to craft said portal. Reading and imagining came easily to me as a child, and I identified so strongly with the worlds created by writers that I could never imagine doing anything other than growing up to create my own worlds, to explore them with and for other folk who chose to journey into the pages I would write.

The powerful imagination that so completely transported me to Hobbiton, Caer Paravel, Amber and Erlenstar didn’t bother to capture the nitty gritty of the effort required to make a work magical. I think one of the many reasons my first novel written as an adult didn’t progress beyond the first much tinkered with draft was because I baulked at the work required. I wanted imagination to be sufficient. The ideas to be enough. I had perspicacity enough then to recognize, somewhat foggily I’ll admit, how much more was required, and I didn’t want to do it. Because it is hard. Not the hardest thing in the world, this isn’t a poor me moment, but the task of finishing a novel is not for faint of heart, or the glibly workshy, as once I was.

My editor is copy editing my manuscript as we speak. Once I would have considered that an ending. Now I know better. It will just give me a grammatical bedrock upon which to do my first last revisions, which will then be reviewed and changed some more. Another crop of errors will be spotted and altered, then the newest most final version will be proofed, in which more corrections are made. Then comes the formatting examination, which I now know leads to yet more fixes as the grimly inevitable last-minute flaws make their presence known to the author’s at times incredulous eye. If you let it, I think this could never end. These are the stages at which I think some writers can spend years in desperate search for an endless chain of perfect words and sentences. Unfortunately the seasons pass, and in the changing light and shifting contexts borne by previous alterations, the perfect chain keeps breaking.

I don’t feel I have the time to chase perfection that fervently. I still make it a goal, aim high, but I can’t let it become an obsession to block my progress.

Semi-Pro tip that I am sure you are all aware of: when proofing change the size and format of the pages of the manuscript. It is astonishing what seeing the words in different patterns will reveal. I have at least two read-it-out-loud run throughs to do. (Maybe I should record one, complete with my swearing as I trip over things, and release it as the Audible uncut version!) I will not read it backwards as some do. I’m afraid of what might happen to me if I try it!

So this certainly isn’t why I started writing fantasy, this hamster wheel of frenzied activity around a book that I would once have considered mostly written, but it is an essential part of what I do now, and why I do all of it, from first imaginings to last comma deletion. The work. Without the work, the dream stays flimsy, and who wants to read a flimsily constructed book? In the end, you pray your efforts are invisible to the reader’s eye, and that all they will see is a new world beckoning them to come and visit a while, complete with memorable people to meet and fantastic places to go.

And that, today, is why I write fantasy.

The Writing Life: Work and Writing Part 1: The Overview

I’ve been meaning to write about the struggles of managing work and writing for a long time. I’ve written, or tried to write in a lot of different circumstances, and it is hard to say which, if any, has been the best option.

Obsessive teen living on a farm with not much else to do? Check.

Undergraduate student more interested in going out and having fun than either studies or writing but kind of managed both? Check, though one book’s first draft took over 6 years, because I really didn’t give it that much attention – just enough to be able to talk a good game!

First real job doing day/night rotation, 8 then 12 hour shifts? Check.

Dealing with emigration, change of country, work environment, culture? Check.

Time off to write full time? Check.

Back to work full-time, writing on weekends and evenings? Check.

I think I did best in terms of output as an obsessive teen. Pity the writing was… ah… less polished. And I wrote a couple of choose your own adventure books too, but never did anything with them, like, at all. Strange to look back on that, and think I didn’t even send one off to Steve Jackson. I doubt anything would have come of it, but you never know about the roads not taken.

Student life, I had ideas, lots of ideas. And talked about them. Frequently. But the writing was scattered, and focused into times when I had no distractions and very little money!

First job, well I had decent time off, got my first PC, and started ‘working on’ the first draft I had produced as a not-quite-eternal student. Thus was born the long era of my tinkering with a text and calling it editing. I really wish now I’d taken the time to study what editing truly means, and how to approach it. I still have the books that I bought then to help with the process, but either they didn’t have the right information in them, or, far more likely, I simply wasn’t receptive to the message. I chose to learn the wrong lessons. I never gained any distance from my writing, and could never accept help or criticism at that time. Missed opportunities aplenty in this era. Writing, though a constant dream from childhood, was not a priority, there was just too much else going on.

And then I left Scotland for the United States. Talk about too much going on! Two years flashed by as I adjusted to an entirely new life. There was another PC, this one with an internet connection, and yet more tinkering with the by now tired old manuscript, but no real commitment. That book had fossilized. So I enjoyed myself, lived and worked and went on vacations I could actually afford, moved to the burbs with the girl I married, and enjoyed the fruits of disposable income. New ideas always bubbled, I was always thinking of story ideas, plots, and characters. Among them, The Thief and The Demon. For a few years it was a page and a half of a word file, among many others.

After many years of fits and starts I decided to take time off to write. At first I just took time off. More missed opportunities, but I don’t regret it – I know that should I ever again have the opportunity to write full-time again I won’t feel the need to revel in the simple joy of not working! I spent time writing and ‘editing’, again with little idea of how to structure myself and the work, wasting time on superficial changes, still not understanding what I needed to do. Eventually I learned, got help, and produced The Thief and The Demon.

So now, working full-time and writing evenings and weekends. It is hard. I rue the time I let slip away when I had those years off. Given how much I am managing to achieve now, I can’t help but imagine how much more I would do with this discipline when free to write full-time. Or at least that’s what I hope, while a more honest part of me wonders that if I had more time I wouldn’t just ease off again. Like expenditure rising to match income, would my ability to waste time increase with the time made available? It is possible. So I am left at present feeling I am working two jobs simultaneously, which in short intense bursts of editing activity is doable, but I think long term would be wearing. I can’t wait to finish The Killer and The Dead for many reasons, but one of them is certainly to take a writing vacation and have more time for myself and my wife. But the next book needs to be written, and the one after that…

This is where I am now: actively learning how to juggle a new work/writing balance when I am committed to my writing career as much to my paying profession. I think I’ll adjust next year’s editing schedule to give me more time between passes, so this phase of novel writing feels less pressured. That way I can have time off that feels like an actual break, rather than an exercise in switching hats. There is an optimal balance to find, which I suspect differs for every writer, and I’m still working on finding mine.

Good luck to all of you on finding yours.

The Writing Life: The Long Road of Line Editing

What is line editing? Well, if developmental edits are big picture issues looking at story, plot, character and setting among other things, and copy editing is getting down to the nuts and bolts of grammar, then line editing exists somewhere in between.

Line editing is taking your manuscript to a spa: to sweat off the flab, get massaged into shape, and emerge refreshed, ready to deliver its message with vigorous clarity. Or something.

That’s what I’m up to now, trimming away unnecessary words and phrases, re-arranging sentences and paragraphs to make sure the flow of ideas at the sentence to paragraph to page level is clear, and will be clear to the reader. Some stylistic measures too, watching for word and sentence structure repetition, and altering, if the alteration does not draw more attention to itself than the original repetition did. That’s a tricky one sometimes. I should tell you the tale of three wants in a future outing.

The big one I’m wrestling with, in a first person narrative with a framing story that periodically intrudes into the narrative as being told, is tense. Which parts in present, which in past, and why? What about the narrator’s asides, which do not necessarily apply to either the past tense narrative or present tense frame? How to distinguish them?

Is it enough for me to have a rationale for my choices? I don’t think so. The reader needs to intuitively grasp the tense choices and never have them intrude into the experience of the book. All the work with tenses must read naturally, or they will be the reading equivalent of potholes in a literary road, constantly jarring the reader out of their smooth enjoyment of the written journey.

And that is how I regard the editing process, the creation of an autobahn of excellence from a rough track. The book evolves from a dirt path to cobblestoned street to seamless tarmac as the finished product. Each pass lays foundations, replaces sharp bends with sweeping corners, fills in potholes, removes errant old cobbles, and hopefully ensures a seamless and exciting ride for all.

So I have a plan for the tenses, each type of interaction has its assigned tense, and there is flow from one to another as the narrator fights his way through telling a small portion of his life story. I think I have a solid rationale, now I’m working on making the transitions seem entirely natural, so the reader cannot imagine any other alternative. A lot of work goes into natural, and I am so grateful I have an editor working with me to do a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard. I may disagree with some of the suggestions made, but know I am fortunate to have that framework to accept or reject, those working comments to consider and build upon. Without that input I would be where I once was, tinkering aimlessly, wasting time. And I don’t want to go back there again.

I chose first person for this novel because of the challenge it represents. My desire is to learn, to improve my craft as a writer. I intend to set myself further technical challenges with my next book. Is that smart? I genuinely don’t know. I’ll take stock after the first three are out, evaluate what I’ve learned, and see how I’d like to proceed from there.

For now it is the long line edit, trimming, clarifying, refining. And quite a bit of tensing.

Writing. It’s thinky.

One Year On

So in fairy tales it is often a year and a day that people must wait, or that passes before the next significant event in the story.

It has been a year and three days since I officially released my first book.

Doesn’t seem that long.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have bought my book, read my book, shared my book and talked about it. I am extremely grateful for the investment in time you put into my words. I hope they repaid them well!

Thank you for spreading the word, for telling friends and relatives about my book, for waving your copy at other people, for taking pictures of the cover, for posting it on FB.

I’ve heard tell that one of the best ways to sell a book is to write another. Pretty long term plan, if you ask me, but I’m up for it. The Killer and The Dead progresses. Line edits take time. I’ll talk about the nitty-gritty of that on Thursday.

But for now I’ll just say how ridiculously fulfilling it has been to spend this last year sharing my writing with a small, but slowly growing pool of readers. I truly appreciate you, one and all.

And now for sweet sleep, so I can arise anew.

Later.