Cameron Darrow's Blog

When to Let Go

After four restarts, endless revisions and never getting past the halfway mark, I've given up on a project after committing to it for the first time. It doesn't feel like I thought it would.

For context, I've been working on what was going to be the third Alumita book for what feels like forever. It was the book I started immediately after finishing the Ashes books two years ago (!), and the one that frustrated me to the point I ended up writing the first Dizzy book to get away from it. But fresh eyes and a new book under my belt didn't work out how I thought it would. I picked it up, set it down, restarted and revised the first half innumerable times without ever making it past the halfway point. I thought it was just resistance at first, and that my usual strategy of dealing with resistance (turn away for a little while and then run past it when it's not looking) never worked.

I've talked numerous times here about working with resistance and using it to take stock of what may not be working in a story, and also how important it is to just get the story down and worry about revising later. But in this case, both strategies failed. No matter which new angle I came at it from or how much momentum I thought I was building on every reboot I hit the same wall at the midpoint. I changed the love interest, I changed the whole premise of the story (while keeping basics like the setting and other ephemera that was working), I even overhauled the main character's motivations and outlook, and all of it to no avail. No matter how much I changed the foundations around, I could never figure out a way to salvage a decent building out of it. The story just kept fighting me, to the tune of months worth of work. And it won. (I hope it's proud of itself!)

I'm still not entirely certain what the root problem was. I still think there's a good story in there, I just couldn't find it, even after months of looking and multiple restarts from different angles... in short, working on it until it wasn't fun anymore.

And that's when I knew I had to be done. For good.

I think there were two issues, neither of which have anything to do with the story:

1) The same problems were waiting for me when I got back from writing the first Dizzy book. Like I went on vacation, had a great time, and then as soon as I got back I remembered why I left in the first place. My subconscious was no help in solving them behind the scenes; maybe it was smart enough to move on before I did?

2) I think I reached a new level of writing maturity with Death Has Golden Eyes, and returning to to an old story (especially one that had so much work already done) made me feel like I was going backwards as a writer. Short of blowing it up and starting from scratch, it was always going to feel like Old Me's book, like I was going to have to devolve somehow to finish it the way that 'd started, and that didn't feel good.

And that last part is the real reason I'm done: it wasn't fun anymore. The whole point of the Alumita books is that they're fun, for me first and foremost. If I don't enjoy it, there is very little chance you will. I'm not a perfectionist or a tortured artist or anything, it's simply that being unenjoyable is pretty much antimatter to a comedic romance: they annihilate each other on contact.

Not to worry, though! There will be more Alumita books at some point, just not this one.

It wasn't an easy choice, but the decision to bury this book once and for all has been a liberating one. I feel much freer and more creatively inspired, and look forward to tackling new story problems every day, rather than for excuses not to. The sunk cost fallacy got the better of me for awhile, but the best way out isn't always through. Sometimes it's to set the whole quagmire on fire and ride the updraft.

Whee!

Miss Dixon! Hurrah!

'Death Has Golden Eyes' has cracked the top 100 in both the LGBTQ+ Mystery (this close to 50!) AND British Historical Fiction categories in its first few days! Being my first mystery and wondering at times if I would ever write a book again makes the response even more incredible, and more than I had ever dared hope.

Thank you so much.

Excelsior!

Release Day!

Death Has Golden Eyes is now available worldwide!

This day has been long in coming, and sometimes felt like it would never get here. But I am proud (and relieved) to say that it is finally here! I have a new book out!

Thank you all so much for your patience and your understanding during this time. I hope it was worth the wait!

If you do read Death Has Golden Eyes, thank you, first of all, but when you're done please consider leaving a review or even just a rating. This is a new genre and a new step for me, and every review/rating helps me believe that I didn't screw everything up, and makes the book that much more visible at the same time. I spent a long time alone with it, some external feedback from all of you would be most welcome.

Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy getting to know Dizzy and the gang, and this new world they live in.

Excelsior!

IHeartSapphic Feature!

I did a little Q&A interview celebrating the release of Death Has Golden Eyes over at I Heart Sapphic! A little more insight into the book, my process and what cocktail Dizzy might enjoy (including a recipe)!

Thank you to the hard-working folks over at I Heart Sapphic for the opportunity and everything they do.

Paperback Info

Everything is locked and final for the paperback version of Death Has Golden Eyes! Since I can't put paperbacks up for pre-order, I wanted to let you know that it will be priced at $12.99 in the US, €11.99 in the EU and £10.99 in the UK, and is 324 pages long. You know, in case you need to make an extra slot on your shelf. Really happy with how the formatting came out, classy and period-appropriate.

If you've been wondering about the fabulous cover, the Kindle and paperback versions were both created by Vila Design. Check them out if you need a cover that's both incredible and reasonable.

Just a few more days to go!

Why A Mystery?

Given my bibliography up to this point, you may be wondering why I wrote a paranormal mystery all of a sudden (you probably have fewer questions about the historical part). I've mentioned several times here that I needed to do something different than I'd done before for various reasons, but I haven't really talked about why I wrote a mystery in particular.

I'd been toying with the idea for several years, even picking up various how-to books on writing mysteries and going over genre conventions and whatnot. Both Remember, November and The Raven and the Firebird have mystery elements to them, so it wasn't completely uncharted territory.

The short version of why a mystery, though is this: I write romances with my heart, and mysteries with my brain. My heart was tapped out; I was emotionally toast, and simply couldn't get another Alumita book off the ground despite three different tries. But a mystery? With low emotional stakes and what is essentially a puzzle at its heart? That's something else. Something doable, I thought. Putting a puzzle together is such a different exercise from drilling down into someone's emotional core and extracting all that they are and why and everything you need to make a romance compelling and believable. They can be emotionally exhausting. Writing a mystery was still hard, but in a different way. I could let my subconscious chew on it, and being able to bring in more external obstacles was fun. Romance protagonists have to make choices for emotional reasons that are internally driven (rejecting love, protecting themselves, being nervous and uncertain), whereas a mystery protagonist having the world dumped at their feet is kind of the point. If a couple separates in the third act because one thinks the other is dead after a bomb goes off, that's not super interesting romantically; they didn't choose that. But if a bomb goes off and destroys evidence the sleuth needs? Well, shit. Now what? The whole structure and driving forces are different, and it was an incredibly rewarding exercise that I hope has resulted in a rewarding story.

"But it's a Cameron Darrow book! What about the characters?" Don't worry! It's still character-driven. They are the focus. It's about them, the circumstances they face and why they're the ones who have to do something about them. Dizzy, Azalea and Kaliori are every bit as three-dimensional as Vimika and Millie, just with much different problems. Getting into the head of an extradimensional vampire with a wildly different sense of morality is delicious, and I hope you think so, too.

So what was my direct inspiration? Two major ones: an Australian TV show and YouTube. Let me explain:

During the pandemic, I fell down a rabbit hole of freely-available mysteries from the '30s and '40s on YouTube. There are an absolute ton of them (as the copyrights have expired and they're kind of orphans), including entire runs of radio shows and movies like the famous Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Radio shows like The Shadow and Suspense are entirely theater of the mind, very atmospheric when listening in the dark, and force you to put your phone down and pay attention. Yes, there are extremely dated and offensive portrayals in some of them, but I skipped those episodes when that crap came up. They aren't present in, and so do nothing to diminish, the brilliance of episodes of Suspense like "Sorry, Wrong Number" or "Will You Make a Bet with Death?". They're timeless--compelling, dramatic and eminently listenable just as much today as they were when they first aired 80 years ago. The Shadow is the first modern superhero, and a direct inspiration for Batman. Did you know Orson Welles was the first person to play The Shadow? Crazy! Not my favorite portrayal (Bill Johnstone FTW!), but certainly interesting. "The Old People" is a completely batshit episode of his if you want 30 minutes of Orson Welles-led WTF-ery.

The other inspiration was the "Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries" TV adaptation. They take place in Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s, and showed me just how wonderful a period mystery could be. The glamour, the costumes, the performances (I adore Essie Davis as Miss Fisher), the characterization of Miss Fisher as a well-to-do flapper who's whip-smart, well-read, in complete command of her own sexuality and doesn't take shit from anybody is so satisfying, and a large influence on Dizzy herself. (In fact, Dizzy having bright green eyes is a direct homage to Miss Fisher.) I first saw it years ago, but it stuck in my brain as my first introduction to anything like it, and jolted me out of what I thought mysteries were and had to be. I have since read many of the books the show is based on (known as the Phryne Fisher Mysteries), but I was introduced to the show before the books, so I'm a bit biased in my preferences.

So! That's my tour of the background to the Dizzy Dixon Mysteries! I hope you enjoy Death Has Golden Eyes when it comes out June 25th! If you haven't pre-ordered it yet, that would be a super-cool totally awesome thing to do. But! It will also be available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, so if you're waiting for either of those, that's cool, too.

Thank you so much! More to come as the release date gets closer!

Excelsior!

New Book Announcement!

Friends, it's finally time! I am so very happy and proud to be able to formally announce my new book and series!

First, the series:

The Dizzy Dixon Mysteries is an alternate history paranormal mystery series set in the North of England in the late 1940s. You've got your vampires and your werewolves, which is the paranormal part, but the alternate history? Well, those vampires and werewolves have to come from somewhere! How about another dimension known as the Realm? That the Nazis found a way to not only access during WWII, but siphon magic from?

So what happens when you introduce vampires, werewolves and zombies into a population already exhausted and on edge after years of war?

People die.

And you get The Dizzy Dixon Mysteries!

Death Has Golden Eyes is just the first. We meet Dizzy and her Realmic companions Azalea and Kaliori, and are immediately confronted with a mystery Dizzy can't ignore: an unconscious werewolf on her doorstep and a dead one in her field. Why? What happened? How did two werewolves show up on her property the night she moved in? Did one kill the other? Is it even her job to figure it out? How much brandy is too much? Can a vampire can be too charming? If so, can Dizzy resist letting herself be eaten alive? Does she want to?

So many questions!

Now, a mystery is new for me, but if you like my other books, you'll like this one. It's all character-driven, fun and a little sexy. There's a bit more blood (like you get when one of the main characters is a vampire!), but tonally it's very similar, and I hope a quick read. Think of the Dizzy books as a cross between the Phryne Fisher Mysteries and the Dresden Files and you might get a sense of what I'm going for.

It's available for pre-order on Kindle right now, and will be out on June 25th! There will be a paperback version on that day as well, but it's not quite ready for pre-orders yet. If you like my books and are interested, please consider pre-ordering it. This is a new book in a new series in a new genre for me, and I'd really like it to get off to the best start possible.

A new book has been a long time coming, and I'm absolutely ecstatic to finally be able to share it with you. Here's to many adventures with Dizzy and the gang!

Starting June 25th!

Here's the pre-order page again, and the Goodreads page: Death Has Golden Eyes: A Dizzy Dixon Mystery.

Excelsior!

Editing Tips

While my new book is still being massaged into its final form, I thought I'd give some insight into how I revise my books with some simple, off-the-wall advice that doesn't involve the expense and pain of hiring an editor. If you find the process intimidating, or get frustrated by it, I hope you'll find some of the following useful!

In chronological(ish) order:

1) Wait. After I finish a draft (especially the first one), I set it aside and don't think about it for at least three days. I don't go longer than a week. This accomplishes several things: it gives your brain a chance to rest, your subconscious a chance to work and allows you some semblance of objectivity when you do come back to it. The most important part is don't think about it.

Resting your brain is important! I know the drive to go-go-go and if you're not working on the project then you're burning time, etc. I get it. But sometimes stepping away and not thinking about it is faster in the long term. This ties into the second part, about your subconscious -- it needs time to chew on things, too.

Your subconscious dealing with things is one reason we have ideas in the middle of the night, or when we're doing something else and very frustratingly can't write them down. Leaving your subconscious time to work is also a good way to train your conscious mind into making the most of 'work time'. When you set the work down for the day (or week, or whatever), set it down and don't touch it. I try not to let my ideas leak out slowly anymore, and this includes talking to people about them. I've managed to train my brain into work now, and only now by not giving it a chance to do it other times. Then it all comes gushing out at once when it has the chance! (But by all means, if you have a good idea, write it down! This isn't an absolute.)

Objectivity is the single most important thing to editing, for me. When I walk away and come back, not only do I see things I didn't see before, I'm a lot less precious about the work that I did. I'm much more willing to cut a paragraph (or scene) the farther I am away from creating it. It's really important to be able to do this, because...

2) Kill your darlings. Yes, it's cliche, almost trite advice by this point, but only because it's absolutely true. Be willing to cut anything from the book that doesn't need to be there, no matter how much you like it or that it was the first thing you wrote and therefore must be central to the story Is it? No, really. Is it? It may not be anymore.

Once I finish a draft, step away from the book, come back and try to read it all the way through, that objectivity makes it much easier to see that "Oh. No, this doesn't need to be here," or "Oh, that's not the story I'm actually writing," or "This story isn't actually about what I thought it was." Stories evolve as you tell them, don't bend over backwards to find a reason to keep something that doesn't belong or doesn't work. Even when I have a solid outline, living with my characters for weeks or months tells me a lot more about them, and they don't always respond the way I think they will!

3) Save your darlings. By that, I mean that just because you cut something doesn't mean it isn't useful! Maybe there's some good description/ideas/grist in there. For example, I tried maybe four different ways of describing the main character in my new book, but only one worked as the first description. The other ones are all in a file that I may use later. They're compact and straight to the point, more efficient for later books when most readers will already be familiar with her but need a refresher. For the record, I use Scrivener to write my books, and it's dead simple to add and move files around with sub-folders and whatnot, and then export them directly to a new project (which I've done countless times already).

4) Learn to like cutting. I know, easier said than done. But over the course of writing so many books, I've come to enjoy the feeling of cutting stuff that needed to be cut. If there's some bugbear, some scene that just doesn't feel right and I can't figure out why, or I encounter a ton of resistance to it, that's usually a sign it needs to be cut. And you know what? I've never regretted doing it. It's a relief, and feels like an actual accomplishment. Adding by subtracting is progress! It gets the story closer to what it needs to be.

5) Change font/format/program. This applies once I've got the story in a good place, and I'm in a more advanced stage of looking for the flow and presentation of the story, and I need it to feel more 'real'. Up to this point, I've probably been writing and editing in the same window size, the same font, the same zoom level, etc. Changing any of them is shockingly effective at finding mistakes, repeated words, clunky presentation, that kind of thing. If you have another program you can open it in, say from Scrivener into Word or Pages, it really is like a whole new book! The closer you get to what it will look like in its final form, the better, but I would hold off on getting too close until you're in final proofreading. You don't want to get too used to it that way, because you may not have anywhere left to go, visually. The simple step of making it look different can help put off the point where your eyes glaze over from reading it too much.(Or you fall asleep, as has happened to me.) Many swear by printing out a hard copy, but with how much ink costs, I might as well do it in my own blood. No matter how, though, try looking at things in a new light! Literally!

(As I have nowhere else to put this, Scrivener has a 'word frequency' tracker that tells you how many times you've used every word in the book. It can be... enlightening. If a word shows up with a suspiciously big number after it, do a project search and it will highlight that word in yellow, making it super obvious if it's too often. Especially in a single scene or paragraph. No one has to know except you!)

6) Put it on your Kindle/tablet/e-reader. This is for when I'm doing final proofreading. I compile and export the book as it would appear to a potential reader, and read it like they would. Pick it up, put it down, stop thinking like an editor and more like a reader; pretend it's already on sale and that this is what people would be spending their hard-earned money and precious time on. I've noticed a lot of weird things this way that I didn't over the previous three/four/five drafts. Like losing track of who's speaking by using 'she' too often instead of names, or dialogue/prose that suddenly seems strange once it's escaped the bounds of my computer. Having it on my Kindle also helps with the pacing/structure, since it has a percentage counter at the bottom instead of a scroll bar. To do this, I use Calibre to move files onto my Kindle, including public domain books from Project Gutenberg!

7) Let someone else read it. Can't stress this one enough! No matter how much I read and re-read, no matter how much I think I know a story and that I've conveyed it as best as it can be, another person will see things you simply can't. Why? Because no matter how many times you've changed things like font sizes, it's still the same text again and again, and you just start to tune out. The fancy term is 'semantic satiation' -- when words just stop meaning anything. That's also a good sign it's time to stop and hand it off! (This happened to me in a big way on Remember, November. It was my first novel, I wanted my baby to be perfect, but I distinctly remember going for just one more pass and when I went back to the beginning, the words literally didn't make sense anymore, like I had forgotten how English worked. It was weird and scary, but it taught me to recognize when I was done! Though I try not to let it get quite that far now.)

7a) Be open to feedback. If you're not, then why bother to ask other people to read it? My books are all orders of magnitude better because of feedback I got from beta reads. This new book is no exception, and it's my ninth! (My descriptions were very repetitive. I kept using 'of' over and over again. 'Eyes of black,' 'hair of silver,' etc. Yes, this is a tiny preview of what to expect in the new book. Thank you for reading this far!) Things that are clear to you may not be to others, since you already know what happens and all of the backstory, etc. Things you forgot to set up, or telegraphed, or muddled, someone else can catch that stuff for you.

8) It's not done until you hit 'publish'. Whatever flaws are revealed, whatever we missed or overdid, the stupid typos that we don't see after five drafts, it's all fluid. Nobody else is going to see the shitty previous iterations of that scene, or that I used the word 'of' seven times in one paragraph or the terrible placeholder dialogue or that I put off writing a sex scene by leaving a space that just says 'THEY FUCK' on it so I could get on with writing the rest... Ahem. The point is, readers only see the final, polished version, not what it took to get there. Don't sweat it. But...

9) There's no such thing as perfect. Ask a self-declared 'perfectionist' to look back on their finished work and name the 'perfect' one. They won't because they can't. It doesn't exist. Do your best, get it as good as you reasonably can, and then... let it go. If you've done the work, nobody's going to notice. Notice what? Exactly.



Well, that was certainly a lot! More than I intended, but I hope it was helpful in some way. I should have something to say about the new book/series soon! It's just not quite ready to be unveiled yet.

Thank you for reading.

Excelsior!

I'm Sick of It. Hooray!

One question new writers often ask is "How do I know when a book is done?" and the answer from many authors (myself included) is "When you're sick of it."

Well, after weeks of revising my little heart out, I'm sick of my new book. Hooray!

Now, before the champagne comes out, it's not done done yet, but it is ready to go off for its second round of feedback. Beta was very successful (see my last post) and the book is in a much stronger place than it was, so barring some catastrophic mistake on my part, that means mostly final editing. The largest barrier to true euphoria remaining is the title. The working title is... fine... but not good, and that needs addressing. Kind of important, titles. Oh, and a cover, I suppose.

But it's hard for me to overstate how big a deal this is to me. There were times I was convinced I would never be here again, and here I am about to share a new story with you!

So what about that story? I've been very coy about just what I've been cooking up here at Cameron Darrow's Ye Olde Sapphic Fiction Emporium, but things are progressing well enough for me to pull back the veil a little further for you...

It's my first mystery. But not just any mystery, oh no. You know me, I couldn't do that! It is, in fact, an alternate history paranormal mystery.

WTF does that mean? Well, I will tell you when I'm ready to fully reveal this thing to the world, but here's a little of what's in store for you:

Murder? Check.
Blackmail? Check.
Vampires? Check.
Werewolves? Check.
A talking fox? Surprisingly, check.
A protagonist who is clever and doesn't take shit from anyone yet is capable of deep empathy? Check.
A door to a parallel dimension blown open by atomic bombs dropped on Nazi magic experiments? Check.

Want more? Well I've got it. A lot more, and you won't have to wait much longer to find out just how much.

I am so excited. Yes, to be done, but only because it means I finally get to share this new world and all of the wonderful characters in it with you.

Excelsior!

Feeling Like A Writer Again

If you asked me to define what it means to be a writer, I don't know that I would be able to come up with a firm definition. It would likely involve writing in some way, but I've never really been one for labels and categorization. But, like a few other words in the English language, I know it when I see it. Or--to be specific in my own case--know it when I feel it.

For the last year and a bit, I haven't felt like a writer. And not just because I didn't publish anything, but because I didn't enjoy it. I was burned out and tired... the spark was gone.

Well, the spark is back! I feel momentum again, and I don't want to stop working. I haven't felt like this in a long time, and it's almost scary. I know that sounds weird, but after the last few years, optimism has felt like hubris, swiftly punished and harder to build back up again every time.

What's changed? Progress! My new book has made it all the way to beta!

That's right! True to my word, I said I wouldn't bring up any new projects until it was in beta, and now that it is, I have to stop myself from telling you everything.

Here's what I can say:

Firstly, The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and exactly what I needed to remember that perhaps maybe I still know how to do this. The feeling of accomplishment has buoyed me immensely, and I just want to write more and more in this new universe I've created.

New universe, you say? Yes! This new book is the first in an entirely new series, in a new genre for me. It has many elements from my other stories, some more familiar than others, but altogether something new and different. (Rest assured though, one of the first pieces of feedback I got was that it definitely feels like a Cameron Darrow book!) It has magic and fantastical creatures, and a setting that is... familiar, let's say, but still its own thing. Strong, three-dimensional women who quite fancy other women, deep character relationships between them, fighting the good fight, humor and fun dialogue, learning to get along, cross-cultural pollination, all things you've come to expect (and I'm told you like) about my books.

I want to save details for a separate announcement post, but I have been hard at work editing and rewriting it, and I am champing at the bit to get it back so I can get back to work on it. Staying away has been the hardest part! Got to let it marinate a bit. Hopefully, that post is coming sooner than later!

I cannot thank you for your patience while I work through things. I hope you find the result worth it. It has been so hard, and taken so much work, to get to this point that I was genuinely hesitant to say anything, but I wanted to let you know--and perhaps remind myself--that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

For the first time in a long time, I'm excited about writing again. I love working on this story, I love these characters, and I love the possibilities of the blank page and the imagination again.

Not only do I want to write again, I need to, and I can't think of a better definition than that.