Andrea K. Höst's Blog, page 21

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 8 : Fantasy/Horror Crossover

Part 8 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Chris Howard's blog.  This month we're looking into the crossover between fantasy and horror.

Portal-keeping

I don't usually indulge in the rah-rah-down with gatekeepers blah-de-blah which so many people associate with self-publishing.  Trade publishing has brought me many good books and I hope that it continues to do so.

But.

Reading this discussion about portal fantasy on Rachel Manija's livejournal has made me at least briefly pick up the pom-poms and start cheering.  Ms Manija starts the post out with:

Yesterday there was a fascinating discussion of portal fantasy, in which a character from our world is transported to another world. The classic example of this is Narnia. I can’t link to the post, because it was filtered (the “portal fantasy” discussion was in the comments) but I offered to make a public post on the subject. I invite the participants to copy their comments to it.

There was a Sirens panel in which five agents, who were discussing their slush piles, mentioned that they were getting quite a few portal fantasy submissions. Two of them said those made up about a quarter of their total YA fantasy submissions.

I said, "This intrigues me, because I haven't seen a single one in the last ten years. Is it that editors aren't buying them? Did you pick any up?"

The agents replied that none of them had even requested a full manuscript for a single portal fantasy.

They explained that portal fantasies tend to have no stakes because they're not connected enough to our world. While in theory, a portal fantasy could have the fate of both our world and the other world at stake, in practice, the story is usually just about the fantasy world. The fate of the real world is not affected by the events of the story, and there is no reason for readers to care what happens to a fantasy world.

One agent remarked that if the protagonist didn't fall through the portal, there would be no story.

And, of course, I was thinking Stray.  I never submitted Stray to any publishers or agents, not because it was portal fantasy, but because it was in diary format, deliberately rambly, and written originally in blog form.

I had no idea that the biggest bar against it was that it was portal fantasy.

An entire sub-genre.  A sub-genre which is the basis for some of the most popular and enduring stories we have (from Narnia to Oz).  And both levels of 'gatekeepers' were automatically not interested, had declared the sub-genre dead - and not told anyone.

I've had plenty of opportunity to fully appreciate the frustrations of the submission-go-round, and I'm so glad that this particular bullet is one I dodged.

The Touchstone Trilogy remains my most popular story.  People read it end to end, and start over.  I had one reader tell me it got her into reading science fiction.  She went on from me to McCaffrey!

So, yeah, rah rah self-publishing.  Here's to having multiple options, to that internet-wide hole in the fence beside that gate.

Time for an apocalypse

"And All the Stars" is now working its way through the internet gateways.

Smashwords Amazon Kindle (US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy)Kobo (Coming)Barnes & Noble (Takes between two to six weeks to be distributed)
This has been a book which set a lot of "firsts" for me:

- First book which began as a Goodreads comment.
- First book set on Earth.
- First book where I could go visit most of the settings.
- First book I've where I've tracked the drafting progress (that was fun!).
- First book I've started and published in the same year.

Hopefully my regular readers will like it! ^^

The winners of the ebook competition should have received their copies by now.  If you're keen for a physical copy, the Goodreads giveaway still has a couple of days before it finalises - though competition is fierce!  That's a side-effect of having the giveaway up for so long.
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Goodreads Book Giveaway And All the Stars by Andrea K. Höst Giveaway ends October 03, 2012.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 7 : Animals in Fantasy (Pt 1)

Part 7 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Deborah J Ross' blog. This month is the first of a two-parter looking at animals in fantasy.

And All the Stars ebook competition

Just over two weeks out from release day (3 Oct) - sounds like a good time to run a competition for my blog readers.  A nice simple one this time - just email giveaway@andreakhost.com with "And All the Stars competition" in the subject line, and I'll randomly pick a winner or two just before release.

Make sure you include your preferred e-format in the body of the email!

Competition closes last day of September.

Classic Mystery Primer

I have a guest post up today over at the Readventurer blog, all about Agatha Christie.  There'll be a Part 2 up tomorrow which covers other favourite mystery writers.

AAtS Word Cloud

First draft of And All the Stars done!  It came in at just over 90,000 words, and involved quite a bit of tearing up during the last chapters.

The word cloud shows the focus on my galmance (my term for the girl version of a bromance), but is not particularly spoilery.


Next step is the end-to-end re-read - during final chapters I usually come to a better understanding of some characters, so on the re-read I'll do a little shading and emphasising certain aspects - as well as spotting typos, pace issues, continuity errors, etc.  Hopefully I'll get that done by the end of the week (though fatigued at the moment because I pushed to get the draft done).

After that, betas - I'm fascinated to know what their first reactions will be.  Then editing passes, copy-editing passes.

Just over eight months for first draft, which isn't bad.

The Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 6 : LGBT Issues in Fantasy

Part 6 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Warren Rochelle's blog.  This month we're looking into LGBT issues in fantasy.

AAtS - Progress and Promotion

Getting toward the end of And All the Stars' first draft - there's around four chapters still to write, which in theory will be done by the end of August.  Since I've been planning a number of these scenes for quite some time, and also because there's a lot of action in the end-game chapters, this should be do-able.  I write action a great deal quicker than transitional and emotional chapters, and conclusions are often more exciting to write (if only because you can see the light at the end of the tunnel).

[Of course, I'm self-sabotaging a little playing a lot of The Secret World, which is a very good MMO indeed.]

After the first draft is done it's an immediate re-read, which is good for identifying changes of tone, and of course massive great inconsistencies and loose ends you've forgotten to tie.  Then beta readers, then editing rounds, copy-editing rounds, I'm sick to death of this book rounds...  In theory I should make my provisional release date of 3 October.

Now that release is getting closer, one of the things I'm turning my mind to is promotion.

I have a comfortably minimalist approach to promotion (ie. it's not something I enjoy so I don't spoil my fun with it).  I've had my Goodreads giveaway ticking away in the background since May, which has at least made the book a blip on some readers' radar.  I ran a single ad on a blog (The Book Smugglers) where I know I gained a few readers, so that any of those readers who don't follow me have a chance to notice it.  I'll run an ebook giveaway on my blog for those who do follow me!

The one thing I'm yet to decide relates to a site called NetGalley.  NetGalley is a review copy distribution site used by many publishers.  It is possible (but rare) for self-publishers to place a book on the site (for a fee of $399 per book), but whether that will translate to any reviews is another question altogether.  It's not something I'd normally consider, but AAtS is definitely the most commercial book I'm likely to write (the female-focused adult high fantasy I usually produce is _not_ a hot genre) and so I'm at least thinking about it.  [It's not that I can't cover the cost - it's that I'm a self-publisher and thus far less likely to get arc requests than the many many many other books available there.]

But, either way, it's exciting to be nearly finished on this one.  I'm very much looking forward to reader reaction to my pure unmitigated authorial evil some of these plot twists.

Rule Blinkers

Every so often I run across a critique of someone's writing slating the piece for daring to begin sentences with conjunctions (and, but, etc).  And I look at my novels, proudly flourishing buts in every direction, shrug my shoulders, and go on exactly as before.

I write for clarity.  For pace.  For impact.  I will use sentence fragments.  I will gaily lavish any number of adverbs.  I will spit and hiss, answer, whisper, fill the air with said-bookisms.

So long as it works.

On every writing site or forum I've come across different lists of 'rules' - many of them incorrect (look at a few language usage texts and you'll see there's no rule against beginning sentences with 'and' or 'but').  Once you have a basic understanding of the tools you're using to express yourself, it's well worth checking 'received wisdom': too often it doesn't ring true.

Edit to remove ambiguity, to add emotional impact.  Make sure the words flow.  Cut the extraneous.  But don't clunk up your prose keeping to an arbitrary list of what some person on the internet thinks is 'good' writing.