Anne Lyle's Blog, page 19

First glimpse – and a competition!

Whilst having a publishing contract is all kinds of awesome, there's nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your book in physical form at last. Sad to say I haven't laid hands on a copy quite yet, but at least I now know they exist!

Photo courtesy of Marc Gascoigne, my lovely editor and fellow typography geek

Yes, a batch of ARCs (advance reading copies) arrived in the Angry Robot offices last week, mine amongst them. You can see The Alchemist of Souls there in the top left corner, in excellent company with several other titles from Angry Robot's spring catalogue. The selection of covers just goes to show the diversity of books on offer, as well as the awesome design skills of Marc Gascoigne and the various cover artists (clockwise from top left): Larry Rostant, Amazing15, Joey Hifi and Nick Castle.

This first batch of ARCs has already gone out to reviewers, so I'm both excited and anxious to see what they make of my fledgling efforts. Obviously I think it's pretty damned good, but no book is ever perfect and in any case you can't appeal to all tastes. Regardless of how it's received, I can't wait to take delivery of my sample copies and show them off!

Caption competition

Fancy getting your hands on one of my ARCs?

You have approximately 36 hours to come up with an awesome caption to the cartoon I contributed to the Angry Robot "12 Days of Christmas" blog series. Closing date is tomorrow, Wednesday 21st December.

Enter the competition

Good luck!

Web presence 101.4 – Introduction to social media

Writers are frequently not the most social of people – sitting alone typing for hour after hour isn't really a hobby/occupation for extroverts. And yet nowadays we are expected, as part of our online presence, to be active on at least one social medium if not several. So, is it a boon for writers, or a soul-crushing time sink?

As with blogging, it helps to have a strategy in place; a haphazard approach is wasted effort. And whilst social media can be addictive and a temptation to procrastination, it can also be the perfect way for a shy writer to network and get noticed.

Note that I'm not going to go into technical details on how to use any of the social sites mentioned – there are many fine resources out there, and in any case, available features change all the time. Just google "twitter for beginners" or "facebook tutorial" or whatever

Which social network(s) to choose

Do you have to join every network? Good question! On the one hand, as I mentioned in part 1, it's wise to at least register an account on each popular social network, to stake your claim to your author name in cyberspace (do people still say "cyberspace"? I may be showing my age). On the other, there's no point participating in an activity you don't enjoy – it won't be an effective use of your self-promotion time.

My strategy is to focus on the one I like best (which happens to be Twitter) and maintain a minimal presence on the other ones that are currently popular, so that members of that network can find out a bit more about me. Note that I say "currently popular" – the internet is evolving all the time, and some sites that were huge 2-3 years ago (MySpace, I'm looking at you) are now shrinking in popularity, at least with certain audiences. You don't have to jump on and off every bandwagon, but at least be aware of where your readers are likely to be found, and make sure you're there.

The care and feeding of social media

The issue that exercises the minds of most writers is: how do I maintain a presence on social media and still find time to write? The facile answer is that you need to limit your time on these services and use them effectively, but that's easier said than done! However, here are some suggestions:

1. As with blogging, remember that the purpose of social media is to promote yourself, not just to sell books. It's called social media for a reason – use it to engage with your audience rather than churning out spam!

2. Research the technology. The popular services have lots of add-on applications that can be used to schedule posts, generate posts automatically from, e.g. your blog RSS (see below), manage your friends/followers, and so on. A few hours spent trying out these add-ons can save you a lot of time and effort down the line.

3. Remember to be professional. Even more than your blog, your social media presence is your public face. Act like an idiot online and people will soon notice – and not in a good way.

4. As a corollary of 1, don't sit back and expect people to come to you. Get out there and follow the interesting people. "Like" your favourite authors, publishers, TV shows and so on. The more you interact, the more likely it is that others will share your posts and spread your name around. Social media is the ultimate viral marketing environment!

RSS (Really Simple Syndication*)

You've probably seen the RSS icon (see left) on blogs and other sites you visit. It's a way of exporting posts from a blog or social media feed so they can be read in, say, your email program or – more importantly for our purposes – displayed on another website. This means that you don't have to post to all of your social networks all of the time. I feed my blog's RSS into my FB page (using a Facebook app), thereby providing regular content even when I don't have time to visit Facebook, and use the free service Twitterfeed to send it to Twitter. At the time of writing, Google+ doesn't have this facility, so you can only post stuff manually.

* OK, so RSS actually stands for RDF Site Summary, but how dull is that?

So, is that it?

To be honest, without going into specific details about individual services, it's hard to give more advice. So, in upcoming posts I'll be covering the three main social networks I use: Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads. (I was going to include them here, but this post is already quite long!)

Find me on social media

Facebook
Twitter
Goodreads
Google+

Next time: Facebook – the 800-pound gorilla of social networks

Book review: A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham

It's not often that a debut novel blows me away, but A Shadow in Summer did just that. I came across this book a few months ago on Fantasy Faction, where it was getting great word-of-mouth, and was surprised I had not heard of Abraham before; unlike contemporary debuts by Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, etc, this one had totally slipped under my radar.

The novel is set in Saraykeht, an Oriental-like city in an apparently pre-industrial fantasy world. It's hard to say who is the protagonist, since the book follows several characters involved on different sides of a complex political intrigue*, but my favourite is Amat Kyaan, the elderly chief accountant of a foreign merchant. Amat is what is generally described as "a tough old bird"; she refuses to take life lying down, despite the pain and fragility of her years, and is, to my mind, the most sympathetic and well-rounded character in the book.

What really sets this world apart is not just the Japanese-inspired culture, but the magic used by the poets of Saraykeht. Not wizards, mind; the poets themselves have no magic apart from the gift of being able to capture an abstract concept in words and thus transform it into a sentient being, an andat. These beautiful, djinn-like beings are enslaved to their poet-masters, and have the power to perform any magic that can be encompassed by the concept they embody. Thus the andat in this book, Seedless, is used to instantly remove the seeds from the cotton harvest, thus giving Saraykeht's textile-workers a huge advantage over other nations who must card their cotton by hand. However this is not the only possible use of his abilities – anything that involves the removal of seed (in its widest biological meaning) can be done with ease by the andat – and the story revolves around a plot to abuse that power.

This brings me around to my one criticism of the book, which is that sometimes Abraham is too subtle for his own good. The intrigue hinges around an event which is described so obliquely, with litte explanation either before or after, that the reader is left scratching her head for several chapters, trying to work out what the heck just happened. I did come to some conclusions eventually, but my enjoyment of the book would have been greatly improved by just a little hand-holding from the author.

A Shadow in Summer is beautifully written, complex and subtle, and some may find the languorous pace of the narrative boring, but my experience was one of being drawn slowly but inexorably into a fascinating world that has all the elegance of a tea ceremony with the undercurrent of menace of an ukiyo-e woodcut. This is a seductive novel that I think will bear re-reading; if it's helter-skelter action you want, look elsewhere!

* I was not surprised to discover that he has occasionally collaborated with George R R Martin; whilst their books are very dissimilar in many respects, their politically complex, morally grey fantasy worlds have a lot in common.

Book giveaway: December

November winners

Congratulations to Michelle and Lyn – I'll be in touch!

December giveaway

So, we reach the last pair of books for this 2011 giveaway, and I've saved the best until last.

How to Write Fantasy and Science Fiction, by Orson Scott Card (hardback)

"This award-winning classic on the art and craft of writing science fiction and fantasy provides invaluable advice for every science fiction and fantasy writer interested in constructing stories about people, worlds and events that stretch the boundaries of the possible – and the magical. They'll learn: what is and isn't science fiction and fantasy, and where their story fits in the mix; how to build, populate, and dramatize a credible, inviting world readers will want to explore; where the markets are, how to reach them and get published. There's no better source of information for writers working in these genres."

I've read this book so many times, I know it pretty much off by heart now. Unlike other how-to books, this one focuses on the particular challenges of writing SFF, including world-building and exposition; in fact a whole chapter is devoted to the latter and is, IMHO, worth the price of the book alone. Whatever else you may think of OSC's personal views, this is a must-read for anyone wanting to improve their craft in this genre.

The King of the Crags, by Stephen Deas (signed paperback)

An ARC of the final installment in this fantasy trilogy, signed by the author – Stephen is an old friend, so I cheekily got him to sign this convention freebie at an SFF evening earlier this year

"Prince Jehal has murdered, poisoned and betrayed his way to the top. There is a new speaker for the realms, his opposition has been crushed, now he just has to enjoy the fruits of power. And yet . . . He feels more for the wife he married for power than perhaps he should and his lover knows it. And out in the realms those loyal to the old regime are still plotting. and there are rumours that the Red Riders, heralds of revolution and doom are on the ride. And still no-one has found the famous white dragon. The dragon that, if it lived, will have long since recovered from the effects of the alchemical liquid fed to the dragons of the realms to keep them docile, to block their memories of a time when they ruled and the world burned…"

Same rules as always – only UK/EU residents may enter, owing to postage. Leave a comment below, saying which book you'd like (or either, if so inclined!), before noon (UK time) on Saturday 31st December. Please use a valid email address in the comment form so I can contact you to get your snail-mail address if you win (don't put either in your comments, for security reasons!).

Good luck!

Action? Figures!

One of my favourite bits of writing fantasy is the action scenes. I rarely bother to plan them in advance – one sword-fighting scene in The Alchemist of Souls was described as "Big fight!" in my outline – as I find they're more fun, and more fluid, if I just make things up as I go along. However occasionally I want to write something that involves more than a single pair of combatants, and it's at that point I have to plan the logistics a bit more carefully. Writers have various techniques for doing this, but one I'm trying out during the writing of The Merchant of Dreams is to use Playmobil figures. They're a handy size, come with lots of different weapons – and of course they're fun to collect!

Note: After taking photos* of the various stages of the fight scene, I realised they were potentially massive spoilers for the ending of the book, so for the purpose of this blog I mocked up a generic fight scene as an illustration, using the same figures for my protagonists and some random pirates. I might post the real photos after the book comes out…

From left to right: Kiiren, Sandy, Ned, Coby, Gabriel and Mal take on some pirates!

The setting for this scene is a square in Venice, hence the cardboard "palazzo" in the background and the terracotta "well" in the centre. In the above photo we see a nice street-level view of all the separate combats, and having chosen the figures carefully (and swapped hair, hats, etc around as needed) it's easy to tell who's who. However it can be hard to get an accurate idea of distance from this angle, so you might want to take a top-down photo as well:

Birds-eye view of the same scene

Now we can see exactly who is fighting whom, lines of fire, that kind of thing, so this kind of shot is great for logistical planning.

Finally, you can use close-up shots to get an "over-the-shoulder" perspective from a single character's viewpoint:

Close-up on Coby, looking towards Mal's fight

Not only is this rather cute, it can give you ideas for the next move in the combat. That pirate in the red bandana is looking like a good candidate for a head shot!

That's really all there is to it – I moved the characters through the combat, taking photos at each stage, then when I came to write the scene, I used the photos as reference material. I didn't always stick exactly to the original plan, and I dare say it may change again in the next draft, but it gets the creative juices flowing

Do you have any favourite outside-the-box techniques to share for handling the trickier aspects of writing?

Technical note: I used a Panasonic Lumix FX-55 with no flash (it tends to create too much over-exposure) and manipulated the light levels in The GIMP.

Sunstones and skraylings: a bit of alternate history

A lot of the fun of writing fantasy is in the world-building, which consists largely of taking a bunch of ideas that you find cool, and fitting them together into something new and interesting. When creating a secondary world, you're free to take absolutely anything you like and try to make it work, but in historical fantasy, you're somewhat more constrained by facts. Note that I say "somewhat more" – there's still leeway to make connections that would have you laughed out of your undergraduate history class, but as long as you can make a convincing case to your readers, you're good to go.

Danes about to invade England (c12th; Pierpoint Morgan Library)

The "connection" I made in the world of Night's Masque is that there is somewhat more continuity between the Viking voyages across the Atlantic and the later voyages of discovery of the 15th and 16th centuries. Whereas in our world the earlier voyages seem to have been largely forgotten, in Night's Masque at least some of this history has been preserved, albeit in garbled form.

My original impetus was that I needed a name for my New World non-humans, and I liked the anglicised version of the Viking skræling (their word for Native Americans) that I'd come across in Michael Moorcock's recent Elric novels. It suggested something otherworldly and slightly sinister – just the thing for my fanged and tattooed traders!

I decided that the Vikings of Night's Masque had brought back stories of these enigmatic people, and that the name had been preserved in folklore for five centuries, until John Cabot's voyages to Newfoundland revealed them to be real. However this was the only historical link I foresaw between the 11th and 16th centuries – until earlier this month.

Icelandic spar crystal (source: Wikimedia Commons)

According to Viking legend in our world, their ships used magical "sunstones" to navigate, but until recently this was dismissed as just another fanciful storytelling element. However, careful research into the polarising properties of a piece of calcite crystal found in a shipwreck have shown that it could indeed have been used for navigation.

So far so cool – I love anything to do with ancient technology, particularly when it turns out to be far more advanced than we like to give our ancestors credit for. But what really gave me a Twilight Zone moment was the identity of the ship on which the sunstone was found. Not a Viking longboat, but a 16th century warship that sank near the Channel Islands.

The Elizabethans were using sunstones, just like the Vikings.

My immediate reaction was: whoa, cool! And then, damn, why didn't I think of that first? The trouble with realistic world-building is that you don't want to push the coincidences too far, or you risk breaking the reader's suspension of disbelief. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction…

The mundane explanation is no doubt that sunstones continued to be used in Northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. But I like to think that, in my alternate history at least, the Vikings took their sunstones over to the New World, and the skraylings adopted this new technology for their own navigation and  traded the stones with Elizabethan sailors. Let's face it; it's a much more interesting explanation!

Further reading

Sunstones may have helped Vikings navigate from Norway to America (Guardian newspaper, 2 November 2011)

Book review: Songs of the Earth, by Elspeth Cooper

I like to vary my reading diet a little, and having come across the charming Ms Cooper on Twitter and discovered her to be a fellow aficionado of the blade, I couldn't resist her debut fantasy novel, Songs of the Earth, published earlier this year by Gollancz.

Gair has been raised by the Church to be a knight of the Goddess, but when he is discovered to be hiding magical powers, he is sentenced to death as a witch. Fortunately for Gair he has an unknown benefactor amongst the religious leaders; instead of being executed he is branded on the hand and banished, though not without one of the more fanatical churchmen setting a witchfinder on his trail…

Songs of the Earth is very traditional high fantasy, a tale of a young man who is taken under the wing of a kindly (if sometimes overly secretive) old wizard, comes into his magical powers, and helps to save his new wizarding community from an attack by a psychopathic former pupil of his master. So far, so Harry Potter meets Star Wars. What lifts this novel above such simplistic comparisons are the vivid descriptions of the natural world: this is a writer whose love of the wild places of Britain shines through in many a scene (Cooper lives in Northumberland). The clean and cosy island community of gaeden (wizards) reminded me a great deal of Earthsea, and also of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar, and I think fans of those books will find a lot to enjoy.

For me, though, it was a little too black-and-white. The protagonist, Gair, is a naive 21-year-old who comes across more like a teenager than a grown man (understandable, perhaps, given his literally cloistered upbringing), and of course he just happens to be great with a sword as well as the most powerful magical talent his tutors have seen in many years. His nemeses, meanwhile, are blacker than black: an irredeemably twisted mage whose motivation seems to be to destroy the world just because he can, and an equally twisted cleric with a taste for torturing young men. Some of the scenes with the latter show that Cooper can write dark and cynical when she wants to, and I for one would have liked to see more of this side of her work.

As a debut novel, Songs of the Earth shows an impressive talent for writing description and action somewhat hampered by a predictable story, and I hope that having tested her fledgling wings, Cooper will gain the confidence to tackle something more demanding in subsequent books.

Web Presence 101.3 – Blogging

Last time I covered setting up your author website, and suggested using one of the popular blogging platforms as an easy way to run it. If you've done this, you now have full blogging capabilities at your fingertips – but what do you blog about?

Choosing a topic

Your knee-jerk reaction might be "Well I'm a writer, I'll blog about my writing". Thing is, there are a gazillion other writers out there doing exactly the same. I'm not saying you shouldn't blog about your writing or the craft of fiction, but if you're going to do so and build an audience, you need something unique to offer. A new voice, a new perspective.

Take for example, Terrible Minds, the blog of freelance writer Chuck Wendig. I should warn you in advance that Chuck's blog is not for those who are offended by strong language. It's colourful and profane but always very funny, and simultaneously very insightful about the craziness of being a writer. Chuck has a loyal following, enough that he can self-publish compilations of his blog posts and people will pay money to get this stuff that they can read online for free, which is the ultimate blogger's accolade.

But what if you don't think you have anything special to say about writing? Not a problem. Find something you are passionate about, something you can talk about endlessly without getting bored (because if blogging becomes a chore, your readers will sense your boredom and go elsewhere). Preferably it should be something that links to either your fiction or your target audience's interests. Maybe you're a keen gamer, or an expert on medieval weapons, or like to crochet tiny Cthulhu toys in your spare time. It doesn't really matter, as long as it connects you with readers. The purpose of your blog is not to sell books, it's to sell yourself as a cool person whose books might therefore be worth looking into. In fact that bears repeating:

The purpose of your blog is not to sell books, it's to sell yourself.

This might sound cold and calculating, and I guess some people might approach it that way, but if you are genuine in your enthusiasm for a subject it will shine through.

If you don't have a strong overarching theme, don't worry. I really have two strands to this blog: stuff about (historical) fantasy, and posts like this about modern technology. They're very different, but they're both key elements of my personality and they probably bring in different readerships. A little diversity is unlikely to do you any harm, as long as you don't stretch yourself so thin that you fail to satisfy any audience. Which brings us on to:

How often should you blog?

Again, opinions differ, but the general consensus seems to be that a) it's essential to be regular and reliable and b) less than twice a month and you are probably going to find it hard to build a readership. I would recommend at least once a week, twice if you can. Daily blogging is good if you're as prolific as, say, Chuck Wendig, but I think one good post a week is probably going to be more effective than seven indifferent ones.

A final confession

I actually cheat on both the above. In addition to this regular weekly blog, I have a Writing Journal where I blog about my writing progress on an intermittent basis (sometimes daily, sometimes hardly at all). It's really just an online diary, which is why it's tucked away behind the navigation bar rather than featuring on the home page. As a promotional tool, it's not a model to be emulated!

So, what are you going to (or do you) blog about? Feel free to pimp your blog here, if you already have one.

Book giveaway: November

October winners

Congratulations to Dan and Edith, who won copies of "Characters and Viewpoint" by Orson Scott Card and "Jack Cloudie" by Stephen Hunt, respectively. Watch this space for more great books in the run-up to Christmas!

November giveaway

How to Write a Damn Good Novel II, by James Frey (hardback)

"Frey expands on his earlier take on the art of novel writing. His focus here is on dramatic fiction. Using examples from a broad range of fiction, he shows what these works have in common and how writers can learn from the authors to improve their own writing. Some of the areas discussed are developing characters, creating suspense, using a strong narrative voice, and understanding the author/reader contract. Chapter 8, entitled "The Seven Deadly Mistakes," talks about being timid, trying to be literary, and the failure to produce; it gives some advice on how to avoid these writing traps. The final word is to write with passion. This is a good choice for the writing shelf. It is a clear-headed study, with a bit of humor and solid advice. Anyone who owns the first book should have this one, but it can also stand on its own." (Library Journal)

The Crown of the Blood, by Gav Thorpe

Another convention freebie, this time some military fantasy by my fellow Angry Roboteer Gav Thorpe. Rather than repeat the cover blurb,  I thought I'd quote from a review by Pornokitsch:

"The hero or, at least, the protagonist is Ullsaard, the most successful general of the empire of Ashkor (a vaguely Roman analogue). When we open the book, he's busy conquering some uppity savages – the general himself punching a dinosaur to lead the way into battle. Despite being a military genius and dinosaur-puncher-of-renown, Ullsaard has his frustrations. As he's not of "The Blood" (a direct descendent of the centuries-dead Ashkor), Ullsaard is forever a second-class citizen. The lowliest noble – one who could barely slap a newt – can order him around.

The Crown of the Blood is a testosterone-fueled, dinosaur-punching of a book. It is a collection of violent conquests and vicious battles, from the fields of war to the equally-bloody arena of politics. It all culminates in a very surprising twist ending – the sort that neatly wraps up the book whilst getting readers excited for the sequels. Not I, Claudius, but definitely "Rome", this book is hairy, gory, sweaty, shameless… and perhaps even a little bit thoughtful."

Same rules as always – only UK/EU residents may enter, owing to postage. Leave a comment below, saying which book you'd like (or either, if so inclined!), before noon (UK time) on the first Saturday of December. Please use a valid email address in the comment form so I can contact you to get your snail-mail address if you win (don't put either in your comments, for security reasons!).

Good luck!

NaNoWriMo 2011

Way back in 2005/6, I was stuck in novel-abandonment hell: I'd write twenty thousand words or so on a new book, then realise I had no idea where the story was headed and give up. There was always a newer, cooler idea beckoning, and every time, I was convinced this would be The One. Of course the real problem wasn't a weak idea, it was my lack of perseverance. I knew something had to be done, but I didn't know what.

Then I heard about National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo) – an annual challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. Specifically, in the thirty days of November. It sounds like an impossible task, but I soon discovered that the buzz I got from facing this challenge alongside a horde of writing buddies (both on- and offline) made a huge difference to my productivity.

The result of that first attempt was a very rough draft totalling just over 50k. Over the following four years, about 90% of it was discarded and the whole thing rewritten into what eventually became The Alchemist of Souls. (For the curious, the surviving 10% consists mainly of two scenes: an important flashback to Mal's past, and the arrival of the skrayling ambassador.) In 2007, I repeated the exercise on a sequel, incorporating the changes I'd made to my setting during initial revisions. This time I didn't complete the story, though I did pass 50k. The bones of that draft have been rendered down into the basis for The Merchant of Dreams, though with little apart from the Venice setting and a handful of characters surviving the process.

Some of my NaNoWriMo buddies take their Halloween costumes very seriously!

A lot of my writing buddies do NaNoWriMo every year, with a new project each time. The downside is that they rarely get around to going back and revising earlier drafts, so it becomes an activity in itself rather than a means to an end. For me, on the other hand, every year since those first two drafts has been an "unofficial" NaNoWriMo – I go along to the write-ins and participate on the forums, but I don't claim a winner's banner because I've been working on revising an old project, not starting a new one. I had hoped that this year I'd be able to do an official one again, rough-drafting Book Three in the Night's Masque trilogy, but I'm still in the middle of rewriting The Merchant of Dreams, and that has to take priority.

There are a lot of advantages to be a contracted author, and I wouldn't swap it for the world – but being able to work on what you like, when you like, is not one of them. Still, I'll be sitting down to write my 1,667 words every day, along with the official participants. Go Team Cambridge!