G.L. Lathian's Blog

Trinity College Talks

So the other week we were invited to Trinity College in Perth to do some talks and workshops with the year 8,9 and 10’s. Our role for the most part was to try and take away a bit of the stigma that boys associate with creative writing and to show them how much enjoyment can be found by simply putting pen to paper in any creative sense.

On the Friday, Garrett and I met with some of the staff to get an idea of how we were expected to approach the whole thing, because to be honest we were a little lost as how best to go about it. School for us ended ten years back and it’s hard seeing yourself as a teacher rather than a student when you step into a classroom again. But after our meeting and a weekend spent planning and brainstorming, we were pretty confident we could show the boys that reading and writing weren’t just things ‘nerds’ did.

In the beginning it was a little nerve wracking, sitting in a lecture theatre with a class of students staring down at you, but it didn’t take long for us to find our rhythm. And after two days and 600+ kids we’re undoubtedly more confident at the prospect of trying our luck again at other schools in the future.

Aside from the enthusiasm we saw, I think the best part for us was knowing how much we ourselves would have enjoyed young authors coming to our school to share their story and passion. Writing creatively wasn’t something we ever really had a chance of pursuing in school and certainly something we never expected to find a future in, and I feel like we achieved our goal by showing the students that there can be one if you have the want and drive to make it happen.

 

A huge thanks goes to Lisa Mack who made this all possible and all the staff and students that we worked with at Trinity.

Second book update! Sorry about the inactivity.

Well, we're not really sorry, we've just had more important things to do. Like finish the second book. We've been making steady progress lately, and we're currently over 50,000 words way through our final(ish) draft! Of course, we still have another 30,000-40,000 to do but it's nice to have the majority *nearly* finished. We're still going to have to go and re-do the entire process again, and again, but we're really happy with the words and story we have down, so it will be mostly cosmetic changes - a tightened sentence here, a corrected comma here, etc,. 

So if you've read the first book and you'd like the second book to come out even faster, then please leave us a review for Swords of Winter - it's the number one way to help us out. 

In preparation for the release of book two, we'll be releasing a teaser: the first chapter of Blood of Kings. So if you're keen for a taste of what's to come, keep looking at the website!

 

 

 

Wars to End All Wars

We have some good news, our story, One Man’s War has been accepted for publication by N.E. White over at the number one fantasy forum on the internet: www.sffworld.com. A few years ago, we were lucky enough to be win a spot in the first competition of its kind. Our dystopian short story featured alongside the amazingly successful Hugh Howey and Michael J. Sullivan’s work.

This year, the award winning author Elizabeth Moon is the spearhead of the anthology and we’re very excited to be published alongside her and the other talented authors at sffworld.com.

Our challenge this time round was to come up with an alternative story that spawned from the events during the Great War. We wrote a couple of thousand words on our first story idea before we realised it didn’t quite hit the heights we were hoping for. A few days later we scrapped it and decided to focus on Adolf Hitler’s involvement during the war where he fought as a soldier.

With so much mystery surrounding the infamous dictator – how did he die? Where did he get his insane ideas from? Did something happen to cause his hate for Jewish people? Was he actually part Jewish? – we had many different scenarios in which to place a story that could seem plausible, even today, a hundred years later. We think we pulled it off, and the judges seem to have agreed, but we’ll have to wait and see what everyone else thinks. Enough blabber. What do you think of the front cover?

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Here is a list of all the stories featured in the anthology due to be published on the 28th of July. 

·The Girl with the Flaxen Hair by Igor Ljubuncic·Wormhole by Lee Swift·Jawohl by Wilson Geiger·Tradition by Elizabeth Moon·On The Cheap by Dan Beiger·One Man’s War by G. L. Lathian·The Foundation by Andrew Leon Hudson

Thanks to N.E. White for running the competition again. And thanks to everyone who helped her along the way!

Stepping out of our comfort zone

Originally our WW1 short story for the upcoming sffworld contest was going to be based around a Russian Sniper defending his woodlands from invading Germany. We’d planned out a solid storyline and written around a thousand words, when Garrett brought up the fact that the story itself had no (forgive the cliché) x-factor; nothing that made it stand out in the way we knew it must. So after a day of brainstorming, the sniper tale was thrown out the window and a story of Adolf Hitler’s youth was born. The idea itself was pretty intimidating considering we’re writing about someone so famed for their brilliance and brutality, someone everyone the world over has their own opinion of already, but we knew if we could pull it off we’d stand our best chance in the contest.

So rather than just writing about forest settings and assassin style killings which honestly is kind of up our alley (swap his rifle for a bow and you’re in SoW), we’ve been forced to learn a great deal about something we knew so little of; something some readers will undoubtedly know a great deal more about. But the learning process has been extremely interesting. We were both surprised by how little detailed and accurate information there is regarding WW1 and in particular Hitler’s involvement, especially when comparing it to what is at hand when looking at WW2. But these holes and grey areas have given us the opportunity to build our story into the time period, twists and turns occurring around real events. In doing so, we’ve been forced to scrutinize every line we’ve put down, to make sure it aligns with any historical info we could find. This, and Hitler’s already well documented philosophies and ideals, has in turn taken our writing in a slightly different direction; a challenge that has been both enjoyable and painstaking.

So regardless of what comes from the competition at the end of June, the process has already been an exciting and interesting one that we’ve certainly learnt from, and I think stepping away from what we know and trust will only be a good thing in the end. I suggest you try it.

 

An opinion on KDP Select

So as a lot of you know, we had a free promotional eBook run last week. We had some great success and have seen some flow on sales over the days after the promotion finished.

I've (Garrett) read a lot about the advantages/disadvantages of the free book promos that Amazon offers. Some people really hate the idea of allowing someone to get something for free that you've worked hard for. Others think that there is benefits if you have other books in the same series. And almost no one recommends doing it if you've only published a sole novel.

Well, I think we can act as the proof in a pudding. We have certainly noticed flow on effects of the two day deal. I'm not some Amazon fan boy, so I'll put this into some hard number perspectives so you can understand what I'm saying.

Before our KDP Select adventure we were ranked as the #250,000 best seller. We ran the free book promotion for two days and had a total of 1,594 eBooks find their way out to people on the internet. We shot up the free ranks, and after a day, were sitting as the #2 book in the Fantasy genre, and just outside the top 300 overall. We were happy.

Well, our goal was to gain more reviews, not to gain sales, but getting up the next day and opening the computer to see 26 eBooks sold! Yew. We sold just as many in that one day as we had in the previous few months. The next day saw a drop, but we still sold four books and that trend has continued over the week (similar volumes). We also noticed a spike in the amount of people visiting our blog and that seems to be rather consistent with the rising sales.

We did hit our goal and gained an extra three reviews and four Goodreads ratings! The flow on effects have been dramatic for us. Maybe we got lucky, maybe we didn't. But for all those authors out there wondering if its worth a shot - I'd say you don't have much to lose if you aren't setting the world on fire in terms of book sales!

Swords of Winter is free this Saturday and Sunday

Hey guys, thanks to everyone who has bought our first book and helped MS by doing so. Your money went to a very worthy cause, so well done!

Now, we're making the book free for anyone and everyone who wants to read it! So for all of those people to stingy to shell out three bucks for charity can now (hopefully) enjoy our first novel without breaking the bank.

Please help us out by letting your friends and even strangers know if they look like readers  :) Shares on any form of social media will help immensely.

You've got nothing to lose except the time it takes to download - around seven seconds with decent internet!

So go ahead and get Swords of Winter for free.

Progress report and our second book title!

Hey guys, just chiming in with a little update on progress for the second book. We’ve been hard at work over the last couple of months and we’re almost finished the writing part – a couple more thousand words and we’re done. The month of April has proved fairly fruitful and we’ve polished off about 24,000 words at this stage.

This weekend marks the first of our joint editing chances. We’ll be putting away 12-14 hours a day to focus on edits and rewrites. This is how we get away with the fact we’re two different people writing one book. We spend countless hours together making sure we balance out our (slightly) different styles to come up with something we believe is harmonious.

All up this novel looks like being about 25,000 words longer than Swords of Winter, hopefully coming in at around 260 pages. We’ve been thinking up names for the book for some time now and we’re pretty sure it’s going to be called The Blood of Kings. What do you think? Leave us a thought in the comments.

Our release is still planned for the end of the year, but as most of us know, deadlines for novels can be quite tentative. Fingers crossed we make the deadline of Christmas day, 2014!

Home stretch

After extending our donation period several times, it’s finally coming to an end. So far we’ve just raised over $1,500 for what we believe is a fantastic cause.

We’re into the final 25 hours and any help we can get will be amazing. A massive thanks to our local community for helping us out, you’ve really made a difference.

If you’re coming from Reddit then the proof is down below and thank you for your support!

Swords of Winter is available here

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So, what's new?

With the first book solidly behind us now, writing for the second book is well underway. To begin with it was pretty strange getting back into the writing flow of things—turning off that editors brain feels impossible sometimes—but over the last few weeks, we’ve been discovering that rhythm again, and probably more importantly, the enjoyment that writing has given us in the past.

We’re also finding that many of our older chapter—ones written more than 12 months ago—that we kept aside for the second book, have a slightly different voice to what we’re writing now. When we’ve come across this in the past, we’ve often gone through a painfully slow edit/rewrite where we try to save as much of the old as possible, whilst adding in newly written sections. Our new plan in tackling this challenge has been to summarize a chapter with several dot points, the same as we would when brainstorming a new chapter, then go back and write the chapter anew. The biggest benefit this has brought is helping us avoid the stilted blending between old and new writing styles. Definitely worth a try if you’re finding yourself in a similar situation.

On another note, we’re also entering another short story contest through sffworld.com Rather than the post apocalyptic theme that saw us make it into anthology two years ago, The End - Visions of Apocalypse, where we got the opportunity to have a story beside some amazing authors like Hugh Howey and Michael J. Sullivan, this time we’re writing about alternate WWI scenarios. Pretty exciting to step away from the world of The Forgotten Kin for a little while and test our writing out in another genre!

 

10 Great Tips for Writers.

So I (Luke) recently attended the Perth Writer’s Festival. Four days of authors, editors and publishers sharing their knowledge with the public. The first day I found especially interesting because it was based solely on publishing—self vs traditional—and at the end of the seminar ten people were chosen to pitch their book to the publishers directly. I was lucky enough to be picked out of the hat!

But rather than delve into my 3 minutes in the spotlight, I thought I’d share some of the guest speakers’ wisdom that confirmed and added to what Garrett and I have picked up over the past years.

Read. Read. Read: First and foremost. The more you read, the more you expand your knowledge of writing. It’s as simple as that.

Write what YOU want to read: It’s the best way to stay motivated and dedicated to your story.

Enter contests: Be it a shortlisting or first place, there’s nothing better on your writer’s résumé.

Every manuscript can be cut by 10%: Removing overused and unnecessary adverbs is the big one here.

12-18 months: The average wait after being picked up by a publisher before you’ll see your book on the shelf.

2500-3000: How many copies of your book must sell for the publishers to break even.

The best tags for your book: Tags not only help people find your book, they determine where your book is represented. Correct ‘tagging’ can really help your book gain traction.

Agents are harder to find than publishers: This comment was Australia based, but it’s a worldwide issue. There's also a lot of dodgy ones out there.

Send it all: Even if the publisher’s policy says different, you won’t be knocked back because you gave them a slightly larger word doc. A lot of new writers don’t find their “flow” until the latter half of their book, so if your ending is stronger than your beginning, at least the publisher has the option to read both.

Write another one: There’s no better PR for a new author, especially self-published, than a second book. Your first may be amazing, but you’ll need more than that to build trust with your readers.

There was plenty more that I took notes on but I felt this was a decent spread of answers to issues and queries that we had along our journey to publication. I hope these ten tips help!