S.K. Dunstall's Blog, page 36

Do you want to win a copy of Alliance?

Nineteen days to Christmas.  That came up fast.

Christmas in Australia is hot, as you can see by the photo we’ve put at the top of the blog. Except, you’d never see a beach that quiet at Christmas.

A lot of families sit down to roast turkey, ham and roast vegetables. Just as many sit around a barbeque out the back. Each family brings their own plate—salad, cold chicken, seafood or dessert—and puts it onto the table.  Our family has always been a byo plate type. (But without the seafood, as half of them are allergic to seafood. Sherylyn’s one of them.)

The kids run around the back yard while the parents talk.  Everyone plays cricket if the yard is big enough. Some retire after that for a snooze, or to curl up with a good book.

The following day it’s the Boxing Day sales, blockbuster movies and test cricket.

Post a reply here, or on Twitter, or on Facebook. But please, make sure you have the right post.

If you want the chance to curl up with a good book, we’re giving away one ARC* of Alliance, the second book in the Linesman series.  Add a comment here, below this blog post, or post a reply on Twitter to our tweet about the giveaway, or comment on the Facebook post.

Note, you need to reply or comment to the specific post that mentions the giveaway. Comments on other posts/tweets won’t be included.

It’s open to anywhere in the world.  Winner will be randomly selected.   Entries close midnight Thursday 10th December Australian Eastern Summer time.  (That’s 8am Thursday in New York and 1pm in London.

* The ARC is an Advanced Reader’s Copy. It’s typeset, but hasn’t had the final proofread yet.  There are still typos. Not many, but a few.

ALLIANCE – ARCs

Received these from Penguin Random House a couple of days ago.

Uncorrected proofs, also known as advance reader copies (ARCs) and also known as galleys (short for galley proof).

Can you believe, we’ve both been so busy at work we haven’t had time to tweet about it.

These advance reader copies still contain some typos and other errors, but look, it’s a real book.

How honest should a writer be about themself?

Judging a work of fiction

There’s a book, I can’t recall which one at present, but it won a major award for fiction.  The Miles Franklin or the Man Booker, or something like that.  It was a memoir.  After it had won the prize, the memoir was exposed as a fake.

My memory is hazy.  I thought the whole kerfuffle happened last year.  (I also thought it was Norma Khouri but her book was written back in 2004 and she didn’t win any major awards that I can see.)  Google, normally reliable, couldn’t help me.

I still can’t find anything about it, so maybe I imagined the whole thing.

What I remember was the fuss that surrounded the outing of the memoir as a fake, and the calls for her (I think it was a her) prize be taken away.

At the time I remember thinking, hold on, this is a prize for fiction. Why should exposing the story as a piece of fiction make a difference to whether she won the prize or not?

It would be different if the prize had been awarded for a memoir rather than fiction.

Surely a work of fiction should be judged on its literary merit.  Shouldn’t it?

And yet, as readers, we can’t help judging the author

There are layers of—let’s call it understanding—between the author and the reader of his/her book.

There’s the reader.  There’s the story they read and interpret.  There’s the story the author thinks they wrote—which can be very different to the story the reader takes away.  There’s the reader’s opinion of that author, based on what they read in that story. And there’s the author him/herself.

As a reader, you start off with little to no idea who or what the author is, except by their writing.

If you like them enough, maybe you go onto the internet and do some research. Read their blog, follow them on social media sites, even interact with them. If you follow them long enough, eventually you get an idea of who you think they are.

If you’re not honest, expect an impact on your readers when they find out

A well-known m/m author who writes under a male pseudonym recently admitted that ‘he’ was a ‘she’.

When I heard, I shrugged, and said to myself, “So what.”  It wasn’t even unexpected. Most m/m writers are female, and a goodly proportion of them write under a male pseudonym or use their initials.

Yet when this writer’s latest book became available I realised I was reading it more critically than usual. Further, the reason I was reading it so critically was that this person who I had thought such a role model for young gay men, wasn’t.

Note that it wasn’t the author who had let me down so much as my perception of that author. I had an idealised image in my mind of who that author was and what they did.

Reader expectations—be honest about the big things

As in the case of the fake memoir I mentioned at the start of this post, the readers who called for the prize to be withdrawn had their own idealised version of who that author was, too.

I understand better now why they were so upset.

Of course, the writer is not responsible for what the reader thinks of them. They can’t be. Every reader has different thoughts, anyway.

But it made me think about the type of things an author should be honest about.

If I had to give advice to a writer about honesty

In these days of internet, especially when authors are encouraged to do some of their own marketing, it’s a rare author whose readers cannot find out something about them.

If I had to give one piece of advice to a writer about honesty, I’d probably say, “Be honest about the important things.”  Don’t pretend to be what you’re not. One of the reasons fake memoirs cause so much angst is because the reader has more invested in the author than they do normally, because this is the author’s supposed story.  And when that turns out to be lies …

You can’t control what a reader believes about you, but as a general rule, if the reader goes to meet you in a public author-reader space—such as a convention or a book-signing—it shouldn’t be a shock.*

*One piece of advice often given to authors is that your author photo should be close to your real age.  Sure, have a good photo if you can, but if you’re a portly 65 year-old, don’t make your author photo a picture of you back when you were eighteen, and skinny as a rake.

Stranger in a strange land

https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CS0lv-SWoAAfng9.mp4

Ideas come from everywhere.

On Twitter at the moment there’s a tweet going around about Pet, the sheep, who was brought up with family dogs.

According to her owner, ‘Pet’ was an orphaned lamb who was brought up with the family’s four collies. She thinks the oldest dog is her mother, sleeps in the same basket and followed her everywhere from a very young age.

Watch the video. Watch this one too.

This one’s from a site called Tastefully offensive.

Look at the way she jumps, at the way she wags her tail, at the way she pricks her ears up. This sheep considers herself a dog. I don’t know if she’s ever met another sheep? How would she fare if she did?

How does she get on with strange dogs?

There is so much to Pet’s story. All you need is a little imagination.

Halfway through November – you know what that means

Halfway there

NaNoWriMo is half over.

If you’ve managed the word count, you’ll be 25,000 words by now. You’re halfway there. Keep it up and in another fifteen days you’ll have 50,00 words.

If you haven’t … don’t panic.

Sherylyn and I both enjoy NaNoWriMo, and we’d love to do it every year. Unfortunately, life often gets in the way.  We’ve both been trying since 2009, but we’ve only managed to finish twice with more than 50,000 words.

Sometimes we don’t start. This year, for example, we’re too busy writing book three of LINESMAN to even consider it. Another year we both had major projects due at work.

Sometimes we start and work—or life—gets in the way.

It’s not a competition

Note that I said ‘finish’ and not ‘win’.

I don’t know when the idea of ‘winning’ NaNoWriMo came about, but I don’t really like the term. It’s not a competition. At least, not to me.  It’s a marathon, and most people don’t enter a marathon to win, no matter how nice that would be. They enter it to run in it. To do it. To beat their own personal best.

It’s not a life or death situation

Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t can’t get the word count. The important thing is to keep writing. Don’t stop just because at your current writing rate you’ll only have 30,000 words at the end of the month.

Keep writing.

30,000 words is pretty awesome anyway, but it’s the habit of writing regularly that you want to cultivate.

Again, it’s like a marathon. Just keep working at it.

You’ll be surprised where you get in the end.

A writing break

After GenreCon we took a few days extra leave and went down to the Gold Coast to chill out for a few days.

We went to Kirra, which is close to Coolangatta, and the one criteria for where we stayed was that it must be close to the beach.

There’s a lot to be said for taking a break like this. We spent most of our time sleeping, and relaxing, and looking at the view, and swimming in the apartment pool. And eating, of course. Far more than we should have or needed to. But it was relaxing.

The apartment itself had the most perfect view. It was easy to get up at five-thirty in the morning (Queensland doesn’t have daylight saving), write for two hours, shower, go out for some breakfast, come back, write some more, think about lunch or a swim, have an afternoon siesta, then go back to writing for a while before thinking about dinner on the terrace.

I have to say, by the time we were ready to come home I would have killed for an ergonomic chair, but there was something about looking out at that view that made it so much easier to get into a writing rhythm.

The golden rule in martial arts

What’s the golden rule in martial arts? Run away.

View from the hotel, by day. It looks spectacular at night, but my night photography just doesn’t hack it. Note the cloud cover. I’m very happy about that. We have to walk from the hotel to the State Library. Cloud cover is good.

 

We’re here in Brisbane for Genre-Con. Somewhat busy, attending sessions, so not a large blog today, but so far, every session has been truly good.

My favourite sessions so far:

Friday workshop: Write the fight right with Alan Baxter. Tremendously entertaining, as well as being informative.

What’s the golden rule in martial arts? Run away.

After this session we’re going back to look at some of the fight scenes in Linesman#3. Although, given the golden rule, we can’t have our hero run away, can we?

Saturday panel: Mining Myth and History. Kate Forsyth, Sulari Gentill and Christine Wells, chaired by Lisa Fletcher.

Three different points of view on writing historical fiction.

Sulari Gentill sounds like my kind of writer. I’ve got to look up the Rowland Sinclair mysteries.

Saturday night banquet: Mary Robinette Kowal.

An entertaining speaker, and loved the way she used rejection in the puppetry world and compared it to rejection in the writing world.

Loved the puppet show at the end.

To date, the standard of the panels has been excellent.

We’re good about backing up our story files now, but …

I said to Sherylyn the other day, “One thing I haven’t backed up in a while are our emails. I’ll do it on the weekend.”

Saturday morning, I turn on my computer and nothing works. Well, actually, everything works except that the computer isn’t coming on. The red light is flashing, the fan is whirring, but it’s not registering on the home network and nothing is coming up on the screen.

The computer is seven or eight years old, which is ancient for a computer. I’d planned on replacing it this year, anyway. Suddenly, that moved up on the list of importance.

Got the new computer. We backup regularly, so I didn’t lose many writing files, but I did lose my mails. Luckily we both keep or agent and publisher emails, so Sherylyn can give me copies of those. We also both had copies of the email from a relative who’s also a writer (YA fantasy) which I was going to answer this weekend.

Not so bad.

The only thing I couldn’t get back was the tax invoices, which Sherylyn has been asking for all week.

And our tickets to GenreCon, which is on next weekend.

Tax invoices, hmmm.

For GenreCon—I’ll send an email the people at Queensland Writers’ Centre and ask for copies, but I imagine they will be very busy this week.

I hope they let us in without our tickets.

I enjoy GenreCon. I’ve blogged about it before. It’s great to get together with a group of other writers and talk writing (among other things). And they’re all genre writers, so you get a mix of romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery/crime, thriller and other writers.

You also get a mix of writers just starting out, people part-way along the road to being published, and published writers. It’s a good mix to talk to.

Not, I confess, that I’m good at talking to people. I’m a typical writer in that way. So if you see me at GenreCon and I’m a little awkward, just keep talking. If I see you at GenreCon and you’re the same, I’ll keep talking too. Because meeting other people who want to write, or are in writing industry, is what’s it’s all about.

Working on book 3

Outline for book three

We’re really getting into book three now. These are the main story points for the novel.

The words have been deliberately blurred, because, spoilers.

The orange ‘R’s’ mean rewrite this section totally, the blue dots mean okay, but needs some work, and the blue ticks, which you can’t see because they’re all at the top, mean this section is okay, just needs cleaning up.

Revisiting Do You See What I See

We spend a lot of time with each other as co-writers, which means we share a lot of things, including bugs.

A rather nasty cold-like thing (too nasty to be an actual cold, or otherwise colds are becoming a lot more vicious) has downed both of us this week. We haven’t done much writing. Not even a blog, and to be honest it’s hard to dredge up much enthusiasm for a blog post, so today you get a recycled one. This is from back in 2006.

Because it’s so old, I need to give you some context on the novels we were writing back then.

Potion is a massive, sprawling epic fantasy. It’s the second novel we finished and rewrote enough to be respectable. It’s a trunk novel, but one day, if we ever get time, we’d love to rewrite it, just for fun. We have learned so much since then. It’s the type of fantasy you’d write twenty years ago. Fantasy has come a long way since.

Trivia fact for you. We did send this to our now-agent, Caitlin, and she asked to see the full manuscript. Nothing came of it, but it’s funny how things turn out.

Shared Memories is science fiction. Sherylyn calls it young adult, I call it adult with a young protagonist (but I think Sherylyn’s probably correct). Right now it’s a trunk novel as well, but it was a great idea. If we ever get the time we’ll revisit the idea.

Satisfaction is another fantasy. This one is still in the story folder. We remember this one particularly because when I described the original idea to Sherylyn it was an edgy, sexy adult novel, but the actual story we plan to write is the story Sherylyn saw after I described it to her. A whimsical coming of age tale. She took my idea, turned it around, and in half an hour we had a story we both wanted to write.

Also, we mention writing as a team. How we co-write has changed since this post. We still do some of what we mention in that link to another old post, but an article we did recently for Qwillery describes our current process better.

Do You See What I See?

It wasn’t until the fourth draft of Potion that Sherylyn and I realised we didn’t see the characters the same way.

Tegan, one of the point-of-view characters in Potion, has long dark curls that frame her face. We mention her eye colour—blue—when comparing her to someone else but that’s pretty much all the description you get of Tegan’s physical features.

We were talking one day and realised that Sherylyn’s Tegan had rich, chocolate brown hair with chestnut highlights. Her hair fell half-way between her shoulder and her waist, and the curls were quite, well, curly. My Tegan, however, had hair that fell past her waist. It was darker, and the curls were more waves than actual curls.

In another story, Shared Memories, the point-of-view character comes from a world called Nuan. Sherylyn pronounces it “Noo-one”, I pronounce it “Nah-wonn”.

Does it matter?

Not in the least?

The vision we share for a book depends less on the physical than on how the characters act and react. Yes, there are some physical things we know about each character—Tegan’s long dark curls, for example—but it’s more, “Tegan wouldn’t muck around like this. She would unleash a magical firebolt instead, and it would all be over in minutes”, than “That’s not how Tegan looks”.

We do, however, need to share a common vision for the story, and where it’s going. I mentioned in an earlier blog about writing as a team, that before we start writing we talk about the story, finessing it until we have a story we can both visualise and are prepared to work on. Satisfaction is the most extreme example of this to date, where my original idea was changed totally. Changed for me, that is. The final concept of Satisfaction, the one we’re going to write, is the picture Sherylyn saw in her mind in the first five minutes as I described it to her that first day.

That was unusual. Normally we meet somewhere in the middle.

Writing a book with a writing partner is a lot like reading a book you both love. What each of you gets out of a book when you read it is totally your own. But it doesn’t spoil the enjoyment of the story for either of you.