The process of writing and editing the Dream of Asarlai trilogy–part one, Secret Ones

The copy-edits of Rogue Gadda are done and with that comes the real end of the creation of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy. Sure, I still have proofing to do, but you don't get to make massive changes there. So really, this means the story now exists, in its entirety, as it will be published.

So I thought I'd take you through the entire process, step by step, of how the three books went from a dream I had (literally, the original inspiration was a dream) to three physical objects. I'll compare and contrast each of the books, so you can see how different each book can be and also (hopefully) how much better I've gotten at this novel thing over the past couple of years.

Some things to note before I begin.

a) I'm going to start this recount in 2006, however you need to be aware that the books were first drafted in 2003. Over that year, I wrote the three then 60,000 word novels and they went through two separate editing passes each, meaning that by the end of the year, I had three drafts of each.

b) When I get onto talking about the publishing process, I'm talking about how it worked for me. Every publishing house is different. Every author's experience in a publishing house is different. There are some generalities to be learnt from, but also note that this is my experience.

Book one – Secret Ones

It was late 2006 – my fiction writing had pretty much dried up. All my work was going into journalism and I'd been editing fiction and I doubted my ability to write a good story. The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSFG) ran a monthly short story crit group and it was decided to try a novel crit group as well. I decided to take part in it, to try and kick things along and decided of all the novels I had lying around, the one with the best commercial possibility was my fantasy romance (then called Love in Control).

At the first crit group meeting in November, we went through everyone's opening pages. Based on that feedback, I went through and revised the story, adding another 20,000 words to it and re-drafting twice before it was read in full by the group and critiqued in March 2007 (so now we're up to draft five).

As the year went on, and we worked on each other's novels, I learnt a lot about the process. By the end of the year, the work situation had gone south and I'd realised my journalism career was coming to an end. It fired me up and so in December, I picked up Love in Control and committed myself to working it into a publishable state.

It took nearly twelve months. I wrote another five drafts. I had it re-read again. I added the overarching storyline of Asarlai and her plans and the word count went up to 110,000 (or thereabouts). In November 2008 it was finally spat on and polished so much that I decided it was time and so I started submitting to publishers.

In the meantime, I started a whole new book, with no connection to the gadda world at all. I couldn't see the point in spending time working on book two if I couldn't sell book one.

As history now shows, I sold the trilogy to HarperVoyager Australia in July, 2009. Because of the contract and so on, work didn't begin on Love in Control until October.

I met with the publisher, Stephanie Smith, during the Conflux convention on the October long weekend. Before the meeting, I'd been playing the proposed conversation over in my head (as I do with lotsa things) and I had a couple of insights myself about the book. Stephanie and I chatted. She shared her idea of weakpoints in the book or ideas that I hadn't explored fully enough. I shared my thoughts and she completely agreed with them.

I sat down and over the course of the next nine days, re-wrote some scenes and added some new ones. I sent it back to Stephanie, who was very happy with it and so it got passed to the editor.

I went through two steps in the editorial process – copy-edits and proofs. A note here – the in-house editors are both editors and project managers. Your editor in house may not actually do the copy-edits. In my case, she did.

The copy-edit letter for Secret Ones was both an exciting and deflating experience. Kate 1 (I've worked with two Kates at HC) was very generous in her praise but also very clear in the things that weren't working. She said it was a light edit, but when I looked at the scrawl over the page I had to wonder what she meant by that. I've now come to realise that in terms of traditional copy-editing (editing for sentence structure, spelling and punctuation) my stuff is pretty clean and doesn't require a lot of work.

However, Kate also did a more overall edit and that's where the work came in. All through the manuscript were scrawled things such as 'This doesn't make sense?' and 'How can he do that?' There were a couple of quite major things that Kate had me thinking about.

Here's how it works at HC (in my experience anyway) – you get a print out of the manuscript on which the editor has scrawled away in pencil. You get a letter, explaining the good, the bad and the ugly and a style sheet. The author is directed to make changes on the manuscript with pen. Small changes, write onto the page. Big changes – do a new document for each one, write on the paper where it's to be inserted and email the documents to the editor.

I wrote a total of 38 new documents for Secret Ones. Some were only a couple of paragraphs long – some several pages. We're talking thousands of extra words to make up for huge slabs of text that were cut. The copy-edits arrived December 22 and I sent them back January 9 and 11 (there were some internet issues). The pages get mailed back (you get given an Express Post bag to do so).

Kate gave them a quick polish, showed me what she'd done and I said sure. Then I didn't see Secret Ones again until March 7, when the proofs arrived. The proofs come printed out, as they'll look in book form. This is a truly strange experience – my thought was 'There aren't many words to a page!'. Yeah, it looks like that when a paperback page is printed on an A4 piece of paper.

The book had already been proofread by a few other people – the editor and some others. Kate had collated all their comments and passed them on to me. Apart from spelling and punctuation, proofreaders will comment on words that get used to much, repetitions that are too close together and words that don't seem to make sense.

I went through those comments, then through the document and made changes where I saw fit. Then I read through it myself – backwards, to focus on the pages. This whole process took a couple of weeks, and it was done.

Book One – Secret Ones

Resumed working on it late 2006. Wrote another seven drafts before ready for submission Added a further 50,000 words and Asarlai storyline Only required nine days and minimal re-writing in publisher's editing pass Total of 38 new documents required for copy-edit

Tomorrow – book two, Power Unbound.