Just a quick submission update in lieu of an actual post.


I'm editing and submitting my Island of Lost Gods story tonight. Tomorrow I'm mailing out my short story 'Wake Up Call' to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (BTW, really? Still no electronic submission option?  I guess it's a way to keep down the slush, but still...)


I have been remiss in submitting stuff. Mea Culpa.  I'll try to do better.  On the other hand, the rough draft of The Mageborn Mechanic should be done next week.  I still want to do a pass to add in more magic, more humor and 'cool magic stuff' but it's not bad. Fast paced and action-filled at least. I might send it out after a Beta reader read-through to some agents. (I'm saving the round of editor submissions until after I do that 'cool stuff' pass. Let me know if I'm being crazy.)

World Fantasy Convention is in less than a month. I have plane tickets and hotel room booked. The count down is on.  Should be fun. I am just going to hang out and meet people. If they ask, I'll give them my elevator pitch for Angel Odyssey and The Mageborn Mechanic. I should also have Smooth Running up available for sale via Kindle and Nook (and should have it available for Christmas via Createspace/Lightnig

That's all for now. Did IM gaming last night, lots of writing but just for fun.  Good to spend some time with friends, even electronically.

I'm really becoming convinced that for me at least, the mood I'm feeling when I'm writing, comes across on the page. I was editing Smooth Running last night for a release on Amazon and B&N next month and I could remember how I felt writing the passages I was reading.  


The words crackled off the page, there was energy and motion in the fight scenes, and suspense and tension prior to the fight's beginning.  It was there because it was inside me when I wrote it.


Conversely, some of the pages I've written for The Mageborn Mechanic show how much I'm fighting with the story.  Frustration just drips from the page (which works for some scenes, since the character is frustrated as well).  I'm going to have a pile of work ahead of me, rewriting but I'm on the downward slope of the novel now.  When I go back, I'm going to be asking myself what emotion I want in each scene. Try to shake things up and vary the emotional beats, try to make things more upbeat where I can without losing the tension.


Now, I know as an aspiring professional, you can't just sit around waiting for the right mood to right.  But you can cultivate it. If you're writing a romantic scene, put on some music to set the mood. If you're writing a fight scene, go do thirty pushups or run in place for five minutes. Then see what you've written.


You might be surprised to see how your mood affects what you write and the words you choose.

This is as much question as anything else.  I'm shopping around for an editor for Smooth Running. I have one in mind and I thought I'd lay out what I've found and invite any other comments or feedback.


There are a couple of editors I am considering. One works by the hour, the other by the word.  Both are reputable and have worked with authors I've at least heard of. (It's important to get the bona fides from whoever you work for.  Make sure you can look at their work and approve of it.)


Cost is a big consideration, of course.  I have a day job, so I have a little money of my own to spend on this.  My goal is to get the whole book ready and released for under a grand.  I should be able to do this if I'm frugal.  Now you can spend thousands of dollar on the editing alone (let alone what it would cost to get Tim Bradstreet to do the cover).


But I need to commission cover art and pay for the editor out of that.  How much I have to spend on one, determines how much I have available to spend on the other.


So, for instance, if one editor charges $.004 a word and the other charges $100/hr and the book is 125k words...


Yeah, I suck at story problems, too.  All I can do, is try both of them out and see which will give me an estimate I can afford.  I'm not trying to chisel someone out of their livelihood.  I want to pay what I can afford and hope that someone else can afford what I can pay.


Any of you have ancedotes you can share? How much should I expect to pay for an editor.

This might just be first draft-ism but I've noticed something while writing The Mageborn Mechanic.


I'm writing it like a thriller, fast-paced, terse, not a ton of detail (but being specific in my details when I show them).  When I went back to re-write a couple paragraphs (for plot reasons), I added more details to the scene.  When I did, that section 'slowed down'.  It really stuck out, like sore thumb.


So I went back to Angel Odyssey, which was written as Epic Fantasy, not as a thriller.  The level of detail was much heavier.  The pace was slower.  Now, if you've read my travails with AO over the past year or two, you remember that the number one thing I was fussing over was the pacing of it.


Back to Mageborn Mechanic.  Fast-paced but I noticed that I was blazing by some scenes where the emotion and the plot impact should probably be heightened.


Here's my problem.  The two forces, detail and pacing, seem to be diametrically opposed. The more detail I put in, the pacing slows down and that section stands out.  (Which may be a good thing, considering the scene)  But it also jars a bit, to me at least.  On the other hand, as written, I feel like I'm glossing over some things that are huge (and horrific, which might be why I resisted putting the details out there in the first place)


Am I right?  Do you have to have one or the other? Fast-paced or highly-detailed?  Does anyone know of any Fantasy or Thriller novels that are both fast-paced and highly detailed?  I'm racking my brain here...

Two points to this post.


  The first hearkens back to how important it is to have an editor.  Other people see our work for what it is on the page. Not with all the assumptions and backhistory and everything else we have stored in our heads when we wrote it.  Your editor (and your critique group) only sees what's there.  What's there is what people read.  Telepathy is not common enough for us writers to expect people to read our minds.  Not to mention the fact that what's in our head rarely makes it intact onto the page.
  So, you need an editor.  Need, need, need.  You need someone else to catch the typos, the odd turns of phrase, the times you wrote 'what' instead of 'that'.  Because we see what we expect to see.


  The second point comes from the habitual self-sabotage every writer performs.  No sooner have we written the bloody thing than we start tearing it down.  Part of that is the editing process, that vital, pernicious robber of joy. (in my opinion, alone, of course).  
  But the other part is the fact that what we can execute on isn't always what we conceived.  In our minds, the characters were much more witty, more real.  The drama had higher stakes, the emotions were more raw.  When we look at what we actually committed to the page, we're disappointed. We see our own flaws too vividly. We remember the sentence we spent literally hours trying to fix.  All of our turns of phrase feels precious and hollow on our ears. Sometimes we've spent so much time revising a piece that we hate it with the heat of a millions suns.

Well, I got the expected rejection letter for Smooth Running from Ace (Penguin, actually).  I say as expected, not because the story is bad. It's actually pretty good. But it's a niche title.  The 'guys with guns' Si-fi genre is pretty much only being pushed by Baen and Ace nowadays.  Both of them have passed on it.

So, as I have long planned, it is now time to get wet.  I've contacted an editor to arrange for a copy edit. I have a couple of artists I know from Deviant Art to take a crack at the cover art.  I can figure out how to do the .Mobi and .epub formatting myself.

This is an exciting time but not an unexpected one.  I've been watching the rise of self-published and ebooks for about as long as Smooth Running's been complete.  (And, boy, did 2008 come and go fast)  The time has never been better to get your stuff out there for readers to discover.

It'll be a few months until everything is done, editing alone will take time, I imagine.  But with a little luck and a lot of hard work, Smooth Running will be available from Amazon and B&N by Christmas.

I'll keep you posted.  And I'll be starting up on the two immediate sequels as soon as I finish the first draft of The Mageborn Mechanic, probably next month.  I'm going to hold off on a heavy marketing push, though until I have all three books edited, up and available.  Then, watch me fly.


Wish me luck.

I have been struggling a bit with the latest novel.  The last two flowed out of me in a matter of weeks but this one has been harder.  I'm still trying to analyze why while trying to actually write the bloody thing.  There are two problems I've identified and I thought I'd share them.


First, this is a YA novel but I realized I'm writing the main character too much like an adult.  The protagonist is eighteen and it's been a hard eighteen years but I start the story with him already living on his own, out of school and working at a job.


That all made sense to me but my wife mentioned that it may not be relatable.  That turned a lightbulb on in my head. I'm sure there are teenaged readers out there who have jobs.  But I don't think very many of them are out on their own, out of school and living like an adult.


I made my character but I didn't make him a teenager.  I didn't make him relatable to a YA audience.  Now, maybe some of the readers will look at Simon, living on his own, not beholding to anyone and project themselves onto that. I know I really, really wanted to be on my own when I was 17 or 18.  So I'm not sure how much more I need to add to the beginning.  But I do think I need something there, something in that first 10% of the pagecount to establish my character and to show him dealing with one or two challenges that kids his age and a few years younger really deal with.



See, I didn't think I needed that for my plot but I'm realizing that I do need to ground my character in familiar settings and relationships before I get him dragged off, blackmailed and on the run.


So, I'll need to re-write the opening chapters. But first, I need to finish the first draft. That will give me an idea of the rough page count and give me an idea of how many pages I'll have at my disposal before everything changes for Simon.

Do you ever wonder about your favorite character, how they got to be who they were, what forces shaped them?


Did you ever wonder what Han Solo was like when he was eighteen?  Ever wonder what V.I. Warshawski's first marriage was like?  Did you ever wonder what "Dirty" Harry Callahan was like, fresh from the academy?

Apart from writing a ton of fan-fiction (Which we won't, because we'd rather write stuff we can sell, right? Right? Oh, who am I kidding.) or the creator deciding to write an origin story, all we can do is wonder.

But we can answer those questions for the characters we create.  Writing an origin story can be a way to talk to our subconscious (or Muse).  Some authors do this whenever they start a new novel or introduce a new character.

One of the problems I think I'm having with my short story editing is that I'm too close to the story.

It's a litany of faith among writers to let a book 'lie' for a while after writing it before attempting edits.  Much like my pot roast, I have a hard time waiting for the juice to settle.  I usually dive right in and start cutting, gobbling bits down...

Excuse me.  Just got hungry.

Ah, that's better.  My point is not how delicious pot roast is.  It's that I agree we need to let things lie a bit before we work on them.  And I need to do that for my short stories as well as my novels.

Now, if a story is basically solid, I may just fix typos and fire it off to go and gather rejection letters.  But if I need to tinker with structure, then the same novel-based rules should apply.

Minor ranting, I promise.

I spent last night editing a short story for submission this weekend.  The feedback I got from my critique group was useful but to implement it I have to rip out pages and rewrite them. 

The re-written pages felt false to me so I'm going to try to start again tonight.  I'm almost tempted to send it out as it was, barring some line edits that my helpful fellow writer's found.  

When I start tinkering with structure I find it causes a cascade of other changes that ends up altering the story's pacing. That landslide can bury character moments, world building...a host of things.