After seventeen chapters and 90,000+ words, I’ve come to the end of my Egyptian novel. I still haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to call the damn thing though. The working title was The Arrows of Sakhmet, but I never really fell in love with it.
Thankfully, that’s a decision for another day. Now, it’s time to relax and enjoy some family time. 🙂
The other day I stumbled upon a photo that purportedly shows a page of J. K. Rowling’s plot notes for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Her spreadsheet approach makes it very easy to keep track of how the plot develops from chapter to chapter without getting bogged down in a bunch of details.
It’s been my experience that nothing is more fatal to the writing process than excessively detailed planning. When I first started writing, I tried to compose meticulously detailed synopses. But they take forever to do, which delays the writing process. Also, I’ve found that stories tend to take on a life of their own once you start writing them. There’s nothing more frustrating than lovingly crafting a series of scenes only to throw them out because you’ve changed some aspect of your novel.
Nowadays, I usually keep my synopses brief and just focus on the major plot points. The only downside is that, because I write them in narrative form, it can be difficult to keep track of plot development. I’m tempted to try the J. K. Rowling approach and see if it makes life easier.
Today I came across this article in Newsweek about the recent rise in self-published titles:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/30/who-needs-a-publisher.html
The basic gist of the article is that some authors have been lucky enough to hit it big with self-publishing. What the article doesn’t mention, however, is that, when you self-publish, you usually get little or no promotional support, which forces you to take sole charge of marketing your book. Stephen King could probably market a book on his own, but I doubt that most first-time authors would be as successful. Without industry connections or PR experience, they’re basically adrift. It’s hard enough to sell books with the backing of a publisher’s publicity machine. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would be to go it alone.
The other major problem with self-publishing is that there’s little or no quality control. This was vividly proven a while back when a group of (published) sci-fi and fantasy authors got together and wrote an intentionally awful book entitled Atlanta Nights. And when I say ‘awful,’ I mean it. This book had characters who changed from scene to scene, duplicate chapters, and an entire section written by a text generator. They submitted their work to a well-known self publishing company and, lo and behold, Atlanta Nights was accepted (though the company later dropped it when they realized they’d been duped). Sadly, Atlanta Nights is only a little bit worse than a lot of the sample chapters from self-published books that I’ve read on Amazon.com.
It has been argued that self-publishing is The Great Leveler that allows John Q. Public to compete with J. K. Rowling on an even playing field. But there’s still the issue of talent to contend with. If no one is interested in John Q. Public’s novel (and I’m assuming he’s queried widely instead of just contacting five agents and calling it a day), it’s entirely possible that it’s not as polished as it should be or else it’s just not marketable. Of course everyone has heard about how Harry Potter was rejected by numerous publishers before it was picked up by Scholastic. But, ultimately, it was picked up by someone. Maybe I’m just a Pollyanna, but I believe that good books will eventually get published, albeit later rather than sooner in most cases. Self-publishing may allow you to get your work out there, but if the writing’s not good or there’s no market for it, you’re still going to be out of luck.
So while more and more people may turn to self-publishing, I suspect that traditional publishers will remain an author’s best shot at turning their hobby into a career.
This has been the sort of day where I wish I’d just stayed in bed, curled up under the covers. Between the sudden death of my cell phone and a mysterious water feature that started cascading down from my bathroom ceiling, it’s been an eventful day to say the least.
Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to work on my synopsis for A Theft of Bones after I’d ordered my new phone and the landlord had been by to stop the ceiling fountain. Let me tell you, you haven’t had fun until you’ve condensed a 400 page manuscript into five double-spaced pages. It seems like it should be a piece of cake. But it’s not.
At least I have something to show for my pain and suffering. After hours and hours of fussing, I have a decent five page summary of the novel. I might send it to some of the Beta Readers to get their opinion. I might even send it to one or two people who haven’t read the novel just to see if it can hold up even without any prior knowledge of the story.
I’m not quite done synopsizing. Some agents want a mini-synopsis of no more than two pages. Now, the real fun begins!
When I was a kid, I used to spend hours dreaming up imaginary civilizations and writing their histories (I stumbled upon one of these histories recently and noticed that, in its unfinished state, it was just a little bit shorter than my Master’s thesis!). I would take bits and pieces from the real world civilizations I was reading about and combine them into fantastic shapes. It would be scant exaggeration to say that I spent most of my childhood immersed in these fantastic realms.
All that ended up being good practice for fantasy writing. Even though my stories are all set in the ‘real world,’ the presence of magical elements allows me to do a lot of worldbuilding. Usually, it’s in the form of a system of magic or the backstory that shapes the events I’m writing about.
While worldbuilding is a lot of fun, you have to be careful because there’s always a strong temptation to fill your writing with all the delicious details of the world you’ve created. An egregious example of this would by H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. The story is chugging along fine (at least by Lovecraft standards) until the protagonists enter the ruined Antarctic city of the Old Ones. Then, the reader is forced to endure pages and pages of the narrator telling you about the history and society of the Old Ones, as gleaned from their wall decoration. (The idea that human scientists could divine that much information about the Old Ones from their wall carvings strikes me as ludicrous. We have a hard enough time interpreting ancient Egyptian art, let alone the art of an alien civilization!) It’s not even that the material is necessarily boring; it’s just that such a lengthy digression dissipates the atmosphere of suspense.
J. K Rowling, on the other hand, is much better at working her worldbuilding into her writing. She does an excellent job of hinting at the details that underly the story without going off on tangents about the parliamentary procedure used in the Wizengamot or the relationship between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw during the interwar years. Rowling realized, unlike Lovecraft, that you need to keep the story going without bogging the reader down in endless minutiae.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. For starters, I’ve been having lots of issues with my internet connection. Although the signal quality is always good, there are periods where there’s no connectivity. I get my internet access through my apartment building, so I suspect there’s a problem with their router. I’ve brought this to the management’s attention, so with any luck it’ll be fixed soon.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a number of short stories set in the ancient Egyptian ‘universe’ I’m developing. I’m really pleased with them so far. My previous attempts at ‘short’ stories ended up being way too long (but never long enough to turn into a novel or even a novella). Happily, I’ve managed to keep these five stories to a manageable length. I have a bit more tinkering to do, but I should be ready to submit them for publication in the next few weeks.
As preparation for my next writing project, I’m working on a short story involving the novel’s main character in his younger days. I’m having a blast with it, but it’s turning out to be one of the most challenging things I’ve ever written.
For starters, it’s not always easy to decide when events in Egyptian history occurred. My story is set against the backdrop of the tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings. I’ve been using James Breasted’s Ancient Records of Egypt as a source, and he dates the particular trial I was using to year 19 of Ramesses IX. The trouble is, modern scholarship gives Ramesses IX a reign of only 18 years and the trial itself is now dated to the reign of Ramesses XI. I ended up having to use a totally different trial as the basis for my story. Thankfully, I hadn’t gotten so far that I had to do a major rewrite, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
The other problem I’ve encountered is that the Egyptian way of life was so radically different from ours. I have a scene where the main character goes into a tavern and orders lunch, but, once I’d written it, I realized that I had no idea how he’s going to pay for his meal. The Egyptian economy was based on bartering and I’m not quite sure how one would purchase a meal in a tavern under that system. It’s not like he’s going to be carrying a bunch of stuff to trade. That little problem forced me to hit the books to come up with a solution (the tavern lets him run a tab).
Compared to this, writing the Andrewverse is a cakewalk!
Back when I was just getting started with AToB, I used to spend a lo of time browsing the Internet looking for advice for first-time novelists in an attempt to delay actually working on my novel. I came across a blog written by a published writer who actually advised new writers to burn their first novel the moment they were done with it. At the time, I thought that was terrible advice. I still do. The implication is that a first novel is always going to be so bottomlessly awful that it should never see the light of day. Of course, if that were true, we’d never have had Harry Potter or Jonathan Strange.
Learning to become a writer involves more than just banging away on the keyboard until you reach ‘The End.’ You need to learn how to revise and edit your work. You also need to figure out how to market your work to an agent or a publisher. You’re not going to learn any of these things if you’ve reduced your manuscript to a pile of ashes.
My own view is that if I’m going to stick with a novel through the long, drawn-out process of writing and revising, then I owe it to myself to take the final step and try to get representation for it. It doesn’t cost me anything beyond the cost of paper and postage. The worst thing that can happen is that every single agent rejects my work, but at least I’ll have learned something about how writers go about finding an agent.
Last night, I finished making my revisions to AToB. Not only am I seventeen days ahead of schedule, but I’m happy to report that the revision process wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be. It wasn’t as fun as the original writing, but it wasn’t the hours and hours of drudgery I’d been dreading.
I’m really glad I took the time and effort to make the corrections in longhand first. Putting them into Word forced me to reevaluate each one of them and there were a number of occasions where I decided that the original text was better than the revision.
Now AToB is ready to enter the beta stage. I’ve lined up a diverse group of beta readers and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say about it.
While they’re diligently reading, I’ll be shifting gears and jumping into my Egyptian project. I’m going to start off with a short story set during the tomb robberies in the reign of Ramesses IX. I also have several ideas for the main novel, which will probably take place several decades later in the reign of Ramesses XI. I have a feeling that this building is going to play a significant role in the plot:
Last night, I finished making the longhand corrections to A Theft of Bones, thus completing Stage 1 of the revision process. I’ll admit that I was a bit wary of printing out the manuscript and making the corrections by hand, but, in retrospect, I made the right decision. There’s a real difference between reading something on the page and reading it on a computer screen, and I find that the former is much more conducive to the business of editing and revision.
The downside, of course, is that it does create more work since I now have to go back into Word and type in the changes. I think of this as Stage 2 of the revision process because I’ll also be revising my revisions, so to speak. But when it’s over, I should have a tight, clean manuscript that I can ship off to my beta readers with confidence.
Once my beta readers have returned the manuscript to me, I’ll be able to embark on Stage 3, the final stage of the process. That’s when I go through and make the changes my beta readers have suggested. I’m going to try very hard to stop revising after that. It would be easy to continue revising ad nauseam, but at some point you need to close your eyes, take the plunge, and get your work out there.
I’ve been giving some thought to what I want my next project to be. I have ideas for more Andrew-related novels, but, since they’re continuations of the story told in AToB, I don’t want to start work on them until I know whether AToB will be published. If it’s not, I’ll have to modify their plots accordingly.
Instead of working on anything Andrew-related, I think I may try my hand at an alternate history set toward the end of pharaonic Egypt. I have some ideas for a hero and a plot, but they’re still vague at this point since I’m trying to keep myself focused on AToB. I’ve started a writing journal for this project and I can’t wait to see what kind of ideas take root there!
Codex Lochianus 
