No, I haven’t just been reading books these days, I am still working on writing them. More accurately, I am working on one, and while there isn’t a lot of progress in the area of word counts, I have been working on the plan. What’s that you say, I thought he had a plan? Well I did. And it worked for the first half of the book, and the words were flowing like the mighty Columbia River. Only not all of them were good, and my three plot lines and three points of view were competing for supremacy and none were going to win. I needed to know, even more accurately than before, exactly what needed to happen in each and every chapter. I also needed to do some lf the same edits (POV, chapter length) on this manuscript that I did on The Forgotten Road.
So what I’ve got now is about 35000 words divided up into twenty or so chapters, with three plot lines that wend and weave their way through this new world I am creating to work towards coming together. But I can’t have them come together too soon, nor can they wait forever. But since I am also planning this to be a 4 book series, I have to hold something back.
In order to keep this all straight, I’ve developed a very simple Excel spreadsheet, with the following columns.
| Chapter | Character 1 | Character 2 | Character 3 | Notes |
| 1 | 1564 | Meet the Villain | ||
| 2 | 1200 | Meet the hero |
Of course, I specify my characters names, and the first chapter is not about meeting the Villain, well, not really, but you get the point.
I had a few instances where I had chapters yet to be written, without a clear idea of what was going to happen in them. I didn’t want them to become filler chapters, but I had a pretty clear alternating pattern that I developed between the plot lines that was difficult to drop halfway through the book, even though one of the plot lines had to wait for another one to catch up. When these chapter gaps started to pile up, I jumped to the end of the book, and worked my way backwards. In the end, I only had a couple of these gaps. One I eliminated by dropping the chapter. The other I plan to make use of to cover a little more back story to set up books 2,3 and 4. Hopefully it’s not too obvious to the reader when I briefly abandon the pattern, and hopefully the adherence to the pattern doesn’t drive them equally insane.
I also bought some software called Fractal Mapper to help me lay out this fantastical world I am building. Where TFR was built in the current world, this one uses a fictional world with some important geological features that are referenced in the book, so it was important for me to keep everything straight in my head. Building a map pointed out a couple of issues that without a map, would have caused real heartache later in the story.
So with all of this planning pretty much complete, I should be back to writing very soon. I don’t know how much having a plan this detailed will impact my enjoyment and fulfillment of writing, but I know I hate editing, and if this gets me out of that, I learn to live with it.
I saw the movie version, at least the edited for TV version of Deliverance years ago, long before I ever knew it was based on a book by James Dickey. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even known it was a book, had it not been for Jason Black mentioning it to me as part of the review he did for me on my novel, The Forgotten Road. He mentioned it, not just because James Dickey and I both wrote about canoe trips gone wrong (though in different ways), but because of how writing about the solitude of the wilderness can be difficult to capture with the written word. You can write hundreds of thousands of words about trees and rivers, but you will lose the reader’s attention very quickly. The story has to turn from one of physical challenges, to one of intellectual and spiritual challenges, or the exhaustion of your characters will be felt by the reader, but not in a good way. You don’t get tired of the river or the trees in Deliverance. The river is a character as out of control as the backwoods men who terrorize the city folk in their canoes. The river is alive and clean and rough and cold, is both friend and foe, something to be revered, and something to be feared.
I admit, I was nervous reading this book, as the movie is famous for the scene that makes nearly every man uncomfortable. But I was surprised at how quickly that scene passed. Whether it was actually short, or just flew by because the writing was so good, is hard to remember. Perhaps the perspective of the written story diminishes the effect just a bit, or perhaps the movie spent more time on it, I ‘m not sure.
But the rest of the story, thought dated a bit now after forty years, still rings true. At the heart is a man trying to figure out what is important, and how far he is willing to go to survive. It’s a great tale, with well done writing and interesting characters. It’s not for everyone, but I enjoyed dropping myself into that world for a couple of nights. Dickey paints the reader right into the scene, and it’s a pretty cool place to be.
Catch
ing Fire by Suzanne Collins is the Second Book in the Hunger Games Trilogy, and it’s just as fantastic as the first. Katniss Evergreen has survived The Hunger Games, but her method of survival has left her with ruthless enemies who will do anything to contain the damage she has done. It’s almost impossible to write a long review of this book without lacing it with spoilers, and I just won’t do that.
The caliber of Collin’s writing is just amazing. There are no wasted words, no areas that make your eyes skim or your attention falter. Everything moves with ease and grace and horror, and it’s all wonderful. I can easily see myself reading these books multiple times, and I find myself holding out from reading the third, so as to spread the enjoyment out over multiple weeks. This series has snuck into my top three of all time, and will remain on my shelf (or in my hands) for years.
Again, if you haven’t yet read The Hunger Games, what are you waiting for?
I picked up Warrior Writer by Bob Mayer shortly after the 2010 PNWA Conference where Bob Mayer did a full day workshop on writing. I was doing a lot of volunteer work that day, so I didn’t get to see his whole presentation. I bought the book instead.
These days, there is a lot more to writing than just writing. Writers have to be more cognizant of marketing themselves and creating a career plan than ever before. With the winds of change just a blowing in the publishing world, the onus is on the writer to make themselves successful. The writing still has to be good, but lots of good writers aren’t getting published because they are afraid of taking control of their career. The days of a publishing house supporting a new writer are gone (if they ever existed). Publishers will support writers with a good track record, but it is up to the author to generate that history for themselves.
Mayer has written a lot of books, done a lot of speaking, and lived a very interesting life. He’s a graduate of West Point and a former member of the Army Special Forces. His approach to writing is to treat his career like a Spec Ops mission plan, and that’s what he talks about in this book. I suppose, with my record as a software developer, I could write a book on writing based on all the lessons I’ve learned working on major software projects. I do use many of the same techniques in writing that I do in creating software. I just never thought to write them down and turn them into a book.
Unfortunately, this book seems more like a string of wandering blog articles than an organized work of non-fiction. The irony of me pointing that out in a blog entry is not lost on me. The formatting feels unprofessional, there are typos everywhere, and the paragraphs wander to the point that the first sentences often have nothing to do with the last. Not just a logical progression, but a completely different topic that makes you jump back and wonder what key word you missed.
The worst issue I have is that in some sections of the book, Mayer documents the responses he had to questions he was asked while giving his talk. That is not a bad thing in itself. What is completely odd, and downright annoying, is that he never shows us what the question was. It’s like he just wrote down the transcript of what he said, dropped it into the end of a chapter, and called it valuable. I’ve never seen this approach before. It made for a very poor reading experience.
Mayer does make some good points and laces the book with interesting anecdotes from his Spec Ops days and his research. My favorite section was the discussion of The Imposter Syndrome, which I have clearly suffered from for most of my life. While this has very little to do with my writing, it is applicable to my work in software, and has led to some revealing discussions with my coworkers.
Overall though, the flaws in the presentation and in the writing hide much of the value of the book. You may get some lessons out of it, but if you haven’t read a lot of other books on writing, read The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman first. Hopefully Mayer will go back and do another edit on this one an clean it up. Then maybe I could recommend it.
I met C.C. Humphries at the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association conference in July 2010. he’s a tall, engaging man, with a passion for stage and story. He did the keynote on one of the nights of the conference, and as a volunteer for the conference, I had the opportunity to speak with him a few times in the hallway or at the front desk.
I’m a big, big fan of historical fiction writers like Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe’s Rifles, Lord of the North, etc.) and CS Forester (Horatio Hornblower). I love swashbuckling tales that teach me a little history, and tell manly-men stories.
I haven’t spent too much of my life learning about the American Revolution (where the story of Jack Absolute is set), so when I bought this book and had Mr. Humphries autograph it, I had high hopes that it would follow in the tradition of Forester and Cornwell, but teach me about an era that somehow fell through the cracks of my education. In the end, Jack Absolute was a little disappointing.
I should also say, that at the time I was reading this, I was working my butt off editing my own novel, and it’s hard to switch out of editor mode. One of the things I was guilty of in my book was using passive voice. Luckily the free-lance editor I hired to look at my manuscript pointed this out to me, and I spent the better part of a month ripping out occurrences of ‘was’ and ‘had’. I don’t think Humphries ever got that advice from an editor. What’s weird is that some chapters were almost completely devoid of passive voice, while others absolutely drowned in it. My poor wife had to listen to me grunt every time I read a paragraph laced with ‘was’ after ‘was’.
The plot wasn’t bad, but the dialog suffered from overuse of clichés, too much localized dialect, and one line straight out of a James Bond movie (Goldfinger, I think). The history of the era took an unfortunate backseat to the involvement of theatre in the story. I understand that Humphries is a Shakespearean actor, and some of the history of the stage is interesting, but part of writing is to know your audience, and the people reading stories of rogues and battles are unlikely to appreciate the theatre quite as much. Yes, it is integral to the plot, but it probably shouldn’t have been. It seemed too contrived.
I really, really wanted to like this book. But sadly, I just couldn’t, and I was disappointed that I hadn’t found another ‘go to’ author to read when my shelf was empty.
John Scalzi continues to be one of my favorite authors, and Agent to the Stars is both original and wonderful. Benevolent aliens discover earth and want to make first contact, but everything they have seen and heard about Earth (through watching seventy odd years of television broadcasts) indicates that humans are a nervous and twitchy bunch when it comes to interacting with aliens who don’t look like themselves. And these aliens don’t look anything like humans. They come up with an unorthodox idea of how to make humans understand that they come in peace. And it doesn’t involve showing up in a big spaceship on the White House lawn.
This is, as I understand it, John Scalzi’s very first novel, one that he first released on line and told people that if they liked it, to send him a dollar. Eventually, after thousands of downloads, Scalzi was discovered, and the book was published. It has since been reprinted twice, and as of last week, is being made into an audio book, read by Wil Wheaton. This, therefore is the book that kicked off a wonderful career (to this point).
Agent to the Stars is not your average first novel. It is solid and funny and there are few of what we in the writing business call ‘mechanical errors’. Maybe none. Certainly none that distracted in any way from the book.
Scalzi works magic in his dialog, like no other author I know. Every line fits the character perfectly and adds to the bond between the reader and the story. You don’t need heavy tag lines in the story to know how the characters said things. You’re sitting in the same room with them, and you just know how they said it.
Agent to the Stars is a great read, and I highly recommend it.
Since the beginning of August, I’ve been ‘head down’ editing The Forgotten Road. I’ve chronicled my efforts here a few times, but haven’t updated as much as I hoped to, because frankly, every spare writing moment I had was sucked up by the editing process. That process is now complete for this version. I sent the manuscript to Fedex Office for printing last night. I plan on picking it up tonight, and then ceremoniously dumping it into my wife’s lap for her to read.
What was a 91,400 word novel is now 78,200 words. I ripped out large chunks of minutia, rewrote sections of passive voice, corrected point of view errors, removed hundreds of extra commas and reformatted the pages and the chapter headings. I spliced about 6000 new words into the second storyline, and rewrote the very beginning of the first chapter. In dropping the word count, I actually deleted about 19000 words. That’s nearly a quarter of the last version of the manuscript.
So at this point, I’ll be handing it off to a few readers and looking for feedback. I have one or two places in the novel that I am still not ecstatic about, but as I tried to fix them, I just made it worse. I’ve got some room now in the word count to add more if the book needs it. I was working on one of those sections last night, and got about a thousand words into a new chapter before I realized it wasn’t perfect and caused more problems than it solved. I deleted it, and sent the book to the printer instead.
Once my readers are done with it, it will sit on my shelf until the end of November. Then I’ll pick it back up, do the edits suggested by my readers, and another read through of my own. In January, 29 months after I started this thing, I’ll start sending it out to agents and editors again. Writing a novel, especially a first one, takes a long time, and I really wish I got paid by the hour for it.
In the meantime, I’ve got a few books to read – check my reading list if you don’t believe me – and then I’m going to dive back into the novel I was working on before I started this edit. Ideally, I’ll be wrapping up the first version of that one around the end of November, so it will dovetail nicely into my schedule for TFR.
Some might think that having a schedule for novel writing seems a little too much like work. When I started this revision, I set a deadline of the end of September to complete it, and that deadline loomed over me like a guillotine. Editing is not fun for me, and without a deadline, it could have lasted for months. I squeezed a lot of extra writing sections into my days and nights instead of watching TV or playing video games. Hopefully this pace is something I can continue as I work on the next book. I don’t miss TV much. Every once in a while I wish I had hours to play video games, but that time will come again I’m sure, as soon as my kids get the ‘bug’ and I have to ‘supervise’ their gaming time.
Oddly enough, after I sent the book to the printer last night, I didn’t have a big rush of endorphins, and I didn’t stand up from my chair and do a little happy dance. Maybe that’s because I did that when I finished version one 20 months ago. I’ve done 7 major versions since then. The celebration gets a little smaller each time, because I know that until the dang thing is sold or retired, it is never truly done.
I hope to god that my next novel is in much better shape when I finish it. 7 edits is way too darn many.
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but Suzanne Collin’s book, The Hunger Games is truly an awesome read. I knew it from the first five pages that this one was good, and by page 100, it was obvious that this was the book that I would measure my writing progress by. It’s easily one of the top five books I’ve ever read for sheer enjoyment, and I found myself wondering, over and over again, if I would ever be able to write like this.
It’s a young adult book, set in a post-apocalyptic world where the United States has degraded into 13 districts called Panem, and all report to the Capitol, which is isolated in both geography and ideals. The Capitol rules with an iron fist covered in the velvet glove of propaganda. We see the world through the eyes of 16 year-old Katniss Evergreen, who survives in District 12, a hard and cold place filled with coal dust and danger. I can’t go a step further than this in discussing the book without giving away any of the wonderful plot twists and turns.
I can’t say I found a single fault with this book. It sets an impossibly high standard for writers of YA Fiction and after reading it, I was a little depressed while I continued to edit my current novel. The good news is that I don’t think 90% of the novels out there today measure up to Collins’ ridiculously high bar, and that gives a little bit of comfort to hacks like me.
The Hunger Games is the first of three books in a trilogy, and if I wasn’t so danged busy right now, I would be hidden away in some chair somewhere reading the next two, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. My wife read The Hunger Games in a single day. It took me two… but only because I started late in the day on the first day and had guests over on the second.
Go get this book, block out a day, and read it. You won’t regret it.
A few years ago, my then girlfriend (now my wife) recommended I read this writer named Janet Evanovich. I started with the first book in the the Stephanie Plum series, and worked my way through. I think book 8 was out around that time. The characters were funny and engaging and the dialog witty. Sure some of the scenes were a little hard to believe, but hey, I don’t think it was going for true to life action in the first place. It’s also true that this is kind of a chicky series, but if I like it, I’m okay with admitting it.
Since then, we have bought and read every one of the Stephanie Plum series, plus a few of the other JE books.
Finger Lickin Fifteen will be my last.
Why?
Because it is exactly like the previous 14 books. The characters never change. The dialog never changes. The lines that were uproariously funny 7 years ago are now tiny little chortles. I outright laughed only twice reading this book. That’s not good for a book that doesn’t have anything else going for it.
It’s a series that needs to be put down like a lame horse. Not because it wasn’t a good horse, but because it’s just cruel to both the characters and the reader to keep it going. JE can’t go and do anything dramatic now, like get Stephanie pregnant or married or have Lula lose weight or have Granny Mazur kick the bucket. It’s too late. As the saying in Hollywood goes, that’d be like jumping the shark.
I hear Evanovich is looking for $50 million from the publishers for the next 4 books in the series, and I realize that she is a money making machine for St. Martin’s Press. I just don’t know where she could take this series that I would want to read it anymore.
Sorry Janet, but this one is a stinker.
Scalzi has done it again with Zoe’s Tale. He throws us back into the universe he created for The Last Colony and shows us the world from through the eyes of John and Jane Perry’s seventeen year old adopted daughter Zoe Boutin-Perry.
There is nothing not to like about this story, and if my previous reviews of Scalzi’s work haven’t already convinced you to go out and read his books, you are either not paying attention or not a science fiction fan. This series is required reading for anyone who has ever looked up at the stars and thought ‘What if…’
My only regret is that I didn’t have the time to just curl up and thoroughly dump myself into this book for hours on end. With the distractions of writing to a deadline and everything else going on at the end of a busy summer, I read this book in fits and starts, and really did myself, and the book, a disservice.
It’s one of those books I can’t wait to hand to my son and my daughter when they say they are bored in a few years. It exemplifies why I love collecting good books, and have hundreds stacked on my shelf for the next generation of the family to read, and why I can’t box them up and store them in a closet somewhere. You keep books like Zoe’s Tale out on the shelf where everyone can see it, and when someone asks if you can recommend a good book, you point to the Scalzi shelf and say ‘Take your pick.’
Joe Beernink 
