My Crazy Overactive Imagination and Me

I can say with complete honesty, that I'm never guilty of being away with the fairies.

I don't do fairies. The vampires, dragons, Roman legionaries, kings, knights, barbarian warriors... that's a different matter. I spend half my time away with them. Possibly a dysfunctional amount of time, but there you go.

I also have a habit of overthinking things - that's why I don't do fairies, really. I have to make things make sense. It's fine in sci-fi. It worked with dragons. Even, to an extent, with wizards. It worked an absolute treat with vampires.

And I have a tendency to lean towards the dark and creepy. Don't look for too many happy-ever-afters from me.

This adds up to quite a bit of self-inflicted cannot unsee. Sometimes I scare myself. A lot of it I'm scared to write down, let alone publish, in case people think I'm weird, and not in a good way - I'm fine with being eccentric, but I don't want to be some kind of depraved crazy psycho.

The end result is an overflowing mental filing cabinet of squick. Which has been getting to me recently, so I finally decided to inflict it on you guys, somewhere I can explain it instead of just putting it in a story as though it's nothing unusual, and where my mum won't end up reading it (hopefully. Weird, isn't it, how it can be so much easier to say something to the world than one person).
This is a sort of experiment, to see if it really is weird-creepy, or just horror story creepy and it's only my usual worrying about what people will think of me that makes me scared to show it.
Anyway, here's a little showcase of the kind of stuff that turns up in my head:

A Tangled Web we Weave

I had the most brilliant flash of inspiration. Almost certainly I'm not the first to come up with something similar, but I think it's cool.

You know those stories where you have 140 characters and a ton of plot-lines? Unless you have a trick memory, it can be bl**dy difficult to keep everything straight and not contradict yourself. Events happen at specific locations and times, and letting them move around at all is a big no-no. Characters are even harder, since they can move around, but have to not only to be in exactly one place at any one time, but also to take a reasonable amount of time to get between them. Both can be hard to keep track of in a complicated story.

So here's my idea.

You will need: drawing pins (this kind are probably the best for the purpose, and ideally you want as many colours as possible), thread (again, many colours is helpful but not essential, and fairly coarse thread is best), and a large rectangle of something you can stick pins into nice and firmly without them coming loose.

We're going to make a space-time continuum.

It's helpful to draw grid-lines on your pin-board, or stick a sheet of squared paper over it. Now draw a timeline along one side of the paper, and a list of settings on the other. As far as possible, you're going to want to try to make the distance between places roughly correspond to the actual distance between them, but since you're laying out a two-dimensional world on a one-dimensional line, it's not going to work out perfectly. You could in theory do this with a 3d plot, especially if it was done on a computer instead of a kitchen table, but it would probably just turn into a tangled mess, when the point is to be able to see things at a glance. But the spacing of the locations is not hugely important anyway.

Now, for every event or scene, stick a pin in the appropriate point in spacetime. Some labelling system will be necessary. Different colours are useful to see at a glance which one is which, but not important, and you're unlikely to have enough colours to make them all different anyway.

Now, the characters.  For every character except bit-parts who are only in one scene, tie a length of thread to the pin where they first appeared in the story. Then take the string to the next scene they were in, and wrap it around the pin. And so on. If they die (or in some other way get written out), tie off the thread at their death scene.

And there you have it. I call it a plot-web. You shouldn't have any thread visiting two different pins that are level on the time axis, or two pins a long way apart in space within a very short time, unless they have access to teleportation - that's why it's good to have nearby places close on the location axis, so you can tell by the gradient.

If you don't want to bother with pins and thread, you could just draw dots and lines on a sheet of paper, but the pins are more fun, and you can move them around if you change your mind.

Whaddayathink?

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing is a blog hop where writers can share their work-in-progress or soon-to-be-released books. I was tagged by fellow writer and blogger, Kristina Miranda, who posted about her book last week, here.

Now it's my turn; regular readers may recognise this book as the one I've been talking about for months. For anyone new to my blog, Hi! And this is the book I've been working on for more than half a year now and almost finished. It's about vampires.

Anyhow, the premise of this blog hop is that someone somewhere came up with some questions about books, and we all answer them in turn. So here we go:

What is the working title of your book?

A Lonely Road, though if I use that at all it will be as the overarching title of the trilogy (of which this is the first book). I'm seriously stuck on an individual book title.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I got the idea of writing about vampires, and my speciality is to take something magical or supernatural, or at least pseudosience, and agonise over making it realistic until it turns out to be possible. I've done it with dragons, and even to an extent with wizards. Vampires were surprisingly easy.

What genre does your book fall under?

Tough one. Dark fiction, probably. Horror is a traditional genre for vampire stories, but it really isn't horror. It could be described as science fiction, but I'm not sure if it would appeal to most sci-fi fans.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Even tougher one. I tend not to pay much attention to actors and only to the characters, so I honestly have no idea. I couldn't even go on looks, since I have face-blindness, and wouldn't even recognise my own characters in the street. I'd have to leave it entirely to the director.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Fed up with living in hiding, Alexis decides to reveal vampires to the world, and then discovers why vampires don't do that.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

By an agency. I had almost decided to self-publish, until I discovered just how much it would cost. Although I could find the money, I couldn't afford to risk losing it.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About three months once I properly started; I'd been trying to for the best part of a year before that but I didn't even get beyond the opening scene until I invented my Daily K rule and stuck my nose to the grindstone.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Well, if by my genre you mean other vampire stories, probably the nearest to it is Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The story has similarities, but my version of vampire lore is quite different. In that respect, it's perhaps closer to Darren Shan than to anything else I've read, although I wouldn't call it a similar book.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

My housemates were watching Queen of the Damned on DVD, and I came in half-way through. I didn't have much idea what was going on, but the scene of Lestat's being made a vampire struck me quite heavily. So I started playing with similar ideas and the whole story grew from there.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The mix of characters, perhaps. Immortal characters are great, because you can get people from cultures that never coexisted. I've got everything from Spartans to Vikings, and Barbary corsairs to modern Americans. And I hope I've managed to make them all true to their backgrounds.

And as well, every author of vampires, from Bram Stoker to Stephenie Meyer, has portrayed vampires differently, and the style has evolved a lot over the years. There are plenty of readers who insist that this is a bad thing - but whatever incarnation they cling to is invariably different from what came before it and from 'actual' vampire lore. The genre has always been changing and it will keep doing so as long as people write about it, so who knows? This is my take, and if it's successful, maybe it'll influence the next chapter of the vampires' story.


So, I hope that was interesting. And last but certainly not least, the people I'm tagging:

Eliza Stilson

J. C. Martin

Unfortunately, that's all. Seems like nearly everyone I know in the blogosphere is having a break from blogging, or plans all their posts weeks in advance like a sensible, organised person. But these two are great, so get over to their blogs next week, where they'll be answering the same questions about their books.

How the Lion Got his Job

I don't know if anyone's ever wondered why I have a cuddly lion in my sidebar instead of, say, a picture of me.

If you know me from Twitter, you might recognise it. When I first made a Twitter account, I didn't want to put a picture of myself on it, partly because I don't like most of the pictures I have of me - any that are more than a few years old have a fairly unflattering hairstyle, and the one on my passport has my best attempt at a neutral expression. Slack-jawed and staring-eyed. In other words, I look utterly stoned on the photograph I go through customs with.

But I digress. It's also because I'm shy, and I felt awkward about appearing to the entire world in person. So I looked through the photos I had on my computer - because I'm a mathematician, and we're a lazy breed, and I couldn't be bothered to take and upload a new one - and found one of Simba. I like that picture. It's kind of silly and cute, and it seemed reasonable to use it as my avatar since it's of something that means a lot to me. I've had Simba as long as I can remember, and he's been my 'favourite toy' and shared my bed every night since I was ... not sure, four, maybe? That's seventeen years, which is as long as I've known my little brother. So I uploaded it to Twitter.

Then I started a blog. I wanted a picture in the sidebar, but for all the same reasons (the photo of me I eventually put in the About Me page, which I like, didn't exist at the time) I didn't want it to be of me, and for all the same reasons plus that I liked the idea of using the same picture as my Twitter avatar, I used the same picture as my Twitter avatar.

I've also used it on my brand new (and as yet very empty) Facebook author page. Only by now I've thought up some better excuses. I've decided to make it part of my brand. This is partly for much the same reasons as before: I still prefer to have him as the picture everyone associates with me than a picture of me. Maybe that's weird. Like I said, I'm shy. My secret ambition is to become rich and famous enough as an author that I can become a recluse without ruining my career and consequently starving.

But also I think he's more memorable than a mugshot. That's might be largely just me: I have face-blindness, so a head-and-shoulders photo is, to me, extremely generic and forgettable. Even if it's of me, unless I can see something I recognise like the clothes I'm wearing or the background. If it was of a perfect stranger, they'd have to be very strange indeed before I would remember it.

But then again it's not just me. There's about one in forty people who will struggle to pick my mugshot out of a lineup, and that feels like a fairly reasonable size for a target market. And even for the rest of you, there's a lot of authors' faces out there and not so many stuffed lions.

So Simba is the front-man for my brand. Unless I change my mind. What do you think?

I Think I Want to be Traditionally Published

If you're at all interested in writing and publishing - I expect most of you are, since you're reading a writing blog. Not that you're not very welcome otherwise - you are surely aware of the rise of self-publishing, and the biggest decision writers now face: self-publish, or get traditionally published?

Until pretty recently, traditional publishing was very much the thing. Self-publishing was fairly rare, and perceived as desperate measures by writers who'd failed to attract a publisher. I remember telling a friend about my ambition to become an author: he helpfully mentioned self-publishing and POD, which at that point I knew very little about. I was offended, and coldly told him that I hoped I would be able to get 'actually published'.

But now the self-publishing revolution has happened, and publishing your own work is fast becoming ever easier, and ever less stigmatised. Vive le revolution (or not)! And I've been working for some time now with he assumption that  that is what I will do.

The reasons to do it sound pretty compelling. You don't give up the lion's share of the profits to a publisher and there's no agent to collect ten percent of what remains. You don't give up control of your work: editing, title, cover, timescale. And you will never be rejected. Even the statistics comparing the measly pittance made by the average self-published author to the advance given by a typical publisher are easy to discount: the majority of the authors making practically nothing are the authors who would have made nothing from traditional publishing because they would never have been published at all.

But.

There are a lot of buts.

But I don't know if my book's any good. Now, a lot of people will be scornful of the idea of needing someone else's say-so to feel your work is worth publishing. They have a point: I don't have a great deal of self-confidence. It's a character flaw, and one which I should probably be trying to improve, rather than indulging. And of course if you're professional and diligent about publishing your own stuff, you will have had it edited and read by others.

But still, I'm a new author with no track record, and what I publish now will be out there, under my name, for ever. I don't want to publish rubbish, and I can't, physically can't, be impartial about what I write. If someone who knows what they're talking about, and whose livelihood depends on only accepting books that will be successful, accepts my book, that's a pretty solid endorsement that I am, after all, ready to start publishing my work.

But I don't know how to do it myself. Yes, there are plenty of guides and blogs on the subject out there. But they all say different things. Some, for instance, warn new writers away from self-publishing, and others virtually insist that traditional publishing is a massive no-no if your new to the game. There's very little that they do agree on. And if they do, it's vague, subjective, and broad.

And some seem focussed entirely on writing for profit, counting success purely in dollars and scorning the idea of trying to write the best book you can, or wanting to be read as as well as to be paid. They give what is probably good advice, but it's not advice about what I want to do.

A publisher knows what steps a book needs to go through. They know how they are all done. They either have contacts or in-house staff to get all of them done. I've never published anything, I don't know what to expect, and although I've been trying my best I still only have a vague idea how to go about doing it. To be published, at least the first time, would not only get the job done properly on that occasion, but having seen the process I hope I would then have some concrete, first-hand knowledge if I wanted to self-publish in the future.

But I don't think I have the money to self-publish. It's going to be more expensive than I had realised. With POD you don't need to finance an offset print run, and the setup costs sound pretty reasonable. For instance, £500 seems to be the absolute lower limit for editing, and I would be cautious about hiring someone who charged so much less than what seems to be the average. It looks like I'll be lucky not to have to lay out much more than £1000 for editing alone. There's cover design, and I'm now hearing that things like internal layout design and non-free fonts are highly recommended. And that's before you start on any costs of marketing - although traditional publishing doesn't absolve you from promoting your book. Figures of £5000 and higher are bandied about as typical self-publishing costs.

If I self-publish, I will do it properly and professionally, and produce a book that isn't the worse for not having a publisher's logo on the spine. And if I can't afford that, I won't self-publish. And I don't think I can afford it at this stage.

I'm fairly sure I could scrape together the money. But I could not afford to lose it. I would be relying on at least recovering the costs. If I'm traditionally published, I might still need to hire an editor, but what advice I can find on the subject seems to suggest that it's certainly worth a go without, and to only pay for editing if you're consistently rejected by agents. And I will still need to promote my book, and don't yet have a very clear idea of the costs of that. But the publisher will take a lot of the costs away from me, and if I get an advance that at least covers any editing costs, even if I never earn it out I won't be out of pocket.

But I want to be read, not just to make money. One of the biggest arguments in favour of self-publishing is that you make more profit on each book. But it still seems it won't be an awful lot. And it seems like you will be likely to sell less books, and even if that adds up to more money in total, I write for the love of it more than for the money, and I want my books to be read. And as a new author, I want to be read and recognised and build a following. I would love to be able to give up the day job (assuming I manage to get a day job after I finish uni), but mostly I just want to write and be read. And if I am successful I don't really care whether I make millions, or just enough to give up the day job and still live comfortably.

At least with my first book, I will be measuring success by how many books I sell, not by my bank balance, and I think that traditional publishing is the right option for that. For this one at least, the publisher can have the lion's share of the profit, and I'll take the recognition - assuming there is any of either.

Self-Publishing: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I recently bought two books, both books that I'd been wanting to read for a while, both self-published by authors who I know. This was my first experience of  self-published fiction, and I glad to support the authors: it might be presumptuous of me to claim friendship, since we've only met on Twitter, but both are acquaintances and people I like, and I was hoping to write glowing reviews about their books.

The best laid plans of mice...

The Good

The first one I read was Bill the Vampire, by Rick Gualtieri.

he only difference between this and a traditionally published book is the lack of a publisher's logo. The cover is neat and professional - well, alright, it's glossy, unlike most traditionally published covers, but that's not bad, just different - the formatting is just fine, and there is nothing to complain about with respect to the quality of the writing.

It's original, despite being in a rather crowded genre - I won't give specifics, because I loathe spoilers, but Rick's made his vampires his own, and made them funny and convincing and interesting.

I liked the characters (especially James. He's probably not exactly nice, but he's fun.) I liked the plot, which was fast-paced and exciting. I read the whole thing in one day and wanted more. The writing maybe didn't stand out from the crowd, but said crowd is a crowd of good writers who write well and readably. So I enjoyed this book and will definitely be reading the rest of the series and probably the Bigfoot one as well.

The Bad

I'm not telling you what the second one was. As I said, I like the author, and I'm not going to name and shame them.

The cover was ringing alarm bells. In fact, it's a pretty nice cover, but the back and spine are blank. But I try not to judge a book by its cover, and I am aware that e-books are the main focus for a lot of self-publishing authors. So it's understandable, if a bit sloppy, that the e-book cover might be slapped onto the paperback as is. Although you'd think they'd at least put the name on the spine and maybe make the colour blend in with  the front, instead of plain white.

The formatting is ... odd. It's in a sans serif font, which (I've heard it's been scientifically proven) is harder to read than one with serifs. And the paragraphs are separated by double line breaks and not indents. Which is unusual in a fiction book and I at least find it a bit flow-breaking. But maybe it looks better on an e-reader screen and it's another side-effect of the paperback being a second thought. Even so, it's quite poor. Surely it could have been reformatted without that much trouble or expense.

But I tried to ignore all this.

The prologue was incredibly wordy and not very enjoyable to read at all. But that's just the prologue. Maybe it's deliberately meant to sound pompous and formal.

It couldn't possibly be like that all the way through.

If it was like that all the way through it would never have been published by anyone who could write worth a d*mn, because anyone who could write worth a d*mn might possibly have written something like that in a bad first draft. And it would never have been published by anyone at all diligent or professional about their writing, because even if they had produced it, they would have had it edited and listened to the editor, and no editor even capable of writing a decent enough bio to pretend to be worth their salt would have passed something in that state. And although I'd not read anything by this author before, I've encountered their marketing campaign and my impression was that they're pretty diligent and professional about their book.

It was like that all the way through.

I struggled through the whole thing partly for the sake of this post and mainly because I like to finish a book once I've started it.

I could cut it down by at least a tenth just by striking out bits that are entirely unnecessary - never mind restructuring and trimming down clumsy phrases and confusing descriptions - almost every sentence contained lists of three or more adjectives. Whole sentences were simply repeating each other. Dozens of clauses explained in straight terms what was already clearly implied.

And while I'm not exactly an expert on advanced comma placement, the best I could say about the grammar was that it's better than Captain Carrot's.

The characters sounded like they could have been interesting and relatable, if only they had had some semblance of their own voices. Each and every one spoke in the same verbose tones as the narrator.

The plot was pretty plausible and could have been pretty exciting if it had been remotely well handled.

The best I can say about the book is that I have seen worse. But in order not to deceive I would then have to add that I have read a good deal of fanfiction. Including the ones written by ten-year-olds and people writing in second languages.

I had a look for reviews on Amazon. The paperback has none as yet, but the ebook has plenty and they are without exception positive, mostly 5 star, brimming with praise for the brilliant writing, the likable characters, the enthralling plot, and how well it held their interest.

I suppose it's possible that the 11 rave reviews on amazon UK and 3 on the US site were all written or paid for by the author and their mother, although I don't like to think that of them. I'm left wondering, am I that bad a reader, or did the paperback, through some hilarious, hideous mix-up, somehow get made from the very first draft?

I asked my brother to have a look at it, in case I really am that bad. He glanced at one page and said that the book had at least three terrible paragraphs.

The Ugly

Is this it? The self-publishing revolution is in full swing, and is this what we're going to get out of it?

Will choosing a new book in future be as much of a pot-luck as picking a fanfic at random? The shelves bloated with thousands of books that should never, ever, have made it further than the author's BFF. Books whose prose has never seen an editor. Books that could be held up as an example of how not to write.

As I say, I've read fanfic. With nothing approaching editorial control, thousands upon thousands of fics are published that are absolute drivel. And some good ones. A sprinkling of decent ones and a handful of genuinely good ones and there is no way to find them without wading neck-deep in the creek - you know, the one you're up without a paddle.

If that's what reading will be like after the revolution, bring back the feudal system. Bring back the shackles and branding irons. Bring back the gatekeepers. Bring back hundreds of good books never seeing the light of day, and a pittance for the authors of the few that do, because even that is preferable.




One last thing: I said I wouldn't name and shame the author of the second book. But I also don't want to make anyone paranoid. So if you think it might be you, feel free to ask. I won't answer publicly, even to say no, but if that person asks I will tell them privately.

Milestone!

As I mentioned, I've been letting things slide a little and struggling to get on with any writing. But no more. The breakthrough was a resurrection of the old solution of a ban on the things I want to do. My Minecraft shortcut is now titled 'not until you have a title'. And within half a day of the ban being enacted, I have a title. Kinda.

I have an overarching title for the trilogy. A Lonely Road. It's a wee bit clichéd and like all titles and names I actually think about instead of coming up with in a flash of blinding inspiration, I alternate between being totally sold on it and convinced it's terrible. It could change, but at least I have something.

I got it from a song lyric (prizes for guessing the song). It's a song I heard for the first time a couple of years ago, when this novel was still in its idea stages - although it wasn't a new song then - and immediately I both liked it and noticed that nearly all of it was remarkably applicable to Alexis, my long-suffering MC. I spent much of last night googling for tips and ideas on how to come up with a title.

There are any number of articles on that subject out there, but sadly most of them say the same thing, which is to not sweat it, a title will probably just come to you, and if all else fails sell it as 'untitled', or 'working title:_', since the publisher will probably end up changing your title anyway.

Perfect. Unless you're planning to self-publish.

If they do have any tips, it's mostly variations on the same thing: write down all the words that are remotely connected to your book, and stare at them until some collection of them turn into a title. This is a more helpful example than most. Well I have a page of that in my writing-things-down book, with nothing to show for it.

And I found this fascinting little app, which looked like a godsend, but after playing about with it for a while, I've come to the realisation that what you type in the box has absolutely no effect on anything except to bring up a little list of vital statistics in case you can't count or recognise letters. You can even put in a single word, and fill in the 'second word' box, and it won't bat an eyelid (although it does smell a rat if you don't type anything). The score seems to be based solely on the boxes ticked. Which means that you could come up with a formula for a best-selling title, if you had the patience. Apparently the highest score available is 83%, and the highest I've been able to find is 69% - A Lonely Road got that, with figurative, adjective with noun, preposition/article, adjective, no. Let me know if you work out the 'winning formula'!

But there are more useful things out there. Once you scroll past the utterly obvious bit, this article does have a list of places whence an idea could spring. This one is quite a nice step-by-step that's unusual in that most of the steps are concrete enough to actually try to follow. And for me, this one was the gold. I'm lucky enough to have a song that I associate with this novel, so once I had the idea of song lyrics, I immediately jumped to that one, and then to one of the most memorable and applicable lyrics and Bob's your uncle. Well, actually Rob's my brother, but close enough.

But unfortunately I'm only halfway there, and that's looking at it optimistically. You could say I'm only one quarter of the way there, since I need four titles in total: one for the trilogy and one for each book. I'm hoping to come up with all three book titles together because I want them to have something to do with each other. but I'll settle for a title for the first one for now.

So I guess it's only a half-mile stone. But still, progress.

It's Been a While

I have some apologising to do. First, apologies for the long silence. Second, apologies for this post, which is probably going to be rambling and pointless and not terribly interesting, and possibly misspelled because the T on my keyboard is playing up.

I was away without internet access for a week, so I couldn't post, but somehow after that I didn't manage to get a post out and all of a sudden it had been over a week since I meant to get back to blogging. I've been shamefully unproductive since the start of the summer holidays: I got my edited draft finished before than, but since I've done little more than toy with a few ideas for revisions, and I've sadly neglected both this blog and my twitter feed, although I really need to be working on building a platform. I think I'm supposed to have a website as well, and to have worked out how to use Triberr and MYWANA and all of that sort of stuff.

I'm also no further forward with titles, and every time I think I've made a decision about publishing, I hear something else that makes me reconsider, or it turns out that the decision has sired a litter of smaller decisions that all need to be considered and weighed up and finally, painfully, made. Finally decided to definitely self-publish, probably? Fine, now will it be in your own name, or that of a press you will start up? And how exactly does one go about starting up an independent press to publish one's books?

Getting a draft finished, getting through a round of revisions and actually giving the wretched thing to some people to read felt so huge, so very much as though I was nearly there, but now I think I'm sort of lost.

I've also been intending, for a month or two, to rebrand this blog. I was never quite happy with the name - which my brother thought up and talked me into, and which I've steadily alternated between loving and loathing ever since. But however good it was or wasn't for a blog about life, the universe, and everything, the pun is sort of lost on a writing blog. And then the whole thing was started when I didn't know what I was doing, and hasn't been properly sorted out since.

Hopefully, this week or maybe next, I'll finally get around to doing it.

I'm being good now: today I finally started rewriting my opening scene, the only significant change I've decided on yet for my second round of editing. And I recently had an unexpected windfall which ought to take at least a good chunk out of the stuff that costs actual money, like professional editing and websites.

And in less than a month I will be an actual published author! Well, a bit. Remember this? Well, I may have said around the time, but it did get entered into the contest (Eliza, lovely person, said she wanted to make an exception about the length), and it came fourth, and is being published in Open Doors, an anthology by Wayman Publishing, on the fourth of September.

It's only a very short little bit of a story, but check this out:

Things I have become an armchair expert on for one story.

I've written before about researching for a novel, and in particular why you shouldn't consider skiving it off.

This is just a flavour, now that I've finished the initial writing (still got plenty of editing to do, which I must start getting on with properly), of how much, and how varied and unexpected the things you have to learn about might be.

The things I have become an armchair expert on, just for this one book, include, but are not limited to, in no particular order:

• Motorbikes; in particular, different kinds of bikes and how to ride pillion without dying.
• Hells Angels [sic].
• American football, including fouls and corresponding penalties, and the Harvard-Yale Game (I lost the game).
• Train routes in America - top tip: they nearly all go through Chicago. Apparently this is because of Lake Michigan - and the layout of the Texas Eagle and Sunset Something-or-other trains.
• Domestic flights in America.
• Fractures of the humerus, and their treatment. Did you know that you aren't allowed to lie down, even to sleep, for the first couple of weeks?
• Axolotls, turtles, naked mole rats, vampire bats, cats, and probably some other species that I forget. And retroviruses, telomerase (it's an enzyme), and all kinds of other stuff. Do you know, when I was asking people what they thought of the premise of this book, someone actually told me that 'vampires as we fear them are not a scientific or theoretical possibility'! Can you believe that? I'll show him.
• Ambulance and Emergency Room treatment - with many thanks to Jordyn Redwood.
• All kinds of stuff about life in America, like apartments and motels, drinking laws and age of consent, and tons more. Some of it I found out just by chance - like the fact that electric kettles are nearly unknown over there (on that point, I could do with knowing, would a room in a very cheap motel have a coffee maker or anything you could use to get water hotter than the hot tap?). There's probably plenty more I didn't figure out.
• The general layout of quite a few cities in America, from Milwaukee to Los Angeles. Google Maps is very useful for location scouting when you can't run to actually going there. And sometimes amusing.
• The history of Los Angeles.
• Names. Ancient Greek names, Viking names, Persian names, Maasai names, and all kinds of other names.
• Maasai culture.
• Ancient Greek houses.
• Ancient Greek funerals.
• Ancient Greek ports.
• Ancient Greek wildlife.
• Ancient Greece in general.
• Ancient Rome.
• Barbary corsairs.
• 'Vampires' - which is to say, people who participate in the vampire lifestyle. This was very helpful and interesting. Also clinical vampirism, but I didn't really need that, I just got wiki-sidetracked.
• Travelling as a passenger on a container ship.
• Fake passports.
• The south-west coast of Spain.

That's not including anything I would have needed to research if I hadn't already known about it or anything I can't remember off the top of my head, and it's only things I needed to find out about for the book I'm currently writing, which is only the first instalment of the story.

So you have been warned. Don't be disheartened though: if you end up with more to research than me I'll be impressed. Any book which is set in several time periods or places (for instance, anything with characters whose lifetime spans centuries) will generate correspondingly more research, and if you're sensible, you won't set the majority of the present-day part in a country you've never been to.

A Defence of the Singular They

All my life, I've used 'they' as a singular pronoun when talking about some unspecified individual who's gender is unknown and irrelevant. It came as some surprise to me to find out, in recent months, that this is apparently the subject of contention.

But since it appears to be, I thought I'd chip in my two cents on the issue. Without further ado, here's why I say that singular they is a perfectly valid use.

It's better than the alternatives
There are several alternatives for third person singular, gender neutral pronouns. And all but one of them suck.

There's 'it', which is rude and by convention isn't used to refer to humans old enough to distinguish their gender without taking their nappy off.

There are such remedies as 'he or she', which are clumsy and tedious.

There are all kinds of invented pronouns, which most of us don't understand, and even if we did, words forcibly invented and inserted into a living language are as alien and invasive as mink in a British stream. Perhaps eventually they'll become part of the landscape - like rabbits, which were introduced by the invading Romans and are now considered native - but until then don't try and tell me I have to like them.

There's the age old tradition of picking a gender - usually male - and running with it. Which in most situations these days is asking to be shot down in flames. Or similarly to alternate he and she, but referring to the same person by different pronouns has a tendency to be confusing.

Some advocate simply restructuring language to avoid the problem, but the problem will still exist; even if you're willing to put up with the more clumsy sentence which sometimes results, sometimes it's not possible to make a reasonable restructuring.

Or there's the singular they. Which works in nearly all situations where you need a singular, third person, gender neutral pronoun.

There's precedent
You don't object when I call you by that pronoun, I assume?

As anyone who knows a language such as French, Spanish, or German knows, English is unusual in only having one second person pronoun. And strictly speaking we don't. We have two: thou and you, but thou has fallen out of use to the point where it isn't standard English any more and is only used, often incorrectly, by people who want to make the dialogue in their historical story sound more authentically historical.

You was the analogue of the French vous (for example), and thou meant the same as tu.

You, or vous is plural and thou or tu singular, but you/vous is also used as a polite singular pronoun. Tu/thou is insulting, although it may be used informally as well, in much the same way that you might give your best mate a slap on the back where you would shake a stranger's hand. Or occasionally and affectionately refer to your younger brother as 'it'. And in English, for some reason, we stopped using the insulting version entirely and use you as singular whoever we're talking to.

Likewise, we have two gender neutral third person pronouns, singular and plural, it and they. 'It' is insulting, so why shouldn't we use the same solution and say 'they' for all?


It just is
As I say, I've used it all my life, and it's never appeared to be contentious. Certainly, a large proportion of people use it, and have for a long time, and doubtless it's been used in print, and everyone understands it. That's more-or-less the definition of being correct in a living language.

Any thoughts?

The Wrong Side of the Dawn Chorus

Most of the bird song around here could only be called so by the very loosest of definitions. There's the odd crow or similar, but mostly it's gulls. Common gulls, herring gulls, black-headed gulls, and kittiwakes. The most inland breeding colony of kittiwakes in the world, in fact. But that's beside the point.

Gulls' cries can be eerily beautiful, in a lonely, dramatic sort of way. On the sort of overcast night you only get in a big city, when the lights reflect off the thick blanket to bathe everything in a purple glow, and ghosts soar and wheel against that weird smoke, wailing.

It's an odd blessing to light pollution.

Most of the time, though, they're annoying at best and very often alarming, when they catch you off guard and sound exactly like a human scream.

But there's odd blessings to insomnia too.

There is birdsong around here, and it's beautiful. I don't know what bird it is, but it sings so incredibly sweetly. I never wake up early enough to hear it, but occasionally, on summer nights when it gets light in what could still reasonably be called the wee small hours, and when I'm finding it particularly hard to get to sleep, the sky grows bluer outside my window until it's lighter than twilight. And the dawn chorus starts up. It's quite soft, and quite cheerful, and infinitely more musical than the gulls' efforts.

I was still awake after four this morning, and not because I hadn't gone to bed early. But despite hearing it at the wrong end of the day, I count myself pretty lucky for it.

The Moment of Truth

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was giving up coffee for two weeks, to see if it helped my insomnia. Well, It's now been two weeks, and I haven't noticed anything, so I'm going to see how tonight goes and then finish the experiment.

I guess I ought to be hoping I get the best night's sleep I've had in ages, but part of me is willing it not to make any difference so that I can have coffee tomorrow with a clear conscience.

I don't want to have to make the choice between sleeping better - which would be lovely, but I've managed for nearly twenty-one years without it - and coffee. The responsible choice would be the sleep, of course. But I like coffee.

I'll let you know how it goes. Goodnight.

[UPDATE]: Slept terribly last night. So this morning, coffee.

Do You Want to Read the Next Bestseller, Now?

Well, that might be coming it a bit strong, but I hope it's going to be the next bestseller. Aim high, and all that. Also 'now' here means sometime next week, but it'll still be some way earlier than anyone else gets to see it.

I will soon - hopefully in a few days- be looking for beta readers for my novel. As regular readers will know, it's a new take on the vampire genre, and if that sounds up your street and you'd like a preview and the chance to influence the book, apply now!

In return for some feedback, you will not have only my undying gratitude but also a free copy of the book once it's published. As well as feedback, I will be asking for suggestions for a title, so you could end up naming the book!

If you're interested, please email me at cazzz20@hotmail.co.uk (that's not a typo, there are meant to be three z's. Long story). I'll get back to you with some guidance about the kind of feedback I'm after, and a copy of the manuscript once the first round of editing is finished.

Revisions and Revision

I'm in the middle of exam period, and nearly a week ago I finished the first draft of my novel, so today I started editing.

As for the exams, I've once again broken out my trusty three-point plan for revision, and so far it still seems to be working. I had two exams this week, and they both went well enough. They were two of the hardest ones too; the next two are easy and I have a week until the next one and then another week before the last two. Wish me luck!

As for the editing, I'm still very much a noob, and worrying that I'm not being harsh enough as I haven't yet cut much. But I haven't got very far - 15 pages out of 160 - and I'm still in the early parts where I spent more time perfecting each bit rather than just getting on with it. Or so I'm telling myself.

The daily k rule worked fantastically for the writing, so I've made a ten page rule for the editing. Ten pages of edited manuscript before I'm allowed recreational internet, including blogging and social networking. The definition of non-recreational slipped a little over the course of the writing, but seem to have settled down into a happy medium. I'm allowing myself Minecraft after twenty pages.

I'll keep you updated on how it's going, and anything useful I learn from it. I've been writing, more or less and usually less, for years, but as I've never finished a first draft before, this is new ground for me.

In other news, I'm experimenting with giving up caffeine, in the hope that it will help with my insomnia won't help at all so that I can go back to drinking copious amounts of brain juice with a clear conscience. Apparently I need to give it up for two weeks before I'll know if it's working; I'm 48 hours in and I WANT COFFEE!

The Truth About Vampires

Here's a piece of trivia for you: you can tell a real vampire by their teeth. Or rather, you can't which is how you can tell whether they're real or not. Popular culture has vampires with huge fangs for their canine teeth. Bullsh*t, if you'll pardon my French, and one of the things that ticks me off in vampire fiction - that and the way people think of Dracula, as if the poor bloke hasn't had enough bad press.

Most animals with fangs do indeed have them for canines. Indeed, that's where the word canine comes from: teeth like the fangs of a dog. But that's because most most animals with fangs use them for ripping and tearing and doing as much damage as possible. That's really not practical for a vampire; even if they might sometimes tear a throat messily out, vampires want the ability to make neat incisions - and they do, in most fiction, leaving two neat holes, in spite of their wholly unsuitable teeth. And even supposing the vampire was content to simply tear out a throat, he couldn't. An animal with a muzzle can, but with a human-shaped face, you just try bringing your canines to bear on something that won't fit in your mouth.

The clue is in in the word. Which of your teeth would you use for making an incision? How about your incisors? And nature bears me out: the only animal that has teeth and feeds entirely on blood has razor-sharp pointed incisors.

Real vampires bite you with their front teeth.

In fact, a lot of what the stories say about vampires is untrue. Some of it is half-truths and misunderstanding, and much more could reasonably be termed balderdash, or indeed something a little less printable.

To start with, a lot of their powers and strengths are grossly over-exaggerated in popular culture. That's not to say they don't have them - most of them, at least - but just that they aren't the virtually indestructible, godlike superbeings you're probably used to.

But don't be disappointed. Real vampires have plenty of frightening abilities. The ability to exist, for starters. There's no need to believe in magic or the supernatural, or even to suspend disbelief of soft science, to believe in them; they're real. I think one of my housemates might be one, and I'm almost serious about that. The funny (or possibly worrying) thing is, a lot of the things that looked like they might cause problems with the science just fell into place; things I had no idea were the case just turned out to be. With every bit of research I do, vampires as I envisage them seem more and more plausible. And I have a bad track record with this; things I think I've made up nearly always turn out either to have been written about by someone else, or to have happened in real life. And I'm 99.9% sure no-one's written about vampires with a principle similar to mine.

Then, they have the ability to not be bl**dy obvious. Vampires can tell each other, but humans can't. If you knew what to look for, you could at least tell who definitely wasn't, but you could only really be certain who was on a much closer examination than any vampire is likely to allow you. Even their teeth aren't obviously different from a human's; the incisors are sharp, and angled so that they meet in a point, but the angle is slight, and you couldn't be sure they didn't just have slightly crooked teeth. Your best friend could be one, and unless they told you, you'd never know.

So I've Written a Story

Yesterday evening, I finished the first draft of that novel I've been going on about for ages. Of course, overall it's far from finished; I haven't even begun the first round of revisions - I'm having a few days off and then I'm planning to start that on Thursday, since I have exams Monday and Wednesday.

But this is a huge milestone for me. I've started working on quite a few stories over the years. One of them - you know the one: the one you write when you're a kid and cringe whenever you reread - I got to about two thirds of the way through. And I've done one or two short stories; one of them is here. But I've never finished a gull-length novel before.

I now have a story. The writing, and maybe a few plot points, will need a lot of revision and polishing, but an uncut diamond is still a diamond, and my story is finished. It exists, in detail and outside of my head.

So I'm pleased as punch and proud as Lucifer, right now. And also enjoying the release from my daily k rule. I like being able to go on Twitter in the mornings, and I played Minecraft this afternoon for the first time in months.

But I'm also aware that I have a lot to do, and from here on I'm in unfamiliar waters. Not entirely uncharted, but many of the charts are quite vague and some contradict each other. I know how to write a story; I've been doing it since I was a kid. But I have to make it good now, and publish it - I'm pretty certain that I'm going to self-publish, for all the reasons everyone else is self-publishing these days - and market it. I don't know how to do that.

I read today that I should start marketing now, or at least very soon. I don't have anything approaching a marketing plan. I don't even have a title, and I don't think I can do that much without one.

I know I need to get it professionally edited. Before that I will have to turn my first draft, which is very first-drafty in places, into a first decent version, and what I've read recently seems to suggest that I should get it beta-read and do more revisions and get it to a state that seems finished to me first and turning it over to an editor should be the last thing I do.

It will need a cover, of course. I know someone who started a design business with a publishing branch, and while I intend to self-publish, I'm hoping he'll be able to give me a good deal on a cover design. And there are plenty of design companies out there if that doesn't work out.

I suppose that when I have all the essentials of a book I will go through Createspace or a similar self-publishing service. I hope it will be easy and obvious how to do that.

And then, in theory, I'll have a book. I will have to sell it. On Amazon, for starters, but whether, and how, I will get it on any other shelves I have no idea.

All in all, daunting is a bit of an understatement. But it will be a learning curve, and with a bit of luck I won't mess it up too badly.

Names, and Pain

This is my personal bugbear.

When you write a story, you have to name all your characters. You have to either decide on real locations or invent place names as well. You have to come up with a title. It's a pain.


Naming characters isn't too difficult, even if you're not so good at names. If you want 'real' names, a quick search will reveal dozens of baby name websites. I like behindthename.com, which seems to be more focussed on researching names: it has less cutesy baby stuff than most, it's easy to find names used in a particular language/culture, and there's a link to a surname site. I generally ask the nearest person to pick a letter, and look for names starting with that letter. If none suit, or if I suspect them of deliberately choosing a difficult letter, I demand a replacement until I find one.

Some people also recommend visiting a graveyard and borrowing names from the headstones. I've never tried this; to be honest it creeps me out a little.

If you want names for a fantasy story or something else where you don't want names that are used in real life, it gets a little harder. But there are some tricks. Spell a name backwards - alter the spelling a little if the result looks clumsy. They often sound very name-like; I discovered this playing a pretend game with my brothers when we were little. It involved creating a 'language' by the simple expedient of spelling everything backwards, and I liked my younger brother's and my resulting monikers so much I used them in a story (you know, the one you wrote when you were a kid that you now cringe when you reread). My older brother unhelpfully turned out to be a brand of mints.

Or, similarly, pick a name that sounds interesting and modify it a bit to make it unique. Another approach is to choose a language quite different from yours and pick names that are real but unfamiliar. Although I can see this having drawbacks if you hope to publish in other languages - specifically, in the one you borrowed the names from.


I find places harder than characters. Again, it's easy enough if you're setting it in the real world. Just pick your locations out on a map. I've done a fair bit of location scouting via Google maps, where Streetview is extremely useful and sometimes funny.

For made-up places, I'm afraid I have very little to offer. I really can't do these well. 'Pick a letter' can help a little, especially if followed by 'and now pick a vowel', etc, until you get a decent first syllable, and analogous techniques to the ones I mentioned for made-up character names.


Then there's the title. This is apparently quite an important feature, something you really need to get right. So far I've only found two approaches:

1. Miraculous burst of inspiration leading to the perfect title. Out of my list of Novels I Plan To Write, three of them have titles resulting from this. The big drawback is that this only happens when it wants to. If it doesn't, I resort to

2. Working title. For example, the vampire story I'm currently working on has from the start been labelled on my computer as Vampire Story. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs. To make matters worse, I'm going to need a trilogy title as well as a book title. I'm now in the final scenes of my first draft, and still have absolutely no idea about either.

So, here's a question for you: how do you come up with a good title?

Review: A Song of Ice and Fire

I'm pretty niggardly with new books. This isn't because I'm a tightwad; or at least, it isn't just because I'm a tightwad. Otherwise I'd just get them second hand, or from the library like I do with books I'm probably only going to read once and don't want badly enough to fork out cash. The main reason is so that I don't run out of books I really want to read. In particular, when I find a series I particularly like, I ration myself to one book at Christmas and one for my birthday, which conveniently falls approximately halfway round the year form Christmas. And I stick to this.

So when I finished the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire and within a day was on Amazon ordering the third, you can guess that I was pretty gripped by it.

I have to admit being a little put off George R. R. Martin when I noticed how he styles himself: although it appears that he does indeed have two middle names, both beginning with R, not many authors put middle initials on their cover at all, and it still looks a bit like ripping off Tolkien. But it's the only thing that does.

Ice and Fire gets compared to Lord of the Rings a lot, but I don't think it really should be. Yes, it's a fantasy series set in a world with pre-gunpowder technology and magic, and there's a lot of fighting going on. But it's not really the same kind of story at all. It's on a different level: much more about the people, some of whom are doing what might be termed mighty deeds, than the mighty deeds, which are done by some people since that's the traditional way for deeds of any sort to get done. And about power struggles and politics, petty grudges and love polygons of varying complexity more than about saving the world. Although there are hints of the world possibly needing saving at some point, but we're three books in and the power struggles certainly seem to be the main point.

It's a little like the bastard child of LoTR and Eastenders.

Warning: some spoilers for the first three books (up to the end of A Storm of Swords part 1) ahead

Writing Tips: Concentrate

If you're a writer, and you're like me, you make up stories. A lot. It's what I spend most of my free time doing, as well as a reasonable amount of time that's not exactly free, but I'm bored and struggling to concentrate on what I'm actually doing, and all the time - often upwards of an hour, same again if I wake up in the night - between going to bed and finally getting my insomniac self to sleep.

The net result of this is a head full of stories. Now, the majority of them are my own, personal stories. But a not insignificant number develop into full-blown Novels I Plan To Write. Currently I have six, at least two of which will probably be series, that I seriously, definitely intend to write, and a handful more that I might at some point.

And I'm only allowed to work on one of them for the next three years.

Because that's the thing: you have to focus, and concentrate on one piece of work at a time.
Otherwise, if you do a little of one and a little of another, as and when you feel like them, then at best, you'll spend years and years working on them, and then have a dozen finished at once.
And that's probably what you want. Doing the promotion and marketing as well as all the technical stuff for one book sounds pretty daunting, and even if you could handle all that it sounds like a much better idea to have a steady trickle of books coming out to publish like a shaken ketchup bottle.

But that's at best. I really do think you need to concentrate on one major project at a time to get it finished at all. I know all about wasting time and not getting anywhere with my writing; I did it for years, and the least progress of all, even sum total progress, was made when I just opened whichever file I felt like working on today.

So I'm refusing to work on any novel besides the one about the vampires (as yet untitled. How do people think of titles?) until that's finished. Or rather, until they're finished: it's - I think - going to be a trilogy, so at a rough estimate that's about three years before I can let myself put anything on paper for any of the others. Maybe two and a half, with a following wind, since I'm a good way through the first draft of the first one.

It's not easy. I recently allowed myself a short story (you can find it at the top of the page, if you like), which is part of the world of one of the Novels I Plan To Write: now I keep thinking of the characters and I want to write about them. And I even more recently read The Sword of Senack which reminded me ever so strongly of a sci-fi future universe I have, which I intend to write about, most likely in several novels, and now I want to write that one too, and the sole thing stopping me from doing so is willpower.

But it's worth it. It's so, so worth it, because as long as I keep concentrating, and keep up the willpower, I have a fighting chance of making it as an author. So concentrate.

On a somewhat related note, they do say that you should also pick one genre to concentrate your efforts on.  'They' are people who seem to know what they're talking about, so I'm sure they're right, but I'm trying not to think about that, because the Novels I Plan To Write range from vampires - but scientific vampires - to a brave stab at the supernatural, to historical fiction, to the aforementioned sci-fi.
I have a faint hope that vampires, being traditionally in the realms of the supernatural, will lead on to that one, the sci-fi element will lead on to that one, and the fact that half of it is set in Ancient Greece will lead on to the historical ones, but basically my plan is to put it out of my mind and cross that bridge when I come to it. I would advise you all to at least try and focus on one genre, though.

The Sword of Senack: Review

The Mer-sons and The Sword of Senack is a young adult fantasy novel by EC Stilson.
It's set in the future, on another planet which humans have colonised from Earth, but it's definitely fantasy rather than sci-fi. As for the YA part: I think it would be a spectacular book for younger readers, but it's also good enough that the writing style isn't annoying for those who would usually choose something a bit more mature.

The plot is original and dramatic - very dramatic: within the first half-dozen pages we already have magic and a kidnapping, and rumours of hauntings - and keeps going with the action right the way through with plenty of twists and turns. Some of the twists I could see coming - and fictional characters can be frustratingly slow on the uptake sometimes, others were unexpected.

The world and the characters are nicely fleshed out and 3D. I had the feeling right the way through that there was a whole world there, even a whole galaxy, not just the immediate setting, and it's teeming with its own living things - peoples, animals and plants - and cultures and customs and geography and politics and everything a world should have.
Varied, relatable characters, not half! From devious villains, plotting and double-crossing away, with a little light sadism for entertainment, to brave and heroic warriors, and plenty more. There's Vander, for whom the word 'indomitable' might have been designed, and Hivis, whose first impression may be misleading, and he's not the only character who you might get the wrong idea of. I must say, I found myself getting a little exasperated sometimes with the main character, Aliya.

I'd heard about The Sword of Senack from following the author's blog, but I hadn't planned to read it: YA fantasy doesn't have a huge appeal for me these days. A few years ago, back when I was still very much into stuff like the Edge Chronicles, I'd have jumped at it, but now I usually prefer something a little more mature. In fact I only read it because I won a copy, and I'm extremely glad I did! I shall certainly look out fr the sequels promised by the ending, and I'll even go so far as to say I think this will be one of the books I'll reread a lot in the future.

Well worth a read, then: a fast-paced, original and immersive story, well-written, and recommended even if YA isn't really your thing.