Hot weather and editing

We drove out to a country park on the Derwent Reservoir the other day to give ourselves and Tim a change of land and smellscape, and will go back again. It's not too far, but gives the feeling of being out in the country - which it is! Pine trees and heather are so different to the green fields and deciduous trees where we are. I  noticed the low  water level in the reservoir  - and it is so early in the year. Come July there will be water shortages if this weather continues.

In a way I hope it does go on being warm, for it is so nice to be out and not blown away or come home soaked and freezing. (Actually, dog walkers will know that we come home warm and toasty whatever the weather - it is only the first few minutes that are pretty dire. After that, the exercise warms the muscles and its fun to be out.) The other thing I'm thinking is that France will be even warmer by the time we get there. We've experienced occasional weeks there when it is too hot to contemplate moving about too much, and there may be more of them in the future.

As for editing, I'm whipping out words out of Banners at a tremendous rate. The word count now stands at 118,158 which is a vast difference. I hunted out early critiques and reviews and gleaned the following tips:

• dialogue is repetitious
• needs paring down
• used passed instead of past

I had noticed how wordy I was as I was going through! Still, fifteen years ago books tended to be wordier. I'm contemplating a different title and a new cover, but have not settled on anything yet.  

Writing news

I think I’m missing a trick here, for rarely do I mention my books on my blog. I hope everyone finds the links to the book pages and leave it at that, but maybe I should do more. As I’ve said, I’m re-editing Banners of Alba, which I published ten years ago in the US. It astonishes me to see how wordy I was back then, and I’m desperately trying to edit 147,000 words down to something closer to 100,000. Currently I have 100 pages to go on a first run through and I’ve “lost” 10,000 words. Still room for lots more to go.

I’m experimenting with shorter chapters, too. In many cases I am attempting to keep a chapter to one scene, or two scenes at best and I’d prefer it if the characters remained the same. In order to accomplish this I may need to do some re-jigging, place scenes in a slightly different order, but it will all be for the best. The reason for this? It saves skipping from one POV to another too often. 

Would the pic on the right make a good new cover? 

New beginnings

After a few days of not working on a book, I'm now back in the groove. I amused myself by checking through all the photographs I've taken in the last  few years, and deleted all the ones that were not worth keeping. That freed up a lot of space! Then I began to look at writing again. Started slow, by opening up a copy of my first book Banners of Alba in a word document. (The publisher closed, so I have my rights back and plan to re-publish it myself.) It needs some work, because I've learned a lot in the last ten years. 

First of all, I changed the font to Bookman Old School, and the Language from US English to UK English. I fully justified the document. Then I checked all the chapter headings and decided I wanted just Eleven instead of Chapter Eleven. (That must save a lot of words....). Next I looked at the scene breaks, decided on a particular style and ensured they were all the same.  I've set up Styles for these things. 

We're on a roll now.  I began with the first chapter and read through it. I made changes. Couldn't stop myself. Not to the storyline, but cutting out unneeded words, where I'd over-egged the cake and/or repeated myself. Sometimes simply explaining things more concisely.
Like I said, I've been learning  a  things these last few years. Pity I didn't start writing much, much sooner!

New tasks

The New Year is a good time to turn over a new leaf. (Isn’t it easy to fall into clichés?) I mean that I want to set up a good regime of work again, because if the Christmas holidays do nothing else, they seem to butt into everyone’s working habits. I’ve done virtually nothing for a fortnight now, but from today – things will be different!

So much to do. I’m learning all the time, and there are so many changes coming along that it is hard to keep up. This month my long time independent publisher Write Words, Inc will close its doors after 17 years and leave two of my titles homeless. 

I’m deciding whether to publish myself or canvas for a publisher for Banners of Alba and Dark Pool. How much do I want to re-edit them? They were my first books published, and I could probably improve them. Dark Pool in particular has never had much success, so perhaps a change of title and a new cover is in order there.

Certainly I shall do nothing with them until I have The Matfen Affair published, but other tasks will probably include trying to get Amazon to remove all traces of the old version, particularly the paperback of Banners – still for sale at the ridiculous price of £33. I’ll need to alter the book page here, too. There’s nothing worse than an out of date book page!

I'm also having another go at mastering Goodreads. In the past I have found it the most difficult website, but I really should have a presence there.

A little shameless

A little shameless self-promotion today - and why not? Looking back, Banners of Alba was a complex subject for a first book, but my heart was in it and I'm not telling porkies when I say it was a labour of love from start to finish.

Shakespeare was to blame, because he maligned the character of MacBeth for the sake of a play. It was a good play, but I decided to look into the story of the real MacBeth. There wasn't a lot of written history available to me, and so I had to use my imagination. Gradually the shadowy figure of the king who reigned for seventeen years and thought of Alba as one united country morphed into my version of what kind of man MacBeth might have been. Because it is fiction and not a biographical study (not at all!) I gave him a new name - one I could spell, and a Gaelic one whose spelling I had to check every time I used it.

If I wrote it today, I suspect it would be shorter, but it might just lose something in the process. Best to leave it as it is, I think.

Promotion is vital these days

I've discovered software on my computer that allows me to make trailers fairly easily. In the last fortnight I've made two, one for SHADOWS, and here's the one that went up last night: Banners Let me know what you think of it! (I think I'd better re-make the original Dark Pool trailer, which now looks crass beside the other two!)

As for writing, I haven't done any for some time. There's no great angst about it; I'm just having a rest from writing every day by dealing with visuals and matching sound to them. It's a pleasurable thing to do and therapeutic, too. It started as promotion for my new release SHADOWS, which isn't three weeks old yet - still a baby! Because I didn't have a publication date, I was fairly laid back about preparing the sort of promotional tours that authors do these days. When I received a date at the beginning of May, it was a bit late to get on blog tour lists, and even then there was a fortnight's delay. I was lucky to have friends who gave me a mention on their blogs!

So I thought trailers might help, and hopefully they will.

Killing off

Any minute now I'm going to go into my study, sit down at the pc and kill someone off. I'm not looking forward to it, because really the character doesn't deserve it. But that's life, as they say. Life in 1544, anyway, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, say between a rock and the English army in Edinburgh. I've killed people off before in books, and didn't mind. Usually they were baddies, like Moddan in Banners of Alba. In fact I did a shipboard battle scene in that book, with axes, shields and swords. So it's not the bloodiness of it all that worries me, but something else. This death is going to hurt my protagonist, and because I like him, I'm wary of writing the scene. Odd, isn't it? He doesn't even exist outside my imagination, and yet I don't want to hurt him. I've avoided this scene for about two weeks now, but I'm going to have to do it. Today. Now. Well, I'll have a shower first....and then maybe a cup of coffee... The pic is taken while driving over Hartside summit on the Pennines, looking down on Cumbria

Requiem

My publisher, Quaestor2000, is closing. Copies in stock will be sold for another month but after that, it’s over. So if anyone wants copies of Far After Gold or Till the Day Go Down, get them now, otherwise they’ll be pulped.

My sympathies lie with Roger Bennett, who began the Quaestor venture. Publishing is harder than people think. Or rather, to make a success, a profit-paying venture, is harder than it might seem. Getting a book printed is easy enough today, but the trick is in selling it. Faced with 500 copies of a title, where do you off-load them?

The big chain booksellers go through their chosen hubs, and select only what they think will sell in multiples. Persuading them to accept a novel from an unknown author is like trying to push a snowball uphill, in my view. Or, they accept politely, and eventually it dawns that nothing is really going to happen. The precious book never appears on their shelves. Or if it does, it's there for one week and then vanishes.

Some people are built for the task of selling their own work and enjoy it, but the mere thought of filling the car boot with copies and touring the countryside as a salesperson fills me with dread.

So, my brief time with paperbacks published and available is soon to be over. I’m sad about it, but console myself with the thought that I still have two e-books available – Banners of Alba and Dark Pool.

And soon I’ll have a contemporary ghost story, Shadows, coming from Sapphire Blue. As with everything else, its Onwards and Upwards and Don't Look Back.

(The pic? Prudhoe Castle in the snow.)

What five years does...

I recently put an excerpt from my first published novel up a post on bellesandbeaus

It was interesting to look back and see how I was writing then and compare it to how I’m writing now. I have to admit I made all the common errors everyone talks about – repetition and overuse of words, etc etc, but in spite of it all I can see a directness I like in that early story (which was the longest of my four published titles).

Perhaps I’m now trying to hard. It’s a question that concerns me sometimes. In absorbing all these rules of how a writer needs to write to please editors and gain a contract, I may have lost that vital spark, that freshness that makes things leap off the page. Or maybe I’m deluding myself, and I never had it at all. That’s possible, too.

I read a post yesterday and planned to keep and comment on it. When I went back to read it again I found I’d deleted it along with all the other stuff that comes in everyday, so I cannot refresh my memory, or give credit to the author, which is a shame. The gist of the post was that a writer gives away a lot of his or her own personality in writing. I’ve heard this before, and I’m not sure I agree with the premise.

Surely a writer makes things up, uses her imagination, builds a story around characters which are usually (but not always) a mish-mash of people we know and characters we’ve read or seen on the screen with a dash of our originality thrown in? What makes a successful story-teller but the ability to blend traits we recognise with out-of-the-ordinary, heroic style deeds? To take and everyday situation and think What if, and take it from there, into realms the ordinary person in the street would never contemplate?If that is what fiction writing is about, where is the danger of revealing one’s own personality? More on that tomorrow.

And just in case you wondered, the starter was salmon...and it was delicious. But it has absolutely nothing at all to do with this post!