For dragon enthusiasts
Bloodharvest is now live on the Kindle Lending Library, and the updated interior will go live shortly.
The physical book is uploaded, and marked published, but I don’t see a way to buy it yet.
I want to blather on about every part of doing it. Struggling through self-publishing is very much a battle of unknown-unknowns, and it might be useful for someone else to read a step-by-step guide to how I did it. Is that the sort of thing someone might want?
Every single part of self publishing takes longer than you would expect. I thought I’d have the paperback of Bloodharvest up weeks ago.
I submitted the manuscript to Amazon and got a proof. It looked fine. Not great, not terrible, it was fine. Wanting something a little better than fine, I shopped around for someone to do layout. I found someone (I’m going to put his contact information up in the Books page when I’ve got everything done) who did a full layout, but it took a few weeks including both work and searching through samples. He was great. After reading through the layout for the paperback, I realized it was much, much better than the ebook layout, so I took his recommendation for an ebook layout service and contracted them. They said by the end of next week or the beginning of the one after, they’ll have my layout done.
Meanwhile I resubmitted the paperback and found that the revision resulted in some cover bleed. The number of pages changed, so now the cover doesn’t quite fit. No worries. My cover designer (also to be revealed when all the books are ready) said she was more than happy to fix things. It’s just a scaling issue. Her schedule allows her to take care of it next week.
So next week, or maybe the week after, I’ll have a paperback and an ebook with the improved interior up on Amazon. Unless something else comes up.
OTOH, I had a complete surreal moment holding my proof. It’s signed and dated, the first of my fiction to be printed, and it’s on my desk. It’s almost done. I just need some text shrunk, and it will go live on Amazon. Concurrently the ebook should be sent back, and that will go live too. They’re both vastly better than what I could have done myself.
I wrestled with that for a while. Your humble narrator is not rolling in money, and layout is not cheap.
But it’s worth it. The product is just better. And while it’s all well and good to trumpet things aren’t people and we shouldn’t care too much, creating something like this, a book of my words and my ideas, is a reflection of me.
I worry the villians aren’t enough. Since most of my stuff is written within the perspective of the heroes, it’s easy to make weak villians who don’t bring the fear. What is my villians aren’t sinister enough? Can I amp them in some way? Can I just make sure they’re actual forces of antagonism and not just annoyances? Basically, are they bad, I mean really bad, or just kinda there?
I hope they’re okay.
Struggling with something. Update will drop before midnight MDT, but it may be close if I can’t square this circle.
When I get burned out, it’s because I’m doing so much work I don’t have time to do the work I want to do.
I had a job recently which was a great job: good coworkers, boss, pay, etc. But because of the way the contract was structured, I didn’t get to do a whole lot and often couldn’t do what anything directly. I had to watch others or prepare for others. I got burned out something fierce.
Right now I’m over committed with my free time. Employment is whatever, but I’m pushing the Nine, trying to shape Bedtime Stories up into the final draft (Final Draft #4, so yeah), and writing Death Mountain. A couple of side stressors, get into better shape and not spend money, are hardly unique or especially challenging, but screwing around and spending money were two things I could do that I liked to do. I am now broke, so obviously that’s not so good on the planning end.
I’ve also noticed that often I do nothing, spend a lot of time doing it, and then don’t have time to do things I want to do. I always thought this was me being ridiculous, but I’ve read about the same phenomena from CS Lewis and Marcus Aurelius.
However it happens, this feeling results in intense feelings of powerlessness that initiate burnout. The solution seems to be work more, but work smarter and harder. I am not sure how this is done.
Which of course I wouldn’t be. If I knew how to work smarter, I would, but that itself is a learning process and a lengthy goal.
All of this is a lengthy way of saying nothing, but it’s what I’m thinking about.
I visited Evergreen Library today, a bit outside Denver but not far. It’s amazing. A deer and her fawn nested ten feet from the windows, and I got a table with natural sunlight and a view of trees. Powered through my two hours of DM, which is steadily contracting in productivity as I try to work out all the little plot holes. After that I went and roamed, and wound up driving up Mt Evans. The highest paved road in the US services the peak, and at the top it was sub freezing with biting wind. I had no clothes or boots, so I did no hiking. The road is CO RT 103, Squaw Pass. It’s worth a trek, but be careful. The road isn’t well paved, and its busy with cars, bikers, and wildlife.
It would be interesting to go back, fully prepared, and hike a little in those conditions. That’s good prep for serious mountaineering. But I’d need a buddy and probably a GPS, and I’m not kitted out to undertake such things yet.
The mountains did remind me why I live here. I could see over the shoulders of lesser peaks into Denver sprawled out on the plains, as well as formations of white-bearded old men with their arms linked to the west. I saw the Sangre Cristo Basin (I think) spread out, mountains on either side, and tall purple shadows in the distance. They really do look like phantoms standing in a line.
Mountains are weird. They don’t look like peaks, but rather low bumps on brown fabric, the green stopping far below and the white only frosting the tips.
Mountain goats aren’t. A pack of them, five or six, blocked a road for a while, and they looked exactly like you’d think. If you have a picture of ‘big goat’ in your head, that’s a mountain goat. Don’t embellish; you’ve already got it.
First, thank you to the guest who left kudos on the Nine!
Secondly, I want to talk typography.
I commonly use two non-standard characters. The first is the EM or M dash depending on what you read, which is two hyphens stuck together. Both AO3 and LC have difficulty representing EM dashes, and AO3 tends to show it as two special characters stuffed together. You can find this in my stuff. –, but the dashes have little tails. I forget the name for them.
The other is accent marks, such as in Numenor or Númenor. I’ve had problems with them rendering on AO3 as well, but LC seems to use them fine. What’s weird is that sometimes the accents come through without a problem and sometimes they don’t. I don’t know if specific accents work and some don’t, or if the ALT codes LC and AO3 use are different, or what.
The punchline here is that I try not to use any weird characters except for EM dashes. This does mean I intentionally misspell some names. It’s a lesser of two evils type thing. Would you rather see N%n23menor sometimes or Numenor all the time, given I don’t really know exactly what procs the issue? The dashes don’t get used in words, so I’m leaving them alone.
Edit: In paragraph three, I used two hyphens and WordPress corrected that to the EM dash. Interesting.
Some of the recent bits of the Nine have been small because I’m really trying to get these moments right.
I’ve never much liked how many people belabor fight scenes. Most combat is quick and brutal, so the writing should be too. As such I’m taking two or three days to write 1000 words. But that doesn’t mean things aren’t significant, for later chapters will exist largely as responses to events in these. Most of this narrative is going to be consequent actions.
What’s more I’m trying to evolve some people and keep others the same. Characters like Julian are complex, whereas Tatianna is changing. It’s hard to get right. Author’s who do it effortlessly are masters of the craft.
The best part of writing is stuffing dragons everywhere.
Dragon Law: If you have a problem, you just need more dragons!
I prefer 1st person POV. One reason why is that as an author the separation between character viewpoint and writer viewpoint is more clearly defined, and can be expressed without constantly writing ‘he thought/she thought.’
Suppose Bob thinks all orcs should be killed. In 1P POV from Bob’s perspective, I can just write ‘All orcs should be killed,’ and that’s clearly an opinion of the character. Statements like that should be supported by having Bob live that opinion, and it can be undercut easily with narrative elements. If orcs are always chaotic evil, than scenes of orcs doing so can be shown. If I want to demonstrate that the all orcs should be killed opinion is wrong or flawed, narrative elements showing orcs being good, or at least worthy of living, can be shown too. That also leads to narrative conflict which is the pulse of a story.
But if I’m in 3P POV and Bob’s getting genocidal, that opinion is difficult to reveal without either having dialogue or a bunch of ‘he thought’ tags. Now the dialogue introduction of opinion is fine, but it’s a hoop to jump through. Writing constant thought attribution tags gets cumbersome, and sometimes I don’t really want to reveal a character’s thoughts. If there’s a murder mystery and the victim is an orc, I might not want to reveal Bob’s murderous impulses.
This is not to say any of those things cannot be done and done well, but they are often cumbersome. More specifically, they’re set of problems I don’t enjoy solving. I much prefer writing opinions that are wrong and subverting them.
Typically I revise a published chapter on AO3 three times within half a week of it going up. I’ll revise at least once more within the week after that.
Regarding the Nine and my aforementioned comments on continuity, the biggest thing I caught was a counting error. Specifically, the number of rings in the cashmere bag didn’t always work out right, and sometimes more or fewer rings existed in the world. It should be fixed now.
Other revisions are grammar based and most of them are errors that spellcheck won’t catch. It’s/Its, to/too, and capitalization errors are the bulk of these problems. This is one of the reasons I find paid copyediting so useful, and while it is expensive, it’s mandatory for true published works (anything on Amazon). When I write something I know what I mean. Furthermore, that meaning is baked into the words. That’s the point of writing, and hopefully what comes through to the reader, that sense of being pulled along by language. But readers not yet fully hooked won’t get pulled along, and even the most hooked reader may be shocked out of immersion by an unexpected typo. For this reason a paid copyeditor, someone who isn’t going to get pulled along, is invaluable because they catch all the errors the readers will, but also hopefully those the average reader won’t.
Expect anything that’s put up on AO3 to have errors on publishing day, have less a few days later, and continue to have a smaller nonzero number until it hits Amazon if that’s my intent. That’s harder than expected though, hence the low production numbers.
English composition is more art than science, so there are some issues of preference or style. These issues tend to have adherents who think their interpretation is right and other interpretations are wrong. I can’t write to their interpretations all the time, so I don’t.
Let me give an example of opinion treated as fact in grammar.
Suppose Bleys and Caine are talking (1).
Bleys said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Caine interrupted between ‘think’ and ‘that’ with, “That’s your problem, you never think.”
The above is unnecessarily wordy but highly specific. It is most certainly ‘right’ though cumbersome.
Also (2):
Bleys said, “I don’t think…”
And Caine interrupted, “That’s your problem, you never think!”
There are a couple of issues here. First, the ellipsis (…) indicates something left out. That’s what that bit of punctuation means. So the ellipsis draws attention to that which is left out, in this case the ‘that’s a good idea’ bit. Secondly, the second dialogue tag begins with an And which great writers do all the time and English teachers complain about.
Compare with (3):
Bleys said, “I don’t think–”
Caine interrupted, “That’s your problem, you never think.”
The em dash is replaced with two hyphens due to formatting issues in WordPress. But it indicates interruption or breaking. Furthermore the second dialogue tag doesn’t begin with an And.
So which is right, 1, 2, or 3?
Bluntly, it’s a matter of style and adherents to each style will tell you their style is right and other styles are wrong.
Zelazny tended towards 2. He and another of my favorite authors, Poe, never found themselves bound by grammar if it got in their way, and both broke rules whenever they felt like it. In both cases this willingness to defy grammar allowed them to create magnificence, and things like starting sentences with an And created deeply personal styles. Corwin talks throughout Amber and you get the feel of his presence through dialogue. Poe talks through his description, and you feel the fear and madness.
Further, noting the comma after problem, commonly commas are used to indicate a speaker pausing in dialogue. But I’ve heard debate over the ‘rightness’ of it.
Notice also the difference between ellipsis and em dash. The ellipsis draws attention to the fact that Bleys continued to talk but Caine spoke over him, and therefore his words are omitted from the text. The em dash draws attention to Caine breaking into Bleys’s words. They’re not synonymous even if the difference is subtle.
But that doesn’t mean 2 is right and 3 wrong. At least that dialogue tag isn’t right or wrong. It’s obviously stylistic, and outside of English class, one can embrace style at the expense of grammar.
If you, dear reader, want good, quick-and-dirty intros to dialogue punctuation, I have two recommendations. The first is September Fawkes: How to Punctuate Dialogue which is about as clear-cut a case of ‘exactly what it says on the tin’ as possible. I’ve got it bookmarked, and I tab back and forth every now and then. The other one is Strunk and White: Elements of Style which is probably the most useful book on grammar there is.
Style is subjective. It is not right or wrong; it is better or worse. Better is that which makes reading easier or harder as author desires and reader understands. Your writing doesn’t succeed by how many angry grammarians it mollifies. It succeeds by how many readers care and sometimes, whether or not you can pay rent.