As you know, we’re trying to sell novels here. If you read much about writing on the internet then you will also know that that a lot of agents now accept email submissions. This is great for us down at the bottom end of the world because it saves a lot on postage*.

Like a lot of authors I have my favourite agents. Those who sell a lot of books in the genre we** write in, and who sell books that we both love to read. There are even a couple of really special agents who were encouraging with the last manuscript and they’re the first ones we’re going to send to the next query too, when the book is polished enough.

One of these agents is prefers snail-mail queries but one is happy to take email and I have queried her before via email.

Last night, as I glanced through my junk email folder prior to deleting it, what do I see? The agent’s name against a letter touting miracle pills for the male of the species (you know the ones).

That was fine. I understand that we all end up caught by spammers stealing our email addresses, and although it infuriates me I know that there is little I can do about it. Most of the time the poor innocent victim doesn’t even know their address has been spam-napped unless they get an undeliverable mail message back about an email they didn’t even send. What I normally do is add the victim to my junk-mail list and their emails are automatically routed to the junk mail folder.

I caught this one, so I said, yes, agent was a ’safe’ person and all was right with the world.

Except … these spam mails seem to go around and around among the users on the list until the spammer gets sick of it, or we add most of the other users to our junk mail list. It’s fine for me, because I do run my eye down the list of senders of junk mail before I delete them, and I can recognise important names. Like the agent’s.

But it doesn’t work back the other way.

This agent has by now probably received spam mail back from me. She doesn’t know me. What’s she going to do? If she’s anything like me she’ll already have clicked on ‘add sender to blocked sender’s list’. Which means that next time I send my carefully crafted email query to her, with its extra line mentioning that even though nothing came of it, she had asked to see a full for the last novel, that email will go straight into her junk folder, or will be deleted, unseen.

Sob.

*A quick note on postage. The internet has been a boon for us trying to sell our work, and not just because we can email queries to prospective agents. It’s great for the snail mail too.  Why? Because it’s so easy to order postage stamps from other countries. Those of you who remember international reply coupons (IRCs) will probably agree with me that they were hopeless. But now I can order postage stamps, and even correctly sized postcards, and include them with the query. It’s fuss free for both me and the agent.  I love it. 

** The constant switch between I and we is deliberate.  See I, we, and the grammatical intracies of me talking about us.

How different are the names of characters in your novel?

Progress on Barrain has come to a standstill at present as I am concentrating on the novel for my critiquing group.

I gave Calder the first 30,000 words to read last night.

It’s a difficult story to write in that I am trying to hide the true identity of one of the characters, to keep the reader guessing who it is until the end of the story.

“Well,” Calder said at the end. “I know it’s not Vas.”

It wasn’t Vas, but I was trying not to give away who it was, so I asked, trying to sound surprised, “Why wouldn’t it be him?”

“Because of the name,” she said. “You would never name a hero Vas.”

She went on to remind me that we had a character named Vasst in Potion,  a spineless group leader who turned traitor. We also have Vlad the Impaler in a story idea we have yet to write.

“Which leaves Hanna and Julan as the only two people it can be,” Calder said. “And I don’t think it’s Julan because Julian was the bad guy in Shared Memories, so it must be Hanna.”

It was Hanna, in fact, but I had gone to a lot of effort to make Julan feisty and likeable, so that most readers would think it was her.

Flabbergasted is probably too strong a word to describe how I felt, but it did make me pause.

“Arrax is a hero, of course,” Calder said. “Because his name starts with ‘A’. A lot of your heroes have ‘A’ names.”

Arrax is the hero. And yes, in prior books, both Alun and Aled have been heroes too.

I made a list of names and characters in our stories.

Calder did have a point.

There were other similarities. Lots of ‘n’ and ’l’ sounds in the names. One or two syllable names, particularly for the good guys. And definitely a trend to bad guys with names starting with ‘V’.

I have to rethink some character names.

Calder asked me, the other day, how I ’saw’ what I was writing as I wrote it. 

She is very visual. She sees the story almost like a movie as it unfolds in her head, and the hardest part for her is getting that picture down exactly as she sees it, and not losing what she has seen as she translates it to paper.

I had to think about how I do it, and I still couldn’t say for certain. All I can say with certainty is that I seldom see movies.

Most of the time I am inside the character’s head, seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking what he or she is thinking, feeling what he or she is feeling, sometimes even smelling what he or she is smelling. It’s very focused. I couldn’t necessarily even tell you what the view is outside that narrow focus, who else is around in the story. It’s often a nebulous grey area (dark grey) and I have no idea what is happening there.  It’s a bit like a spotlight on the stage. All attention is focused on the spotlight, and everything around it is dark.

Sometimes I can’t even tell you what the main character looks like outside of some general characteristics. Scott, from Barrain, is tall, blonde and obviously nice-looking.  He’s athletic, because he snowboards and skis. Not so long ago he’d be classified as a yuppie—I don’t know what that translates into in this generation. But one person’s nice looking and fit is not the same as someone else’s.  I can’t give you an exact idea of what Scott looks like because I don’t really know.

Ask Calder though, and she could probably give you a police identikit photo of him. And that photo, incidentally, is unlikely to look anything like my version of Scott.

Packing to go away seems so much harder than it used to be.

Once it was just throw some clothes into a bag and we’re ready. Anything we’d forgotten we bought along the way.

Nowadays the clothes are the least of my worries.

Have I got my mobile phone? Have I packed the phone charger?

Next it’s the work in progress. Have I copied the novel I am working on onto the laptop? What about my current research?

Then it’s the computer itself. Is the laptop packed? What about the accessories, especially the power cable. And the mouse for those days when the touchpad is just too much? What about the wireless card? And the phone-away number for the wireless card? Are we sure the place we have booked has wi-fi access? Do we have a flash drive, just in case?

There’s an extra bag for the PC and all its consumables. There’s an extra bag for all the paperwork we need to carry. The car boot is full, and we’re only driving to the airport.

The critique group I joined is changing the way I write my novel.

More story, less spontaneity

I am forced to plan out the story more. This is good in that I have a more solid idea of the world, who the people are, and what made them that way earlier than I would normally. It is bad in that as a result my writing is not so spontaneous. It’s no longer a journey of discovery, I’m working to an outline and it’s starting to feel like work.  (I’m a technical writer by day and I do outline for this.)

I’m writing to a different audience

I have always written to an audience—Calder and myself—but now I’m starting to consider what my critique group wants as well.

If I’m not careful the story will go in a direction I hadn’t planned. I know what the group likes by now; I know that the next part of the story won’t suit them at all. There is a real possibility that I will take the story in a different direction because of this.

That could be good, it could be bad, but right now it’s uncomfortable, like someone is hijacking my story.

Best value is from continuity crits

The best critiquing I get from the other members is comments about continuity.

For example, I have two characters looking at a dead body. Two paragraphs later, one of them removes the sheet that covers her. But they were already looking at her.

Another example. The protagonist is seated, working, when a young girl comes in and tells him he is needed at the hospital. Next thing we know, the girl is skipping to catch up with his longer legs—however, he never moved from his seat.

Minor details, but very important. We may have caught them in the last draft, but sometimes we don’t. So far, this is where the value of the writer’s group is coming into it’s own.

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I love reading about the practicalities in writing fantasy, like how far horses can really travel in a day.

Gillian Polack has done a similar thing with food in her guest blog Food is Just Fantasy Without Substance over at Voyager Online. Gillian talks about carrying pots and pans, and what travellers might eat along the way. Interesting stuff.

I know that even when I pack food for a long car trip how tedious it is and how much extra planning is involved. I do a 500km round trip roughly once a month to see my mother, who lives in the country. I love to take my own food, but the effort it requires to prepare and pack, and then remember to wash everything when you get home adds considerable time to the trip. Many times I just can’t be bothered, and buy food on the way.

After she talks about packing and cooking on the road, Gillian goes on to mention stews at those deserted way-out inns that our travellers always seem to land at, and how it just won’t happen. And I agree with everything she says. 

Notwithstanding that, the poor old stew gets a pretty rough run in fantasy novels. It is generally considered capital ‘B’ Bad, and the sign of an absolute novice if you make your characters eat stew.

Is it really so bad?

I think of what I feed people here when I have a house full of visitors, and it’s generally some form of pot meal that I can cook up and serve out as required, particularly if people aren’t all eating at the same time. Stew is good, or pasta with a sauce I can leave heating on the stove.

So in a busy inn where lots of people drop in for food at various times, stews could be appropriate. They’re quick, because they’re keeping warm by the side of the stove. They’re easy, because there’s no extra cooking required, all you have to do is serve it onto a plate. They’re convenient, because you can cook them early before the crowds of drinkers arrive from their long journeys looking for beds.

So yes, the humble stew is not a good traveller, although you can use it under certain circumstances. Meantime, I might pop over to Gillian’s site and ask for that cubed soup she mentioned. It sounds fun. Like an old fashioned stock cube.

And for our next fantasy when the characters do a journey—they’re taking a frying pan, a billy and a (not very big) bag of flour.

This is the third time I have taken Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, the first book in his Wheel of Time series out of the library to read. It will be the third time I return it to the library unread. I try a chapter or two, and then put it down. I just can’t get into it.

Most of my friends love Robert Jordan. Especially the first few books, they say, and then they go on to grumble that he is [was] taking such a long time to get to the end of the story and that their interest dies off in the last few. When Brandon Sanderson completes the last novel (started by Jordan, who died in 2007) this will be the twelfth book in the series.

When does a series become too long?

I love a good series. If I have characters I really love I keep waiting for the next book, wanting to read about them again and again. But … I do lose interest. After about the sixth book I stop reading. Part of this is me. The character stops being exciting for me. Part of it is the author too. Imagine living with the same characters year in, year out. It would get boring, dispiriting even.

Sometimes it’s for contractual reasons, but sometimes authors remain with a good selling series long after its use-by date. I see this more in mystery than in fantasy and science fiction. Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta, Dell Shannon’s Mendoza, J.A. Jance’s Joanna Brady, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes—I could go on and on. Some, like Conan Doyle, get so sick of their characters they try to kill them off. In others, Patricia Cornwall, for example, the stories become more gruesome with each book.

Many authors, like C. J. Cherryh with her Foreigner series, introduce new characters (Cajeiri) to breathe new life into the story.

Me, if I had a long-running series with popular characters, I’d like to do it the way Robin Hobb did. She believed she was definitely finished with Fitz and the Fool after the Assassin trilogy. She started a new three-book series set in the same world but with different characters. I don’t know if she meant the Fool to creep in, starting out as a minor character, then getting a bigger part, but the Fool’s like that.  Once she did this though, she went back and wrote the Tawny Man trilogy about Fitz and Fool, and tied all three series together. After this she wrote a completely different trilogy altogether, the Soldier Son series. I live in hopes she’ll write another Fitz/Fool story but the point is that she didn’t write the second set until she’d had a break from them, until she was ready. I think that made for a much better story than a tired run-on from the previous one.

I am doing more writing, although it is not yet reflected in the word count.

A lot of it is putting back story into what has already been written.

The writing is clumsy at the moment; phrasing is awkward, with lots of cliches. Where I see them I take them out, but at the moment I figure that bad writing is better than no writing at all.

The story is much stronger.

The most interesting change to date is how Scott has become less of the main character. Taliah and Mathers are coming into it more.

Here’s a dilemma I never expected to have. All our books are starting to sound the same.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but I am noticing aspects of one book creeping into other books.

Take Barrain, for instance. As part of the rewrite for this draft we introduced a substance called bloodleaf, so named because it reacts with the blood and that reaction is important to the story.

In Potion we gave a substance called bloodstone, so named because it reacts with the blood. That reaction is important to the story.

In Barrain Caid is a nice guy but most people think of him as cold and distant, initially at least. In Potion Alun is a nice guy, but most people think of him as cold and distant at first too. Both of them have heavy responsibilities.

These two stories are different. One is a rescue mission, the other is the story of a man who is stranded outside his own world.

And yet, how different are they really? Sometimes I find myself writing things Scott, in Barrain, says that I know could equally well be said by Blade, the point-of-view character in Potion.

Are we writing the same book over and over? I don’t think so.

Are we using the same main characters over and over? That I’m not so sure about.

In the next draft of Barrain we will really have to look at Scott’s and Caid’s characters to ensure that they are unique, and not just badly formed clones of Blade and Alun.

Yesterday I wrote about my first experiences in a face-to-face writing group.

One other thing I learned. I am so out of it when it comes to science fiction and fantasy.

The coordinator brought in a number of science fiction books recently published in Australia. I had not read one of them. (And looking at the covers, I probably won’t either.)

The younger people in the group are heavily influenced by Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica and a little bit of Star Trek. Other reviewers picked up on similarities to these shows that went totally over my head. One writer seemed to be almost writing a spin-off of one of the shows.

I once read an agent’s blog where the agent reviewd queries sent in by readers. This agent didn’t represent science fiction or fantasy normally (or a lot of other things that came through), but she reviewed everything that came through. She found a couple of SF queries she liked.  I remember my reaction was that the ideas she liked were out of date. They had been done to death twenty years earlier and science fiction had matured way beyond that, but she didn’t know the genre, so she didn’t know that.

That’s how I feel right now about about science fiction and fantasy. I am so out of touch.

So how come I am still finding new books to read?