I have been extremely busy at work lately, so much so that when I get home I just flop. I turn on my computer to read my emails, but that’s about it. I defintely don’t have time to open the word processor and start typing the next segment of my novel.

But that doesn’t mean I have stopped writing. I have a note book and I’m writing on the tram and bus on the way to and from work. I’m writing in coffee shops at lunchtime. I pull it out any time I have a spare few minutes. At the hairdresser, waiting for friends. Anywhere I have enough light and somewhere to rest the note book.

I have filled about ten notebooks already. Last Saturday I sat down and typed up the contents of the first one. 7,000 words. A week’s worth of borrowed writing time and I still managed 7,000 words. I was pretty happy.

It has changed how I write, however.

I usually type directly onto a computer when I can. It was hard to do at first, but I am pleased I stuck to it and forced myself to do it. In fact, two technical skills I would urge every writer to learn is touch typing, and writing directly onto a computer without writing it by hand first. If you can do this it eventually frees you up to write faster, and you have less retyping to do.

(I should add a third skill once that’s done. Backing up your work on a regular basis.)

Going back to writing in a note book has made things harder.

• I can’t write as fast, so I have this horrible habit of leaving bits out as I write. I think, “I’ll put that in when I type it up,” but of course, it never happens. I have no idea what I was thinking of by then
• I don’t work on the prose as much. On the PC I would work on a sentence over and over to get the meaning I wanted. On paper, once I’ve made a few crossouts and put other words in, I can’t even read what I meant. Sometimes I rewrite the whole section, but by this time I’m rushing ahead and I think to myself, “I’ll fix that when I type it up”. If I need to make major changes I just rewrite the whole thing, and don’t even refer back to the original. I end with two similar sections. I then type up both versions, which makes an aboslute mess
• Until I started writing on paper I didn’t realise how much I moved around in the manuscript. Writing by hand is sequential and so that’s how I type it up. My story timeline is an absolute mess, so bad that I need to write out a sequence just to get my own head around it.
• I don’t edit. When I am working on the PC, the first thing I do is re-read what I wrote the day before and fix any major problems. In fact, there have been days where I just polish the previous day’s work and don’t type up anything new

There are lots of things I plan to fix when I type it up, but come type-up time I don’t do any of that. I type straight from the notes without changing anything.

As a result, the work I produce from my handwritten notes is a lot rougher, more of an outline, with lots of things that need to be filled in. If I wrote like this all the time the story would need an extra draft to get it to its usual second-draft state.

I can’t wait till I get back to the keyboard.

It’s an old truism that if you hold onto your clothes long enough they will come back into fashion. They might be different colours, or made in different fabrics, but they’re still basically the same style.

You wouldn’t be seen wearing the ‘new’ fashions, of course, but your kids love them.

It’s the same with books.

If I had to pick a fashion in the science fiction world at the moment I’d say steampunk. If I had to pick a fashion in the fantasy world, I’d say urban fantasy. Werewolves and vampires reign supreme, and have done for so long now that we’re ready to move on to the next big thing.

When we first came up with the idea for Potion, high fantasy was at its peak (and yes, this story has taken a long time germinating). Epic journeys, heroes, quests and discovering new powers were the order of the day. By the time we had finished it, high fantasy was well and truly on the wane.

We put the novel onto Authonomy, and the reactions fell into three broad groups:

• Traditional fantasy readers who liked the story.
  This was a small group, and sometimes the comments were tempered with, “Despite that fact that this story (has elves, is done to death, etc.) …”
• Traditional fantasy readers who didn’t like the story.
  These were the people who were so over elves, journyes and bar-fights that they automatically hated it. There were quite a few more in this group.
• People who don’t traditonally read fantasy but enjoyed it anyway.

(There was also a fourth group, those people who flat out won’t read fantasy, but I’m not considering them here.)

I fall somewhere between the first and second groups. I read fantasy. Every time I pick up a fantasy novel I want it to be good, and I want it to be different. While I don’t mind a traditional fantasy, there are a lot of stories I pick up nowadays and don’t get that far into because I know the story. I’ve read it dozens of times before, in one guise or another, and I’m sick of it. It only needs one thing to keep me reading, mind you—a quirky or interesting character, something slightly new in the way the story is written, or even a new take on an old idea—but so many of these books are so similar they run together for me. That’s when I put the book down.

The second group took us to task for writing a traditional fantasy that wasn’t ‘traditional’. Our language is more modern, and faster paced than your traditional fantasy. Our writing style is fast, wheras many traditional fanstay novels are considerably slower. Even so, our story is probably as traditonal as they come—swordsman and mage hire on as bodyguards on a rescue mission. There’s lots of fighting, evil enchanters, magic, and so on.

It was the third group that really interested me. Their comments were almost all along the lines of, “I don’t normally read fantasy, but I like this.”

Their feedback reminded me of an agent’s comment on a query for a fantasy novel. (I think it was on Miss Snark’s now defunct blog, in the Crapometer series.) I read the query and thought, “No way, this story has been done to death”. The agent, however—who did not represent fantasy—said really positive things about it. “This idea sounds interesting, I like it,” and so on. I was surprised, and I have always remembered it because at the time it made me realise just how important it was to get an agent who knew the genre you wrote in.

Other than the fact that it tells us that we’re probably targetting our book to the wrong audience, I wonder if it means the next new fashion in fantasy will be a return to epic fantasy but without the heavy, Tolkeinesque language that characterised it in the past.

A lot of sites lately have talked about the Penguin and Amazon Breakthrough Novel and Authonomy. While I can’t speak for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel—there’s a good discussion about it on Nathan Bransford’s blog—I can talk about Authonomy, as both Calder and I have been on Authonomy since the start of the year.

This is how we did it, and what we hoped to get out of it.

There are two of us. We generally write together. We weren’t sure how two authors would go, so we decided that Calder would ‘own’ the book. We were in it not so much to get a book published by Harper Collins (although that would be a nice bonus, of course), but to garner feedback from readers. In particular, we wanted to see whether a story like Potion would still work, or whether it was so old hat (elves, a journey) that no-one wanted to read it.

We both registered as Authonomy users. I registered as myself, CabSav, while Calder registered under our pen name, Rowan Dai. It was an easy decision. She had a lot more time over January and February to devote to it. Plus, she’s more outgoing and enjoys the forum chats. (The author name doesn’t have to be the same as the users, but that’s the way we planned it. Even so, if we did it again she would use Calder.)

The book we put up was Potion, only on the forum we called it Not So Simple After All. Potion has always been a working title. We’re trying out Not So Simple, but we’re still not sure it’s the final title.

Calder has spent considerable time on the forums and reading other people’s novels. She probably won’t be able to do it for much longer, but for the moment she has been doing a lot of work.  It has been a really interesting marketing exercise. I recommend that everyone try it, just to see how much difference it makes by having a visible (and non-negative) presence makes.

One thing the commenters on Nathan Bransford’s blog said about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award was that they met a lot of really nice people. Other writers like themselves. It’s the same with Authonomy.  There are a lot of really nice people out there, and they all have the same interest as you. They’re all writing novels. How good is that?

The feedback we have got to date on Potion (Not So Simple After All) has been fantastic.  We have learned so much about where the problems are in the first few chapters. People have said the same sorts of things—in general—too many characters, certain spots are confusing, and so on. Not only have people said what doesn’t work for them, they have also offered suggestions as to how we might fix the problems.

In fact, it’s been so good we’re going to put Barrain up too. Just to see how we can improve it.

When I was a child what I knew of elves came from English books written for children—these tiny little creatures with green tunics and peaked green hats who sat under red and white toadstools and sewed. I was never sure what they were sewing. As a young child I adored these little creatures, but I got older and left all the ‘fairy’ stuff behind me. Elves were for kids.

I’m not sure where these images came from, because elves have been around in folklore for hundreds of years.  In most tales they are human-sized and human-like, with some powers. It took Tolkien to breathe life back into the old-style elf with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.  Suddenly elves were fashionable, and Tolkien’s depiction of elves as more beautiful and longer-living than humans was the accepted elf-standard—or stereotype, as many people now say.

I loved these elves. Give me a stunningly beautiful elf with power and talent, and have him/her struggle with some truly human emotions like friendship and moral right, and I’m hooked. If I thought I could get away with it I’d write a lot more elf stories myself.

But anything that’s fashionable eventually goes out of fashion. Elves are out.

If you’ve even got a whiff of an elf in your story, then your story is doomed. Or so popular opinion has it. They’re old hat. No-one wants to read about them any more.  But … but.  I want to read about them. Am I the only person in the world who wants to?

I don’t think so, no.

But they’re stereotyped.  They’re always beautiful. They’re always haughty. They’re always arrogant.

So. Tolkien’s definition of Elves is what we have come to know and expect. It is what we, the writers, bring to our books that makes our elves special.  And it’s not the fact that they’re elves, per se, that makes the stereotype, it’s how we round out, or don’t round out, the characters to make them complex, multi-dimensional people.

I don’t mind starting with the stereotype.  I’ll read a book about a long-lived elf who considers his race slightly superior to humans as much as I’ll read a book about a stiff-upper-lip Englishman, or a post-traumatic stress disorder war veteran, or a hairdresser who minces around the salon and talks in a high voice. (Incidentally, I have a hairdresser like this. He’s got an elegant, graphic artist wife whom he absolutely adores and they have a two-year old son called Benjy he can talk about for hours.)  All I care about is where the author takes it from there and how they make the character someone I care about.

The mincing hairdresser and the stiff-upper-lip Englishman have gone the way of elves. Out of fashion.  The ptsd veteran will go the same way. It’s fashion.

Fashions come and fashions go, but they usually come around again.

I want more books about elves.  Maybe I’ll just have to wait until the next generation of readers comes up. The ones who haven’t read about elves before (because they were unfashionable and they were too busy reading about their own fashionable creatures—vampires and werewolves) and look on them as something new.

Maybe, because they’re so out right now I should start writing a novel about elves. It takes a long time to create a book. By the time I’m up to the fifth draft elves might be fashionable again.

I’ve got lots of ideas.

In Defence of Elves, part 1.

I have spent time on the Authonomy site lately.

When I first heard about Authonomy I wasn’t sure it would work. I’m still not convinced it will work long term, once the initial momentum dies down, but for the moment at least it’s doing a reasonable job of picking the better stories—sort of.

I imagine it would be somewhat like your average slush pile.

Authonomy is a Harper Collins site that allows writers to post part (minimum 10,000 words) or all of their novel and have other users vote on it. If the story garners enough votes it makes it into the top five for the month and someone at Harper Collins will pick it up, read it and, if they think it’s good enough, purchase it. I haven’t seen any purchases yet.

From my observations:

• Networking obviously helps. If you provide feedback on one person’s book they will usually reciprocate by looking at yours, so th emore active you are, the more likely you are to garner votes.
• In the stories I have read and commented on to date, there appears to be a reasonable level of responsible voting. That is, readers won’t vote for the book unless they feel it warrants attention. Harper Collins encourages this by ranking responsible voters higher. If you consistently pick good books (and better still, pick them early), your book gets to the top of the list faster.
• As you would expect, there is an enormous range of quality in the books placed on the site.
• There are some brilliant stories out there, but a lot of them really need another rewrite (or two) before one could say they were finished.
• The general level of writing is above beginner. These people (and I include myself in these people) are serious about writing, but they’re not quite there yet. Some of them are very close.
• There is some good writing out there—a small number of books are very close to publishable.

I have found in reading stories that the blurb is important. This would effectively be the pitch in a query letter and it does make a difference. And I usually also have a good idea by the third page whether or not I want to keep reading.

I am half-way through another book where characters are one-dimensionally good or evil.

Over dinner with Calder—my writing partner—I spent half the night talking about it.  I think I was just disappointed with the way the characters were turning out.  (I know, I need a life.)

Calder, who’d already read the story, said, “It was a first book.  Besides, how can we talk?  Look at Potion. You can’t get anyone more pure good than Alun, can you?”

She stopped me cold.  There is a special place on our bookshelf for first books.  They’re what we call ‘dream books’.  They’re usually first novels.

When you look back on an established author’s writing, you can often pick their first book just by the content and style, long before you look at dates and publication history. They’re fairy tales, pure and simple. Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree is a good example.

Good things happen to the people, seldom bad. And the characters are often nauseatingly perfect. If they’re good at something, they’re really good.

Now, to Potion.

Potion is a classic fantasy journey story. An enchanter and a fighter take work as bodyguards for for a man—Alun— who travels to a hostile land to rescue his aunt. In our story, Alun is pretty good. The fairest of the fair folk, the best enchanter—you name it, he’s got it, ad-nauseum. He is not the protagonist, but the whole book revolves around him.  He’s the catalyst for everything that happens, and continues to be the catalyst for change throughout the book.

Our protagonists—the two bodyguards—are no slouches either.  One is a powerful enchanter in her own right (not the most powerful, of course, because that is Alun), the other is a legendary swordsman who was coaxed out of retirement for the job.

Alun is so pure he’s almost a caricature. 

We know that. We believe that because he’s not the protagonist we can get away with it.

But Tegan and Blade are no slouches either. And this is where the problem lies. 

They’re downright good at what they do—magicking and fighting—not to mention they’re ‘good’ people too.  They don’t do ‘bad’ things.

So here am I, complaining about a set of characters being one-dimensional, when my own appear to be exactly the same.

I was channel surfing last night when I chanced on Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction.

This is a movie about a man who starts hearing a woman’s voice inside his head. This woman appears to be his author, and he is the character in a novel she is writing. (I haven’t watched it. I must do after this.)

In the scene I stopped at, Ferrell—a tax collector—is talking to a woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who has paid only part of her tax bill. There is no sexual tension between the two at all, but suddenly the author’s voice comes in over the top and talks about how Ferrell’s character couldn’t help noticing what attractive legs the woman has, and the way her body fits snugly into her skirt—or thoughts similar to that.

Because I was channel surfing and hadn’t expected the voice, it came totally out of the blue.

I had to laugh because I have read a lot of books where the physical attraction between protagonists is just like that.

I’m not talking about those stories which build up to events which culminate in a sudden physical attraction between two characters. When that’s well done it works, and it’s good.

Nor am I talking about relationships where the protagonists have been friends for a long time and then something happens that triggers an awareness of each other in a sexual way.

And of course, I’m not talking about the story where the attraction starts when the characters meet, and just keeps growing in looks and actions all the way through.

What I am talking about are those books where the characters are getting along just fine, without a hint of attraction between them and then, for no logical reason whatsover related to the story, they start thinking about each other sexually. It feels like the author has decided—all of a sudden—that they must be lovers. Almost as if the author is stuck for ideas, or doesn’t really know their characters. Or they need to change the direction of the story.

So, out of the blue, both characters start noticing things about each other that they hitherto hadn’t.

And it feels like an act of God. One minute the characters are friends or acquaintances, the next—by authorial decree—they’re embarking on an affair.