Sometimes I feel I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t have time for Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against either of them. They’re great sites. It’s just that the way I use my computer and the internet is changing. I find that the content on Twitter, especially, but also Facebook, is too short. I don’t get enough information out of a single post.

I know they say that people’s attention spans are getting shorter, but mine seems to be getting longer. If I don’t have something meaty to read I just don’t read it.

Take blogs, for example. I subscribe to a lot of blogs and nowadays I mostly skip the shorter posts and go straight to the articles with substance. Newspaper articles are the same. A 200 word article simply stating the facts doesn’t cut it any more. I want facts and opinions and background as well.

I even check my email less. Some days I don’t read my emails at all. (That’s not counting work emails, of course. That’s part of what you get paid to do.)

I don’t know if it’s co-incidental, but this reluctance to read short parallels almost exactly my increase in reading electronic books. I wonder if reading more e-books is training me to read longer in general both onscreen and online.

You’ve seen it in the movies, you read about it in books, particularly whodunits and thrillers. The hero needs information. This information is hard to get. It’s on a government computer somewhere.

Our hero goes to a friend or a workmate or a relative who, just coincidentally–or not so coincidentally if the writer has laid the groundwork well—happens to work in the department that can give him the information and says, “Please. I need this.” Sometimes, depending on the movie or the book, it’s a matter of life or death.

So the friend/workmate/relative goes off to get the information for them.

And that’s where my credibility stops and something inside of me starts screaming, “Do you realise what you have just done?”

Nowadays information is better protected than it ever was and in any big company, and in many small ones, there’s an audit trail of who accessed which bit of data and when. Not only that, you can’t look up just anyone’s data. If the friend/workmate/relative goes outside their need to know they start tripping security flags. Someone is going to investigate.

The penalty for accessing data you’re not allowed to is instant dismissal.

Even if the breach is small. Even if it doesn’t hurt anyone.

What can the secondary character say? “But it’s life or death for my friend.”

Most bosses would reply something along the lines of, “He should have gone to the police then. Or come to the boss here and explained the problem.” Which of course, the hero can’t do because a) no-one would believe him, and b) they still wouldn’t give him what he needed to know, which is why the hero got his friend to do it in the first place.

Collateral damage to secondary characters is a fact of fiction.

I accept that.

I don’t know why this particular case bothers me more than most. Maybe it’s because it’s such a thoughtless thing to do and because the consequences for the secondary character can be devastating. Maybe (probably) it’s because I and many of my friends work in environments where data is protected and we have seen first-hand the effects of even minor security lapses.

To me it makes for a selfish hero, so focussed on his own problems that he doesn’t consider anyone else. That always makes me like him a little less.

Writing time is scarce in a full working day. I take any time I can, even lunchtime, to write.

I have it down pat now. Pick a not-so-busy time to eat, find a quiet cafe, order food, then pull out the PC and start working. Since I purchased a netbook my writing productivity has increased fourfold.

I am often approached by other people who are interested in buying their own netbook to ask how I feel about mine. I tell them it’s great, and talk about the things that were important to me when I bought it. Could I touch type on it? Were the control, shift and alt keys in the right place? Then they ask the question that’s important to them. How do you access the internet on it?

The fact is, I seldom use the netbook to connect to internet. The screen is too small, access is slow(ish), and I’d rather use the full-size, faster PC at home.

Yet for most people, how and whether their computer connects to the internet is the only question.

Sometimes I feel I am the only person left in the world who doesn’t need internet access 24-7.

I use the internet, of course. I use it for research. I use it for email. But I don’t need it on all the time. In fact, it’s nice to be able to sit down, uninterrupted, and just write.

If you’ve read this blog before you will know that I’m not a big fan of prologues.

A good prologue gives you information that is not part of the main story but that is important to know. It is often set in a different time to that of the main novel, usually earlier, and it generally has a different protagonist. The classic prologue that comes to mind is Tolkien’s explanation of how the one ring to rule them all came about. (I’m thinking the movie version here.)

Another use for a prologue is as part of a series, where it’s a précis of what happened in previous books. I might add that most of my favourite series don’t have prologues and don’t need them.

Unfortunately, many people who write fantasy novels seem to think that their story isn’t a real fantasy if it doesn’t have a prologue, so they put one in, when really what they have written is chapter one of their novel and they should just have started the main story earlier.

Their prologue deals with events that happen to the person who is the main point-of-view character of the novel. These events often happen only days or—or even in one case, minutes—before the story proper. They’re often narrated in a distant, omniscient voice. If you read the prologue at all you just skim it, then you turn over to chapter one and start reading it and bang, you’re right in the middle of the aftermath of what happened in the prologue.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a story that starts in the middle of the action, but even a story that begins with action needs a place where you, the reader, can begin. That’s usually at the start of chapter one.

I believe that you should be able to read a whole book without the prologue and still understand and enjoy it. The prologue should add further information and enrich the story, but it shouldn’t be part of the story. Going back to Lord of the Rings, the
story of the making of the ring had nothing and everything to do with the story of how and why Frodo and company set out to destroy the ring. That’s the ideal prologue.

In my latest novel I thought I had written—horrors—a prologue. It was set prior to the main story. It was told from a different point-of-view, and the narrator was first-person while the rest of the story is third-person. What happens in the prologue is the trigger for the whole story. You could read the story without it, but you read it differently because if you read the prologue first you knew what was going on and why things had happened.

So be it. If my story had to have a prologue it had one.

And then just a little over half-way through the story the same first-person narrator pops up again. It wasn’t conscious. More a, “Hey, here I am and I want my turn now,” type of writing. Three-quarters of the way through back he pops in again. This time he joins up with one of the protagonists and travels with them for the rest of the book.

So he’s not a prologue any more. I’m not sure what he is yet.

One thing I do know is that he has a totally different voice to the main character. If you pick up my story and start reading it based on that non-prologue you may not like it when you get to chapter two, because it’s a totally different story.

I haven’t quite worked out how to deal with that yet. Or whether I even need to.

I’m a little depressed today. I’ve a cold coming on, a really bad headache and it the whole ‘not working well’ attitude seems to have crept into my writing as well.

My NaNoWriMo novel from last year, which has been progressing so well, is close to completion. I have two scenes to go. The final wind-down scene, plus one other scene that I left out of the original story because trying to write it had stopped me for two weeks. I finally added a note to say do that scene later, outlined what was to happen, and moved on. I haven’t stopped writing since.

So the story is nearly finished. When I’m done it will be 85,000 words, and it’s nice to know that the first draft is done. Six months to write a novel. I worked pretty hard on the novel for all that time, too.

Then I look back and remember that I wrote 50,000 of those words in the first month.

I can’t do a 50,000 word novel every month. I’d be surprised if anyone working full-time can. Not if they want some modicum of life, that is. Right now I can’t even manage 10,000 words, and that’s only one draft. Over the last six months I haven’t taken time to revise any earlier novels. There are two of them sitting waiting for second or third draft revisions. And as for Barrain, I haven’t touched it for even longer.

I should be over the moon. I finished a novel.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back the euphoria.

I have just finished critiquing a fellow writer’s novel. It was a pretty good read. I enjoyed it a lot. But, it was a critique and so I after I commented on the good things, I concentrated on what didn’t work. The main problems with the story were easy to pick. Too much information was conveyed through dialogue. The book changed part-way through, as if the author had finally realised where it was going, but he hadn’t gone back and changed the start. There were some excellent emotional scenes but in other parts of the story there was no emotion at all, and it was just a straight telling of this happened, then that happened and then that.

These are all traits I recognise from my own writing.

If it’s so easy to recognise them in someone else’s story, why can’t I recognise them in my own?

Most authors will agree that time gives distance to their work. Putting a manuscript away for six months definitely shows up many flaws. Yet even so you don’t get them all. You make the novel as good as it can be, but when you get your first beta reader they still pick up a whole lot of things that you hadn’t even noticed, even if it has been months between drafts.

I do a lot of writing with a writing partner. We both work the same way. We talk about what we wish to write and what’s going to happen in the story, but only one person sits down and hammers out the first draft. After that the other writer goes through the text and finds the holes and adds all the things the initial writer left out.

It used to be that this worked brilliantly. The writer who reviewed the first draft gave the same sort of feedback that a writer from a (good) critique group did.

But, I have noticed that as we write more and more together we’re actually becoming blind to each other’s writing mistakes. We know the other person’s writing so well now that it’s getting harder and harder to pick up those mistakes first time around, or even second time around.

We’re relying more and more on other beta readers to pick them up.

Script Frenzy

This is slightly outside my normal posts about writing novels, but I am a big supporter of NaNoWriMo, even though some years I am too busy to actually participate. I like the way it kick-starts my writing habits and makes me get down there and just write. Those WriMos amongst us will know that they also do a companion challenge called Script Frenzy, which runs through April. Write a 100 page script in 30 days. I have never participated in Script Frenzy (yet), but one day I would like to.

I was reading the Script Frenzy forums last night—anything but write more on my novel, and yes, I am procrastinating—in particular the What software do you use thread. For most people on Windows it comes down to Celtx or Final Draft. Celtx looks pretty good and from what I can see on the forum it’s free, or reasonably priced at least. Final Draft is a commercial product and costs around US$250.

If I was starting from scratch and just writing for Script Frenzy, I’d probably go for Celtx. If I wanted to write scripts for a living I’d go for Final Draft. But me, I’m a Word gal, and I write everything in Word, even scripts.

So what templates can you use in Word?

Screenplay templates that I know about for Word include:

• Microsoft provides two downloadable screenplay templates. If you have Word 2000 or XP (or even Word 97) you can use the Microsoft screenplay template. If you have Word 2007 you can use the Word 2007 Screenplay with styles and hotkeys provided by Douglas Ryan VanBenthuysen.
• The BBC’s Script Smart, which was originally created for Word 97, and then they updated it for Word 2000 and Word for the Mac and called it Script Smart Gold.

I have been using Word 2007 for a while now, and that’s what I want to concentrate on here. Screenplay templates for Word 2007.

Read the rest of this entry »

We used to include a tag line in our queries for Not So Simple After All:

For those who like their traditional fantasy tinged with light-hearted fun.

It never got us anywhere, and early on we realised that mentioning the word ‘tradtional’ in our fantasy query was akin to a kiss of death. Nobody wanted ‘traditional’ fantasy. Traditional fantasy was Tolkien and Eddings and Jordan. Traditional fantasy was epic fantasy. Medieval worlds with sword and sworcery, where the fate of a kingdom is at stake, if not the fate of the whole world.

Like most fantasy readers I love traditional fantasy, but I’m also over it. That may sound contradictory but you have to give me something special to make me read it now. A different story or some truly special characters. And I’m not talking boy wizards here. I’m talking characters like Robin Hobb’s Fitz and Fool, or even her latest heroine, Thymara.

I spent today checking out the latest batch of manuscripts in my online critique group. Almost without exception, all the fantasy novels were urban fantasy. There was nothing so old hat as vampires or werewolves—although there was one zombie —but the stories were set in our world, with iPods and mobile phones and the internet. The protagonists drove cars or caught planes when they wanted to go places.

The circle has completely turned.

I don’t know how long this trend will last. Many urban fantasy lovers who grew up reading about vampires and werewolves are starting to feel about them the way I feel about traditional fantasy. Yes, they love them, but they are so over them too.

I wonder how long it will be before traditional fantasy returns, in some form or another.

And yes, we still intend to sell Not So Simple After All, only we’re realistic enough to realise it probably won’t be in the next year or two.

Over on Nathan Bransford’s blog he posed the question do you own your characters or do your characters own you? He says:

I … find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Nathan Bransford - Do You Own Your Characters or Do Your Characters Own You?

The comments on Nathan’s blog could be divided into two camps. One camp is authors who seem to write their story based around plot, while the other (larger) camp writes character-based stories. Plot-based authors definitely control what their characters do and keep them on track if they stray. Character-based authors give their characters some degree of control.

As many of the commenters to the post said, if a character refuses to follow the storyline it is often a sign that something is wrong with the story.

I am very much a character-based person myself. Story always come second to character, particularly in the first draft. My characters do and say things I could never have envisaged when I start of the story.

It’s nice to know that so many people out there work the same way.

Earlier this month one of the agents at the Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency posted a thoughtful insight into the future of young adult novels.

Have you noticed … that the books propping up the industry (Twilight, Harry Potter, etc.) are YA crossovers? Not only do young readers read them, but adults do as well. Editors are now desperate to find … books they can market initially as YA that will attract the adult audience. Given that the last five years have brought about a trend toward more mature YA with older protagonists, what does that say?

Good-bye YA? by Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency

The author goes on to say that young adult literature hasn’t been around all that long. I would agree with that. I was born on the tail-end of the Baby Boomers and when I was a child the age group for children’s books went up to 9-14 and then you moved straight on to adult books.

According to the lecturer in children’s writing at Calder’s writing classes, young adult books now go up to around 26 years of age.

Calder says I often write young adult novels.  Roland in Shared Memories, for example, is 19 years of age. Tanner in Mathi’s Story—the novel I am currently working on—is 16.   The writing style is suited to young people as well.  Our writing ends up with a reading grade of 6 or 7.

And yet … the other protagonists in both Shared Memories and Mathi’s Story are older.  Kym, the other point-of-view character in Shared Memories, is the head of the local army. Jee Lim and Yashua, in Mathi’s Story, are both adults.

People have also commented on how suitable Not So Simple After All is for its young adult audience.  The point-of-view characters in Potion are a retired mercenary and a renowned sorcerer. Do they fit the young adult demographic?

All of these stories were written for an adult audience, not for a young adult audience.

Many would agree that young adults themselves find tagging a book as ‘young adult’ an automatic turn-off, and that if they know a book is a young adult novel they will not read it. I From my own experience I have found that the main group who purchase young adult books are my own peers—either for themselves to read, or as gifts for young adults.

If editors are seeking more and more crossover books that appeal to adults as well as young adults, then the logical conclusion is that the young adult novel is doomed, because if there is no dividing line then surely the novel is just a novel and, by default, an adult novel anyway.

I don’t think the young adult novel is doomed, but I do wonder if the trend is publishing is swinging back the other way.