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’m juggling so many unfinished manuscripts at the moment I’m starting to wonder how I going to do it. Guess which one suffers. Barrain of course, because it’s more in the line of a blogging hobby than serious writing.

I have:

• Shared Memories—science fiction, 120,000 words, now into it’s third draft. There’s lots of feedback and notes from Calder’s last read but it’s up to me to do the next major revision. The opening is still weak and the end needs considerable work but I’d say we’re 80% there.

  The writing style on this is a little different to our other stories. On a recent re-read I noticed a lot more commas, and sentences that I would normally either split or join with an and. I haven’t quite decided whether it works or whether the story just needs a really good line edit.All through the second draft I’ve been trying to write a query for it but it’s just hopeless. Everything I write is just icky.

• Mathi’s Story—fantasy. This is my NaNoWriMo novel and I’m really pleased at how this has come along, particularly given that I was writing fast (for me) on a story that didn’t get a lot of editing. It’s still only 55,000 words (I have written around 2,000 words since November). I think this story will end up around 80,000 words.

  I don’t know what happens in the main storyline yet, but I know my subconscious is working on it. Every couple of days another little piece of the puzzle drops into place. The subplots just wrote themselves.This is the first novel where I’m happy with the start. I think, when I have finished, the start will be almost exactly as I wrote it, sans a few line edits.

• One Man’s Treasure—science fiction, 80,000 words. The first draft is completed, and Calder has done a first read-through. I was up to adding feedback to her edits when NaNoWriMo got in the way.

  I haven’t read this one for a couple of months now, so I can’t say how much work draft two will take, and I can’t even recall how much work it will be to fix. There are the usual problems for our writing—the start needs fixing, and the last quarter of the book needs work, but otherwise it’s okay, I think.

• Barrain—fantasy. And, of course, there’s Barrain. The story that started this blog and the story that keeps getting pushed to one side when all the other writing interferes.

  We’re up to 41,000 words on Barrain. Even though the version we posted on the website is 5,000 words less the next draft I’d like to post is the full draft 3, completed (around 80,000 words, I think) although that looks like being a while away yet. When we’re done with draft 3 I imagine that for this story it will be the equivalent of a draft 1 for any other story we have written.

As I said, lots to juggle, lots to do. In all, though, 2009 was a productive year for me, and for the writing team of Calder and me, and I’m looking forward to having a couple of stories we can attempt to market by mid-2010.

Fight scenes are not my thing.

I’m a conversation writer. I can do repartee with the best of them, and Calder puts emotion and actions around it. So when our characters talk it’s a reasonable mix of talking versus description (we think anyway). Get them into a fight, however, and it’s a different story. We’re both hopeless at that.

Late last year we put Potion up on Authonomy*. Or rather, I convinced Calder that she should put it up and do all the work promoting it and monitoring other people’s stories, which she did under our planned pen-name, Rowan Dai.

We got some excellent feedback which helped us improve the story a lot. One particular criticism that came up again and again was that the fight scene didn’t work. The thing was, we knew that we had glossed over it, but until so many people pointed out the same thing we—I won’t say we couldn’t see it as a major problem, because we knew it was—but we ignored it, and sort of hoped it would go away.

As all writers know, bad writing doesn’t go away. You have to fix it. We worked at it, and worked at it, and worked at it.

It took a lot of work just to get from:

“Hieyah,” Van Wallah yelled, and he charged the elf.

Blade jumped across, grabbed Van Wallah’s vest.

Van Wallah tried to wriggle free. Couldn’t. “Get him, men,” he ordered, and while Tegan watched, horrified, his men converged on Alun.

River charged forward to save him, but two of Van Wallah’s men jumped River.

Blade clubbed Van Wallah with the hilt of his sword. Tegan heard the crack. The bandit went down. Blade then grabbed a stool and bounded into the fight. Summer was close behind.

Katarina hesitated, looking around for somewhere to put her wine. Finally she handed it to Tegan and joined the fight. Tegan put the wine on the window ledge and started gathering a spell.

Her friend had turned into an impressive fighter. Showy too, not like Blade and Alun, who dispatched two men each while Katarina fought hers. River and Summer fought one each as well, but not as easily. Tegan’s holding spell kept another four on the edge until a blast of hatred distorted the spell and they converged on the elf.

She rebuilt the spell and Blade picked them off one by one.

A quick fight. Less than two minutes …

Potion (Not So Simple After All) by Rowan Dai Draft 3

to:

“Hieyah,” Van Wallah yelled, and he charged the elf.

Blade jumped across, grabbed Van Wallah’s vest.

Van Wallah tried to wriggle free. Couldn’t. “Get him, men,” he ordered, and while Tegan watched, horrified, his men converged on Alun.

River charged forward to save him, but two of Van Wallah’s men jumped River.

Blade clubbed Van Wallah with the hilt of his sword. Tegan heard the crack. The bandit went down. Blade then grabbed a stool and bounded into the fight. Summer was close behind.

Alun scrambled out from under the huddle of Van Wallah’s men and jumped at the two men attacking River. He dragged them off, raised a fist to one, who went down. Another fist.

Another man down.

The huddle of men suddenly realised Alun was no longer there. They turned to find him.

Katarina hesitated, looking around for somewhere to put her wine. Finally she handed it to Tegan and joined the fight. Tegan put the wine on the window ledge.

Her friend had turned into an impressive fighter. Showy too.

What spell could she use? If she was alone and was attacked she would use fire or fear, but if she used them here they would work against her own side. Maybe a holding spell, but it would have to work on individuals. She started forming the words.

Katarina used her long legs as weapons. She fought dirty too. Tegan winced at one kick.

One of Van Wallah’s men pulled out a sword.

Tegan didn’t think. It was instinctive to call the weapon to her. All the other swords came too and Tegan dived under the bench as they rattled down where she had been sitting.
The man whose sword it was lunged for it. Tegan gabbled a quick holding spell. He froze mid-lunge.

Blade clubbed another man with his stool. The man went down. Beside another Tegan hadn’t seen fall. Blade clubbed another. The stool broke. He tossed the stool away and followed through with his fists.

Tegan crawled out from under the bench, started composing her spell again.

Another two men were down over where Alun was fighting.

Blade hit another hard enough to push him back. Tegan’s holding spell caught him.

“Behind you,” Tegan said, as another man attacked him from behind. She’d lost track of the others.

Blade dropped low, and pulled the attacker over his shoulders. The man went crashing into the pile of swords.

One man was down near Katarina, who was fighting another. River and Summer fought one each as well, but not as easily. Tegan’s holding spell kept another four on the edge until a blast of hatred distorted the spell and they converged on the elf.

Tegan pulled the spell back into place and Blade finished them off two-by-two, by cracking their heads together.

A quick fight. Less than two minutes …

Potion (Not So Simple After All) by Rowan Dai, Draft 5

Obviously, we still have a long way to go to fix up our fight scene. But after we changed even this much we noticed one thing. In the critiques that followed, no-one commented that the fight scene needed fixing.

 

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*I have seen a lot of writers ask about the value of Authonomy and lots of different answers from “It’s a sales job” to “absolutely brilliant” to “absolutely useless”. I’m definitely in the camp that says don’t expect to get published through it, but if you use it properly and work at it then it’s a great critique group. It helps not just with improving your own novel but also with seeing mistakes other people make. Analysing other writers’ work can really help you pinpoint the same mistakes in your own.  

I have writers’ block with Barrain right now. I’ve gone through the first 35,000 words and done a major tidy up of what’s there (until the next draft). Now I’m onto new work, and I am procrastinating. I can’t seem to get started.

My solution.

Skip the next 10-20,000 words and leave them for Calder. That’s one of the beauties of writing with a partner.

I don’t normally leave such a big chunk of writing for her when I’m writing the first draft (or in this case the third). She’s a macro and micro-type person, fixing overall problems (plot holes, continuity) or otherwise getting right down to paragraphs and words. But I am stuck, and I need to move forward.

Who knows, we may find that we didn’t need those words anyway.

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p.s. Where to put the apostrophe in writers’ block elicited good discussion in this writing household, and we’re still not sure. 

So it’s back to Barrain after a long time away.

37,000 words so far and this is what we call draft 3, although by our usual standards it’s more like an earlier draft.

The first thing to do is read what we have so far. I wince at the start—our starts are always bad—and read on, fixing up typos and cleaning up as I go.

One thing that strikes me reading on is how like One Man’s Treasure it is. (One Man’s Treasure is the workshop novel I have just finished a draft of.) The main character promises to find another character’s killer (or presumed killer).

In Barrain it’s:

I will get your killer, Mathers silently promised Caid. You saved my life once, it’s the least I can do for yours.

While in One Man’s Treasure it’s:

I will find who did this and …

Hmmm. Problems already. I’ll leave that for the moment and let it percolate. It may fix itself as the story goes on. Right now I have other things to fix.

Like birdwatching. The whole kick-off point for this story is dated. No-one uses ‘bird-watching’ any more to talk about guys looking at women. And even the birders don’t do bird-watching any more. They go birding. We may have to re-write the start. It’s a pity, because I’m quite attached to the start. (A sure sign we should ditch it.) Even Calder’s okay with the bit where we introduce Scott.

I can see a huge plot hole already. Why didn’t Kraa send Taliah in to save Caid? I know where the story is going, and I know that Kraa wants Caid, not just the crystal. A dead Caid would set Kraa’s plans back 20 years. But he just sits there and watches Franz and Jacob try to kill him.

Not only that, I’m only up to chapter four and there are typos and omitted words everywhere.

Chapter five is one big info dump.

Many of the secondary characters are stereotypes (as are some of the main characters). And so on.

It’s lovely to be able to see just how bad the writing is and what needs to be fixed. The time away has given me good distance. Unfortunately, the story is only half written. If we were up to a genuine third or fourth draft here it would be perfect, because we can see the flaws so clearly.

Up to chapter 11 now. I’m reading faster and noticing less errors. I should either stop and come back to it at another time, or the story is genuinely getting better. I can’t tell which, so I stop reading for the day.

In the first instance, we try to sell our novels to the American market.

Why would we do this when the Australian market for fantasy is so good at the moment?

The Australian market is extremely difficult to break into. I’m not saying it’s impossible—we’re still trying—but it’s a very small market. Once you have pitched to the small number of agents who accept submissions, and to the even smaller number of publishers who do, you have nothing left.

The US and UK markets are bigger. We chose the US market.

As Australian writers though, just how much should we change our work to suit the American market?

I’m not talking tone here, but the little things that are different between countries that may make an American reader go, ‘Huh?’. Or the spelling, or even the size of the paper we submit on.

In Barrain Melissa goes around to the boot of the car to get the backpack Scott takes on the hike with him.

If we pitch this story to US agents and publishers, should we make this a trunk?

What about spelling. Australian spelling favours English spelling rather than American. Colour rather than colour, grey rather than gray, and so on. Or as jeeagle-ga, one poster on the google answers site puts it, “gray is a color, grey is a colour”.

I also tend to favour ‘ise’ endings, rather than ‘ize’.

Even that paper size is a question. If I am trying to sell to a US market, how much do I damage my chances by using A4 paper?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how much difference any of these things make to trying to make a sale.

We don’t bother worrying about these things when we write. Before we submit something to the US market we run it through a US spell checker, but that’s about all we do.

If I found out that the paper size really harmed our chances, I might order in some letter size paper, but haven’t done so to date.

As for words like ‘trunk’. I’d probably leave them for the agent or editor to tell us to change before we touched them.