The novel I’m reading right now started off promisingly enough. I picked up the first page to see what it was like, and just kept reading.

By around a third way through though, I was starting to get a little antsy. I’m half-way through now, and not sure I’ll go any further. It’s a pity, because it started so well.

The problem? The characters are all one-dimensionally good or evil. There’s no grey here, it’s pure black and white.

We have:

• The naive young mage, neglected as a child, who discovers real powers and goes to the Academy to study
• The grizzled older soldier who loves her, and would follow her to the ends of the earth
• The soldier’s loyal 2IC, who respects her boss and would follow him to the ends of the earth
• The evil Archmage, who wants to take over the world. He hides his evil from the naive young mage, of course
• The twin brothers—one who is evil, one who is good. Naturally, the bad twin tries to bump off his better sibling
• The evil lady mage whose plans of succession are thwarted by the arrival of the naive young mage and plans to get rid of her rival
• The greedy, ambitious woman who marries her way into power.

There’s nothing wrong with these characters in a book, I might add. Half the fantasy world is populated with them. The problem I had with the ones in this book was that they were so starkly black and white. All the good guys were good, all the bad guys were evil. Truly evil.  They had no redeeming features at all. And the good guys were just as bad.

Let’s take examples from the book so far.

Example 1.

Naive Young Mage (let’s call her Nym) has spent seven years at the academy, being tutored by Truly Bad Archmage (let’s call him Archie), groomed to be his heir. The Academy is bad. Nym and Archie and everyone at the Academy live the high life, with sumptious food every night, while outside everyone in the city is starving. Young Nym goes out for a drink with Grizzled Older Soldier (Gos) and walks right into a food riot.  Gos and Nym stop the riot—Nym with her superior mage powers, Gos with his superior sword power. (Did I say Gos was an excellent fighter, by the way, and a hero to boot?)

When she finds out that the riot was because the Academy was taking all the food, Nym says, “Oh, I didn’t know.  We’ll share what we have with the city.”

She’s a hero, and Archie, of course, is forced to grin and pretend that he he’s happy about it, because this early in the book he’s still trying to be a father figure to Nym.

Example 2.

The twins are the only children of their generation. They’ve spent their whole life together with no other playmates, and they were inseperable. They got on well.

They’re in their twenties now. Around the same time as the riot, Evil Lady Mage (Elma) decides to turn one of them bad. In the space of a couple of months Bad Twin (let’s call him Batwin) turns bad. He disassociates himself from the good brother (Godwin) completely.  At Elma’s urging, Batwin attempts to kill Godwin. There’s no remorse, no, “Hey, this is the guy I’ve been best friends with all my life, my brother.  I can’t kill him.” No, it’s a simple, cold-blooded murder attempt with no angst or anything behind it.

Obviously, there’s a lot more stereotyping in the book than just the good/bad aspect. But it is really noticeable. The bad guys have no redeeming features whatsoever.  They’re pure evil.

The good guys aren’t much better. They’re sickly sweet and so unreal I end up despising them.

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.

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.

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?

The writing group I joined had our first meeting last week. We meet bi-monthly for the rest of this year and the aim of participants is that they each write a novel in that time.

It was fascinating to actually meet face to face other writers who are writing in the same genre. Calder and I both know other writers, but no genre writers. Most of the ones we know are writing either memoirs or literary fiction. The only other genre writers either of us have met are online. Not only that, the only writing group experience I have ever had is Critters, an online critiquing group for science fiction, fantasy and horror. I have always been impressed with Critters, and recommend it highly.

Before the session we had to send around a synopsis and a thousand words. I should have picked Barrain—after all, the whole reason for joining this group in the first place is to get Barrain finished so that I can move on to something else—but I thought we had to start something new. My first misapprehension.

The coordinator sent around some critiquing guidelines. This was fascinating in itself—one of the rules was ‘no physical violence’. I wasn’t sure what I had let myself in for. We didn’t get anything else, so I assumed that we would get instructions on the day. My second misapprehension.

The night before the workshop I reviewed the Critting guidelines. Maybe I should be prepared, I thought, and scribbled some hasty notes about each of the other works.

I am glad I did, because pretty much from the moment we arrived we were right into it, critiquing each other’s work.

The group was mixed, roughly half men and half women. Age ranged from 15 years old to mid-fifties. Writing group experience ranged from those who had no experience whatsoever, to me, who had online critiquing experience, to others with face to face writing group experience and still others who had been in this same group the previous year (working on the same novel).

Two-thirds of the novels were science fiction, which really surprised me. I expected more fantasy. I don’t know if this is a trend, just this group, or due to the fact that our coordinator was a published science fiction writer. Many of these novels were past first draft, and some of them had been extensively workshopped prior. Not surprisingly, the workshopped novels were generally more ‘finished’, or if you like, more professional (although they weren’t always the stories that appealed to me most).

We spent the whole day critiquing each other’s thousand words, and still ran an hour overtime to finish it.

You don’t have much time. Those who had attended workshops before came prepared, with printouts of each work and notes on the printout. Once they had finished their critique they then passed the notes on to the author. I like this, because you certainly don’t have time to cover all the points you might like to make.

A thousand words isn’t much, however, and it’s hard to critique in isolation. Most people gave the first thousand words of their novel. Even so, there were still a lot of comments like “I don’t understand what’s happening here” to stories where I was perfectly happy to wait to understand. After all, by their very nature science fiction and fantasy are a little ambiguous at the start. If you write something like:

The spritzer blew 20 klicks out. We had to cannibalise the recycler to repair it, which meant no clean clothes for the next five klicks, which meant that Jenna was furious and spent those five clicks in sub-mode, which meant that I got into trouble because she didn’t calibrate the drive before she went under. No-one likes to take the blame for their gem-partner so naturally I …

I don’t care what the spritzer is. I don’t even care that I don’t know how long or what a klick is. It’s a time or distance unit of some sort, and the time period it covers (or takes to cover) is definitely longer than a day. I don’t even care what sub-modes and gem-partners are yet. It’s science fiction and I expect that in time I will come to know what these things are, if I need to. All I need to get from this is a sense of whose story it is, what’s going to happen next and whether or not I want to read more.

This type of critique—”I don’t get what’s happening. I don’t know what a spritzer is. I don’t get a feel of the story because I can’t visualise it”—came up a lot.

The most valuable critiques were the most specific. “I got confused when you did not start a new paragraph for each new character’s speech,” type thing. I think that was because of the restricted idea we have of each others’ stories at present.

We agreed that a thousand words is the limit that anyone can send through to be critiqued. There is no way we could do any more. It can be any thousand words they want critiqued. Unfortunately, I am the only one who wants to see the rest of the novel. There was a collective ‘no’ when I suggested people send the whole novel up to the thousand words so we could at least get an idea of what had gone on in the story prior.

I’m not sure how much value it is critiquing just that one small part. We’ll wait and see. I know that I will present in sequence, whether or not I think something else needs workshipping, simply because I can’t see the sense in pulling something out of the middle of the book without my critiquers knowing what has gone on before.

Overall, it was a good day and I learned a lot about critiquing face to face. It will be interesting to see what happens as we get to know the stories and the people better.

One thing science fiction and fantasy writers are famous for is giving characters unusual names.

I’m guilty of it myself. I love going through the baby name books, picking out names that are unusual or even, occasionally, making up my own. In this global, multi-cultural age I don’t even have to use the name books, I could use the phone list at my work and people would swear that my names were made up.

Many people say it’s a beginning writer’s thing, and as I gain experience writing I notice that my names are becoming less unique.

You do come across the occasional book loaded with unpronouncable names, and it does make the book harder to understand. Yet what most people complain about when they read a book full of unusual or made up name is not so much the pronunciation or spelling, but the way all the unfamiliar names run together, so that it becomes hard to tell which character is which. 

Introduce one character with an unusual name and providing it’s pronouncable the reader will cope.

Introduce a second and the reader can still cope, provided the names are not too similar.

Introduce a third and the reader starts to founder.

Give every character in your book an unusual name and even you will have problems as you write it.

Give every character in your book a name and even you will have problems as you write it.

The other day I dusted off an old idea for the writing workshop I am taking this year.  I wrote the first chapters years ago. The characters’ names are all … unique is probably a polite way to put it. The obvious solution, change the characters’ names. The problem is, these characters have lived in my bottom drawer for so long, and every so often I have thought about them, and added a little more to their story. Their names are embedded in my psyche. I can’t change the names.

There’s only one thing for it. Write the story using these names. Once the story is complete take a long, hard look at the names and see what I can do with them. If I need to replace them then, so be it. Search and replace in Word was built for times such as this.