Wintertide Report and Preview

Looking at the countdown timer on my blog site, you will see that you still have around nine days left to wait. But if you’ve been listening to me I’ve been saying the release date would be October 1. I padded in some extra days just in case anything went awry. It did. Deadlines were not met, the release date slipped, but still it looked like we would meet the October 1 deadline. Unfortunately the printer’s proof was not perfect. Adjustments were made and a new one ordered, so there will be a minor delay. I can’t say exactly when the book will be released, but I expect it will be in the next few days.

Unlike previous years, when those with Kindles got their eyes on the books first, we will attempt to release all forms of the book at the same time. That is to say, you will be able to order the books from Amazon, in Kindle or print format, and if you preordered they will start shipping then. You will also be able to begin ordering Wintertide direct from my site at the same time. Electronic versions will be the last to go live, but don’t worry, due to the instant download; you will still be the first to see the new book. Those of you insisting on purchasing the books from a brick and mortar store will, as usual, need to wait as the distribution process for that venue is slow and could take up to a month to complete.

So what is Wintertide about? What should you expect?

When last we left off our intrepid duo were miserable, but happy to be alive as they headed north from Delgos on a pair of borrowed horses provided to them by the southern branch of the Black Diamond. The weather had turned decidedly cold and the war between the Nationalists and the Empire was over leaving Melengar alone in its struggle. The criminal mastermind, Merrick Marius, was settling into his spoils where the likes of Arista Essendon, and Modina were not so happy.

As you might expect, this being the 5th book, there isn’t much that I can really say without giving out spoilers. Melissa, at “My World In Words And Pages” has managed to put out one of the very first reviews of Wintertide, without giving anything away. A bit less satisfying than a full-scale review, but a lot safer for those following the saga.

I can tell you a few things. For those reading the series, you may already know how each book is different from the others. The same is true of Wintertide. There will be far less action and adventure than seen in the Emerald Storm. This isn’t that kind of book. I suppose it might be seen as more like Nyphron Rising, but with about the same amount of scenery changes as Avempartha. There are some “dark” moments in this book, perhaps the darkest of the series, and I hope a fair share of moments that will cause my readers to forget themselves and shout out, “YES!”

Most of your friends and enemies will return in this episode, as well as an old favorite who has too long been left out of the series. And there will be deaths. Quite a few. At least six major characters will not survive to see the final book.

If you’ve been paying attention you will realize that a great number of portents and signs have pointed to the significance of the date of the Wintertide solstice. It is a day so significant that it, or the subsequent fallout, will affect everyone living in Elan. After Wintertide, nothing will ever be the same again.

The Frightening Case of the Dead Computer

How do writers write? The question usually evokes ideas of style, attitude, or voice. Sometimes, the concept of when and where the writing is performed comes up, but far less often do people inquire about exactly how the writing is done. Pen and paper, typewriter, computer, what?

I know several writers who insist on writing long hand. Some believe that it slows them down and forces them to think harder. They transfer what they wrote to computer and this transference process works as a second drafting, allowing them to clean their prose. I only wrote one book in longhand, well it was actually a novelette, and technically I only wrote half in longhand. I simply think too fast and write too slow. I end up losing too much in the process.

I’m old enough to remember typewriters. The first eight novels I wrote were on typewriters. I preferred electric. At the end I had a real nice Olivetti Praxis, one of the first typewriters to offer the ability to make corrections without using the little strip of Wite-Out chalk paper. (The idea was to backspace over the unwanted character, slide the correction paper under the carriage—chalk side down—then hit the same character to imprint the chalk over the offending text.)



The Olivetti had the correction built right into the ink ribbon. We’re talking state-of-the-art back in the early eighties. As you can see, the sleek, black space age design was the envy of all my friends…then the personal computer arrived. To this day I still don’t know what happened to that Olivetti.

I’ve always worked on a PC (except for the year I worked as a graphic designer, when I had a nice desktop Mac.) My first computer I got back in the spring of 1984 and was a Compaq Desktop Pro with an 8086 processor and a whopping 20 MB of HD space.



In the early days all PCs had were WordPerfect and Word for DOS, both of which were a nightmare because computers didn't have mice. (well the Xerox did, but it wasn't until the Apple Macintosh, which came out that same spring, that the first commercially successful computer mouse appeared.) Without a mouse, just navigating the screen of a word processor was an act in frustration. I had to check the manual just to determine how to move my cursor to the correct position to insert a word. I actually rejected both programs in favor of an obscure word processor called SAMNA that acted much more like a typewriter. Despite all the hassles, and the awful quality of the dot-matrix printer, it was still light-years better than the Olivetti. Being able to backspace was wonderful.

Back then there was a huge controversy about writing a novel on a computer due to the fear of losing it in an electronic second. The controversy continues, but I no longer know anyone who still uses a typewriter. The lack of a solid stack of pages that couldn’t just vanish if you pressed the wrong button, scared many. While I rarely ever lost anything due to accidental deletion, as I kept back-ups and regularly sent copies to others, I did lose a few novels to technology. My old Compac took the huge, literally floppy, 5.25” disks. These were soon replaced by the smaller hard plastic disks, then the double-sided, double-density disks and now CD and DVD drives.



The result is that several of my early books are locked on old technology I no longer have the key to open. Of course, my very first works, those on paper, were lost as well, the victims of moves and dusty attics. So who’s to say which is better.

These days I use MS Word. Nothing fancy, just the basic program, although I do also use WordWeb that functions with all programs as a dictionary and thesaurus. And while I keep my books up to date now on the current media, I still have problems.

Just recently I had finished the final review/edits for Wintertide. The book was ready to trot off to the printer for the first proofs. Being a little paranoid—even to this day—I sent a copy to my wife Robin, just in case.

The next morning I noticed my machine was making a rattling sound. It’s an old IBM ThinkPad that I inherited during a time I could not afford to buy a new computer. I had been thinking about getting a new machine, but hoped the old black box would survive to see the release of Wintertide. I rebooted only the machine refused, instead displaying an error declaring my fan was being lazy and not reporting to work. I was so thankful that I had taken the precaution of sending the file to Robin, only when I asked she said..."What file?" She never got it, and now the book was done, but trapped on my dead little corpse of a computer, which looked so sad with all its LED lights, dark.

The machine did not warrant a repair bill, but I was faced with taking the computer to a repair shop and letting it—and my book—sit for days, perhaps weeks until it could be fixed. My release deadline was barreling at me like a train and I was tied to the tracks. I was not in a good mood.

Now if it had been a typewriter, I could just pull the last page out of the carriage and ship the book off. Of course I would still be editing the thing, too. The book has been such an ordeal to get out, I just wanted it to be done, to be finished and out the door.

Robin suggested I try fixing it myself. Being the computer geek that I'm not, I tried anyway. Replacing the fan looked beyond my talents, but pulling the hard drive and slipping it into my son's machine looked a whole lot easier. One screw later I was done. I could access my files, I got the book—it was still there safe and sound—the end of the world, averted. At long last the book was done…

...then Robin found a few more errors...

The struggle goes on.

Crunch Month

I have no idea how other writers handle the process of final editing. Perhaps with a big publisher it is a very sterile, very formal enterprise. With my first publisher I received infrequent mark-ups in a Word file that I accepted or rejected then emailed back—all very civilized, but not very effective.

In order to improve the finished product, I have enlisted various beta readers, editors, and proof readers (many are fans who have graciously volunteered.) Beta readers are charged with finding problems with the story. Was I too subtle with that hint? Was that part interesting or just boring? Were the actions of that character believable? You can never use just one Beta Reader. Three or more are required, for as with all things, what is wonderful to one is awful to another. The input of one then can easily be misleading. Three or more can break ties and reveal trends. If three people all hate something you love, you might want to reevaluate.

Beta readers are employed early on in the final editing process. That is to say, long after, I as the author, have finished the final draft and gone through my own series of pathetic editing passes, but before the heavy sanding and polishing starts. This early beta reading/editing period I refer to as the Structural Phase when the system is tested to see if it can handle the weight of a cold, highly critical, reader. I tend to interrogate my beta readers with a list of prepared questions. Then ask for general feedback. Based off of this I find weak areas, logic holes, and places where my intent failed to register.

This results in Structural Reworking, in the form of moving paragraphs, cutting whole sections and rewriting. As with most jobs requiring massive reconstruction, it’s a very dangerous work environment—characters have been known to die. Others are sometimes miraculously saved, shoved out of the way of a swinging plot point at the last second.

A few of my beta readers are also my gross editors, which can be a problem as they become attached to their own involvement, adopting those characters or lines that they save. It then becomes hard to give them up. A veteran of watching my hard-won words gutted, I’ve become like one of those platoon members who refuses to make friends with new recruits because he doesn’t want to go through the pain when the newbie gets killed. I have discovered that a useful skill as a writer is learning to see my writing as someone with nothing invested sees it. This allows me to cut previously beloved lines when they just don’t fit anymore.

Another pitfall is familiarity. When a paragraph or sentence was written eons ago, you get used to it being that way. When it is changed, or removed, it is unsettling. I recognized this preference for “tradition” in my own decisions. A new line has to be great to replace a crappy line that’s been there since the first draft. Only recently have I spotted this behavior in my editors. Watching them freak when a first generation phrase or paragraph is cut or re-worded.

Speaking of cutting. After the structural phase ends the Editing starts and I am convinced now that “editing” is Latin for “cutting every other word.” Wintertide has gone from about 120,000 words to 92,000 words and still cutting. Aside from removing longwinded tangents and run-on sentences, there is the art of jettisoning excess words from each sentence. If someone “sat” you don’t need to remind the reader he “sat down.”

Aside from cutting there is also the rearranging. Moving sentences into more logical orders and moving the phrases in sentences into more intelligible language. And then of course there is grammar. I suppose there are writers who love grammar, and those who feel restricted by it. Actually I suspect a great number of creative writers are annoyed by the rules of English, just as any creative type tends to resent controls on their expression. There have been times I have insisted on breaking the rules for effect. There have also been times—far too many—that I’ve done this out of ignorance. I still growl when I write something and an editor tells me I can’t do that, because it isn’t grammatical correct despite being abundantly clear in its meaning. I can’t begrudge them too much as no one holds it against the author when they find grammar mistakes in a book. They always blame the editor.

The Coarse Editing is grueling as it requires the study and breakdown of every sentence in the book, often with an accompanying twenty minute debate as to whether or not it is better to remove an “and” and replace it with a comma. Also should a girl “say sweetly,” or “sweetly say?” “For this reason Amilia avoided eating?” or “Amilia avoided eating for this reason?” Discussions and arguments rage over the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. It might sound awful, but as the author, the majority of the time, I don’t care. Unless the rewording affects the meaning or the cadence of a phrase, it doesn’t matter to me which way it goes. Editors however will draw swords and do battle, searching for authoritative reference to support them. These can often be hard to find when dealing with the truly finer points of grammar. Most websites and grammar books make the usually correct assumption that the average user is only vaguely familiar with the difference between a noun and a verb and so don’t get into the theoretical string theory physics of coordinating conjunction verses subordinate conjunctions.

Once this coarse editing is finished, the book undergoes a Polishing. This is where the professional or at least the more experienced language engineer makes a pass looking for mistakes in punctuation, word usage and such. Then the book is dropped into layout/galley form and the Proofing stage begins. Everyone reads it in final form to look for missing words, dropped periods, quotes pushed to the next line, duplicated sentences that failed to get trimmed out or passages that were supposed to have been cut weeks ago, but are still there because of a file glitch.

After this, the book goes to the printer for a handful of proofs and once more everyone reads the book. This time looking for any errors the printing process might have introduced. One time during the release of Nyphron Rising, the printer inexplicably shuffled eight pages in the middle of the novel. When Avempartha was printed the last ten pages were in Spanish! The result is that, with Wintertide set to be released in October, I will be reading the book enough times in short succession that I will hate it by the time the rest of the world gets to see it.

For those of you wondering where we are, Wintertide is in the final stage of Coarse Editing. Debates still rage, swords still ring and I’m thinking it might be a good time to take up smoking, or at least get one of those little red stress balls.

A Few Bad Eggs

As I continue to slog through the snows of Wintertide, the world moves on. Sales have slipped recently, but that might be due to the time of year. People appear to buy books starting in November, most likely for gifts, then in winter for something to read in the long, dark months and then again in spring and early summer for taking to the beach. But as late summer/early fall comes around, I suppose people are focused on getting back to school and work. No more time for fantasy adventures until the snow flies.

It might also be that, caught up in pushing book five out, Robin and I have not had time to promote the series. Luckily, others have taken up the slack. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll remember the reference to the Big Wheel of Momentum. Moses Siregar III is the most recent example that the wheel is moving under its own power.

I was contacted several weeks back by Mr. Siregar who confessed to me that after seeing the (then) six negative reviews for The Crown Conspiracy on Amazon (among the seventy-eight total,) he decided not to read it. He came back to the book later and realized he could read a sample and decide for himself, which he did. He then wrote to say he loved the book and asked if I would be willing to do an interview with him.

The interview was posted a few days ago.

Once upon a time, Robin and I had to beg for bloggers to do a review of my books, or interviews. It’s a whole lot nicer to have them approach me. Mr. Siregar isn’t the first, but his posting comes at a much needed time. With book five on the way, Robin and I should be getting the word out, but are too busy getting the book out.

It disturbs me that a handful of negative comments would so taint a sea of positive reviews. Is it too much to hope for that everyone one given pause by the few dissatisfied customers will eventually come to the same conclusion and each write their own reviews or interviews?

I’m a fantasy author, what do you expect?

Wintertide Cover Art

For those of you interested in seeing the whole picture. Below is the art.




And here is the final cover design.



So I suppose I can reveal the spoiler that the fifth book takes place in...winter.

Royce and Hadrian Making Themselves Heard

Since my first book signing people have asked for an audio version of my books. Yesterday the final episode of the audio version of The Crown Conspiracy went up on Podiobooks.com and iTunes and the best news…it is free.

The term podiobook was coined by Evo Terra to describe serialized audiobooks which are distributed via RSS, much like a podcast. Listeners to Podiobooks.com can choose to receive the episodes of their books via an RSS feed or by listening to episodes by directly downloading episodes from this site. Some listeners keep the audio files on their computers, some transfer the book to CD, but most transfer the file on to their MP3 player so they can listen no matter where they are.

Why are authors making these versions available for free? Many authors do this to get exposure for their work, others do it in the hopes you'll buy a physical copy of their current or perhaps next work in development. Still others simply do it for the sheer joy of writing. And while it's not required, you have the option to donate money to the author of your choice. When you consider that audio books run usually twice as much as their hardcover counterparts... we hope you'll be generous. Authors receive 75% of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The smaller portion goes to the maintenance and upkeep of Podiobooks.com.

Nathan Lowell, the author and reader of some of the most popular books on Podiobooks.com volunteered to produce the audio versions of the Riyria series. He has an amazing reading voice and has done just an excellent job putting this together. In listening to his rendition, I found myself sitting back captivated wondering what would happen next. Hearing him voice characters and interpret lines, made me think this is what it must be like, at least to some degree, to see a movie version of one’s book. It comes alive in a way I never expected to experience. It also called into question the exact pronunciation of every word and the sound of accents. With this experience, I can only imagine the insanity of trying to make a film and all the questions that would come up. As it is Mr. Lowell made the process extremely easy. His professionalism, talent, and experience really blew Robin and I away. He managed to get nearly all the words right from the start, and his handling of the work was truly marvelous.

I found myself lost in Nathan’s dramatization and laughing at jokes, more for his presentation than how I wrote them. I also found myself fascinated at some of the writing, wondering if I wrote that. I guess it just sounded better when spoken aloud by a talented reader.

This release is the first venture for Royce and Hadrian outside of the world of print and it is quite exciting. So drop by either iTunes or Podiobooks.com, download the episodes and experience the adventure all over again.

You can expect to hear Avempartha sometime this winter.

Wintertide

A Forced Wedding.
A Double Execution.
Two Thieves Have Other Plans.

The New Empire intends to celebrate its victory over the Nationalists with a day that will never be forgotten. On the high holiday of Wintertide the empress will be married. Degan Gaunt and the Witch of Melengar will be publically executed. Then the empress will suffer a fatal accident leaving the empire in the hands of the new emperor. It will be a perfect day. There is only one problem—Royce and Hadrian have finally found Degan Gaunt.

For those just tuning in, Wintertide is the fifth book in the six book Riyria Revelations series. It is scheduled for release in October, and just as recent as two weeks ago I wondered if it would make it.

I wrote all six books in the series before the first was published. I wrote them as one story divided up into episodes. So if you can imagine, I dreamed up this grand tale and then figured out how to break that down into smaller book-length stories with their own beginning, anti-climax, climax, and end. Then I wrote it straight through, one book after another finishing the last one during the period following my signing a contract to publish the first book, but before it was released.

Now when I wrote them, as I completed each book, I went back and edited each. I looked for mistakes certainly, but I was really looking at “how it read” and to be certain that the pacing and the story worked. I wasn’t studying the grammar or searching for consistency of names and such, because well, at that time I never dreamed I would be publishing the books and assumed only three people might read them, so why bother.

That’s the way it was with all the books. I wrote The Crown Conspiracy in a month (September of 2004) and I wrote Avempartha in the same length of time in the following month (October 2004) but as you might guess, writing at that speed, the books were not perfect. It wasn’t an issue because I never planned to send either to an agent or publisher. I slowed down a bit as I wrote Nyphron Rising taking three or four months to write it, and Emerald Storm was interrupted by our move to the DC area, which left the book in a year-long dormancy.

Wintertide was the first book I fully wrote in Virginia. The first book I wrote after obtaining an agent who gave me the ego boost of saying the books were publishable. The first book I wrote after having learned some fundamentals about writing that I was missing, that my agent gently informed me of, and for which I will always be grateful.

As a result, I felt my writing had improved significantly and this was supported by my wife Robin when, directly after Emerald Storm was released she picked up the manuscript for Wintertide, read it through, and proclaimed it was great and unlike the previous books would not require much work at all. You see, Robin is my first critic/editor. She always does the first pass and it is her job to find fault. I was therefore very pleased to hear that Wintertide would be a breeze to put out and looked forward to a summer vacation.

It didn’t happen.

Robin read the book through three or four times and each time she found new problems. I’m not talking about using “that” when it should be “which” or using the wrong form of “lay” or my infamous use of “starred” when I mean “stared,” but plot problems.

As I said when I wrote the books I didn’t expect them to get published. The same is true of Wintertide. I had an agent, but that is like owning a lottery ticket—it’s a step closer, but it doesn’t mean you’ll win. There were a few aspects of the story I had never been satisfied with, and Robin found those. When she did—when I saw someone other than myself picked up on the same weakness, I knew it had to be changed. Luckily the problems are in-book issues and don’t affect the series as a whole, and center mostly on eliminating contrivances and strengthening character motivations.

Robin took the book, went through it and highlighted all the flaws. Then she made a valiant effort to re-build the book for me, going so far as to actually write new scenes. She struggled with it for weeks and then handed it back to me with a miserable look saying, “I think I broke the book.”

I read it through and agreed. It was a mess, but now that she had revealed the flaws, they had to be addressed. And while her solutions were logical and structurally sound, they reduced the story to the spectator sport of drying paint. Reading it was like driving a car with a serious imbalance in the wheels. The pacing was way off and suffered from the unforgivable sin of being boring.

I took the pile of tattered pages, crumpled, stained and scribbled (metaphorically as it was really a heavily marked up doc file) and right in what should have been my summer vacation (I look forward to one every year, but it never seems to materialize,) with less than a hundred days left before the scheduled release, I began literary CPR.

Sequestered in my office, fortified with coffee, I tried to sew up the damage, but it wasn’t working. I was losing the patient. The more I tried to smooth out the bumps the worse it got. Eventually I scrapped the whole first half of the book and started over. I went all the way back to reworking the story at the outline level, forcing myself to forget how the story had been for years and re-envisioned it. For me this was a little like trying to forget ten years of your life and imagine something else happened instead.

Over the course of one very long day, I paced, I walked, and I pondered as I reconstructed half the novel. By the end, I had a new outline. I showed it to Robin, who was dubious.

“I don’t know,” she told me with a clear tone of desperation in her voice. “I can’t tell from an outline. I can’t see it like you can.”

The next day I began writing with a cloud over my head. Emails came in asking when Wintertide would be out. My neighbor stopped me on the sidewalk. “I can’t wait for Wintertide! When’s that gonna be ready? I want to know what will happen to Arista!”

Sigh. I don’t like writing under pressure.

About ten days later it was done and I handed it off to Robin. I had no idea. Like the myopic builder of a skyscraper, I waited to find out what I had done.

“You saved it!” she beamed. Then her brow furrowed. “Well, mostly. It still needs a bit of work.”

Back and forth it went after that, problems found, problems fixed until at last the book felt sturdy enough to allow a new set of eyes to judge it. We waited as our friend, and new Ridan intern, Annie, read through the newly revised version.

“It’s good. I really liked it, but…”

We braced ourselves expecting the worst. Turned out the “but,” while important, was relatively minor and easily corrected. Actually there were many “buts” and it took the better part of a week to hammer out each. The issues at stake were small, and in some cases, perhaps unnoticeable by the average reader, but each was debated between Robin and Annie over our dinner table with all the passion of two trial lawyers working a murder case and leaving me to make the decisions.

Yesterday the last changes were finished and the new improved Wintertide has finally entered the line-editing stage. The building is over and the sanding has commenced. By August I hope the polishing will begin and by October, if all goes well, Royce and Hadrian will ride again.