Self Publishing post 2-Revisions and Editing

I'm going to start this with emphasis on editing. I don't want anybody putting the cart before the horse and starting on the submission process before they have a fully edited book ready to go.

The first rule of Trade Publishing is the same as the first rule of Self-Publishing: NEVER SEND OUT ANYTHING THAT ISN'T FINISHED.

This means before you do ANYTHING with your book, it is fully written, revised, as polished as you can get it, and as near to flawless as it is possible for one person to make your book. Trust me. You don't want rejections because "the premise has promise but it would take too much work to publish it". Which I've gotten. (I'm mostly sure these are form rejections, but that doubt is always there)

But where on earth do you start with editing? What does editing mean? What's the most important thing to focus on?

Of course, there's another side to learning how to edit on your own: You don't get screwed by asking the wrong person for help.

I had no idea what I was doing when the time came to revise my first manuscript. I would say learning how to edit is a little bit like learning how to walk. You don't even have a concept of what you need to do, or what makes a good book good. You're just sitting there wondering what books you can use for reference and knowing somewhere on the bottom of your mind that no book can really help you, it's all on you.

And so I made the biggest mistake an author can make: I let somebody else help me edit the book. There are a few major experiences I've had on this publishing road that make me feel vaguely dirty, and the Editor was one of them. One of the big watchdog sites is Predators and Editors for a damn good reason. I had no clue what I was doing, I had no idea how to vet, or that vetting was needed, or that I should be checking a track record, or that maybe, just maybe, I shouldn't be trusting an "editor" who was living on his fucking boat and bumming his internet off the local boat club. The good news is, this time I wasn't out any money.

The bad news? We'd done awful things to my manuscript without addressing any of its issues. And I got way too many ass-pats in the process. And the worst news is, if we hadn't agreed on an art-for-editing trade I would have been out a lot of money. A. LOT. OF. MONEY. Editors often charge by the page, and The Book at the time was 600 pages long. (190,000 words, I shit you not)

And so after six months of fucking around, I was back to square one: a red pen, a pile of books on editing, and a manuscript that wouldn't fit on one ream of paper.

So this, then, is the advice I wish I'd gotten four years ago.

1. Everything is connected.

There's a question that floats around writing forums about once a month. That is "What is the most important part of a story". This implies that the different bits of a story--character development, plot, rythem, flow, the actual words on the acutual pages--are independent things that can be separated from the story and/or altered without affecting the main story itself. But that's like asking what the most important part of the human body is. The answer is: All of it.

How do you apply this? Are you familiar with the term "Mary Sue?" You probably are, if you hang out in writer's forums the way I do. But just in case you don't, a Mary Sue is an extraordinary character lacking equally extraordinary circumstances to justify her existence. A Mary Sue is an indicator of issues with not just character development, but of issues with every other thing in the book. Things like a lackluster plot, an insufficiently developed supporting cast, and your own insecurities.

Yeah. I went there. And I'll go into that more as things continue.

When you're editing, your first job is to identify problems with the narrative. Frequently these problems ARE NOT THE THING ITSELF. The thing (IE Mary Sue) is usually a symptom of an underlying issue you haven't addressed yet. Your job is to begin educating yourself in what the problematic things are, and how to fix them. When you fix them, the revisions you make in the manuscript and narrative often fix the most blatant surface problems.

Watch good movies, watch bad movies. Read good books, read really, really awful books. Try to figure out what makes a good book good, and a bad one "Kill with fire". Try to see how everything connects.

2. When in doubt, throw it out.

 You have to kill your darlings. Usually, this means characters.

I like writing about people. My favorite scene in Blue Ghosts was when I sat Casey, Marco, and the rest of the gang on the floor of Marco's mod shop and just let them talk. I did not know, for example, that Tim and Abbey would have that love/hate relationship, or that Ero was going to be a fucking psychopath, until after I let them bounce off each other for a couple pages. But that's kind of why I write and it's definiately why I read.

And that's why I usually solve most of my editing issues by killing and/or removing most of the cast. Becasue my cast? It gets big. And I'll find that I've got two or three characters filling in the same "role" in the story, and that they could easily all be one person, and I would stop having to introduce character after character after character rather than getting on with the story.

The same goes with everything else. When you have an issue with something in your story, your first question should not be "How do I fix this?" Your first question should be, "Can the story I want to tell survive without this element?" If the answer is no, start looking at ways to fix things. IF THE ANSWER IS YES THROW THE DAMNED THING OUT.

The best thing you can do as a writer is make a list of your cast, either in your head or on paper (preferably on paper) and make a note about what "role" they fill in the story. If you have two or more characters filling the same "role", you need to pare that down to one. If you have several similar scenes in the same book (IE Narcissus in Chain's revolving door of rescues) dump all but one of the similar scenes and revise. If you have to introduce more than new character per scene? Toss all but that one new character. 

Ask yourself what that scene is doing for the novel. Ask yourself why X is here and not Y. Spend your first edit trying to find things you can throw out. Be ruthless. Your readers will appreciate it, and you'll probably get another novel out of what you've tossed on the cutting room floor.

3. Words are important. Don't use them more than you have to.

You are not Ray Bradbury, or Robin McKinley. You are not Stephen King and (thank God in Heaven for this mercy) you are not Anne Rice.

Do not try to be them. And more importantly, don't try to use their words. Use your own.

My first draft of The Book was my attempt to be Ray Bradbury. I loved his halcyon green glaze, I read his poetry and my brain had tiny orgasms (Not catch and grab/but find and keep/ go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep. That is my favorite poem in the universe) and I wanted to write Just. Like. That. And so I wrote things that were fifty words longer than they should have been, wagging tails of adjectives that would have put a dog-show poodle to shame. And I had to go back through during the editing process and rip all of that back out. But then I was trying to be somebody else, and I'd have to go back in and rip all that out, too.

The Elements of Style is a book you should own multiple copies of RIGHT NOW. They say that if you can say it in three words DON'T USE SIX.  Figure out what you want to say, say it in as few words as you can, and then go back and take two or three more words out.

Your readers will thank you.

 4. Listen to your instincts. They don't lie.

I think my favorite part of editing The Book came early on, not too long after I met The Editor. It was, I think, the first time I excerted my control over The Book, because he got very mad at me for doing this and I didn't care.

There was an unresolved plot thread that I wound up having to tie up after the main character's story arc climaxed. Both the MC's climax and the book's climax were good and pulse pounding IMHO, but after the MC's climax had happened the book was emphatically done. Trying to get the energy and pacing back up to where they needed to be for the next scene was like dragging the bottom of a car across a ditch. I could hear the scraping every time I hit that scene. And I couldn't figure out what to do about it. I needed to tie up that lose thread, but I needed to tie up the main character's plot thread there as well.

And then I got the idea that fixed everything. Which was going to require an awful lot of work, but it did work. It solved the problem and it cut 2,000 words off the end of the manuscript.

This is a heart process, not a head process. When editing your brain will tell you that everything you've got is just spiffy, but your gut will be screaming NO IT IS NOT YOU IDIOT as loud as it possibly can. You'll get a headache, or eye strain, or become aware that your feet are cramping...or you'll groan and mutter "NOT THIS SCENE AGAIN" which is a big red flag that the chapter you are reading NEEDS TO GO AWAY NOW and you're just not willing to admit it. So a big part of editing is training yourself to listen to these red flags. Which is a lot harder than it sounds.

But if you're trucking along at a good pace and suddenly you feel vaguely nausious and have an overwhelming urge to go reorganize your sock drawer? You've just hit a big problem spot and you need to break out the red pen refils.

5. Your job is to fuck with the reader.

Oh, there are many nicer ways to say that, but none of them are quite so true. And let's be honest with ourselves, okay? If you don't have it that concrete going in? The product won't be as good coming out.

This isn't about you. This isn't about how you feel. This isn't about how much you like writing. This is about taking the reader's mind, tying it into little tiny pretzles, and then letting them close the book with a feeling of satisfaction and/or the violent urge to buy the next book NOW. 

Good storytelling is a subconsious art form. You distract the reader with the plot and you shove major elements of the plot and climax into thier subconsious like you're shoving notes under a locked door. You flat out lie to the reader. You learn how to use visual and spoken cues to develop a character AND YOU USE THEM. You show. You don't tell. Your first thought when considering a scene should not be "how good is this scene?" It should be "How is this scene going to affect the reader's perception of X, and is that a good thing when you factor Y into the account? And can I make them cry?" Your first thought, second thought, third thought, last thought, should be how the reader is going to see your book. Because from the first word to the last sentence your book will be manipulating their mind. And if you do not address every. single. little. thing purposefully? They're going to find other things that you didn't mean to put in there.

Stephenie Meyer didn't intend for Bella Swan to be a whiny spoiled brat, but she also didn't watch her character introductions and interactions as much as she could have. She wasn't trying to get HER image of Bella into the reader's head fast enough, and so a spoiled rotten brat is what we got.

The first thing you do with the first word is develop something you want the reader to feel. Introduce characters by packing their positive qualities into the first few moments. Have their first sentence be something that defines their character. The first moments a character spend in a new location should be charged with atmosphere and detail. Because if you don't do this? The reader is going to do it on its own. I say character development should begin with the first word, not because it is an ideal, but because that's when it does start. The reader is taking every word and storing it up to form the picture of your character, and if it's not something you intended as a positive it's probably going to be something negative.

Your goal should be to write so well that when your book ends on a cliffhanger, the reader throws the book across the room screaming "Fuck you author" at the top of their lungs, and then immediately runs out to get the next book, because they have to know what happens next. And the only way to do that is to polish until it is perfect and make sure that you've done every little manipulative thing you can to make your book a good one.

When you've trained your mind to consider every word, including words like "a, and, it, is, said, the" and "then", for its impact on the reader? You've finally started to learn how to edit.

It's down and dirty, but when it's done right the experience can be oh, so very pretty.  

Blue Ghosts Update (PICTURE!) + CONTEST!

EVERYTHING about this story has eaten my lunch. I think it's awesome, I think you guys are going to love the ever-loving crap out of it, and I will be very happy when it is all DONE.

I've handed it over to the proofreader/beta reader (...aka my mother. Because this is what she does for a living and she is good at it) and so the text itself should be TOTALLY DONE by this time next week.

I've begun working on the cover art. You'll see a WIP below. After we get a little more business out of the way.

I've been playing with Amazon's promotional options. I'm not in love with them, but they've been doing pretty well. And this means I'm going to make a tactical decision regarding how we'll release Blue Ghosts.

First I WILL release it on Smashwords, for free...for a week. After the week is over, I'm enrolling it in Kindle Select, which requires that it be exclusive. I am doing this first, just to see what will happen, and second...I know a few of you hate the Kindle cold, and I want you guys to have your copies of the book.

After that...we will see what happens.

Alright. Contest.

So what is the contest, you ask? Well, as some of you MIGHT know, I'm also an artist. I do all my own covers, I did a webcomic for a while, yadda yadda yadda. And through my Deviant art site, I sell PRINTS. Big pretty fluffy prints of my own work.

What does this have to do with Contests and books and whatnot? I want to hold a drawing, let's say, October 1st, in which I will use a random number generator to pick A Person. This Person will get their choice of print from my Deviant Art Gallery. How will this Person get picked?

Review one of my books. That's all. Review a book, link back to the review, let me see it and I'll give you a number and do the drawing on October 1st.

So. RULES FOR THE BLUE GHOSTS RELEASE CONTEST:

1. Review one of my Amazon titles. (Starbleached is on a promotional give away right now FYI if you want to pick up a copy)

2. BE HONEST. I don't want glory glory happy happy praise and worship here. I just want reviews. Four stars, two stars, three stars, one star, I don't care. I want to know your opinion of my books. If you say it's shit and you never want to read another one, that's fine. You'll still go in the drawing. There are no reprocussions on giving me a bad review. Trust me. I'm harder on me than you'll ever be.

3. LINK TO THE REVIEW in the comments section of this post.

4. PICK OUT YOUR PICTURE You'll get the largest approved size. Usually this is twenty inches by thirty. It won't be framed, but these are damned good quality prints.

I'll generate the number October 1st. You'll have about 24 hours to contact me with your mailing address, otherwise I pick somebody else.

Okay? Okay. PICTURE TIME:

This is gonna look awesome, trust me.

Calling it

The problem with editing stuff is, first I write the story that I want to read. And then I read it, and read it, and read it, and read it, until the words start spurting out of my ears. Most of what I've done the last couple of days has been purely cosmetic stuff.

I just wish there was a way to read this story without knowing how it ended. Because I really like this story. A lot.

But unless the test reader (read as: parental unit bribed with dish washing and sushi) finds something horrendously out of whack, I think I'm as close to done as I can get. Because, you know, you're never really done. You just get frustrated to death.

Artwork next. Which should be fun. I think I'm going to try a couple new techniques on this one, stuff I haven't really done much with before.

So remember, dudes and dudettes, title, sample, and (if I can do it that fast) cover art on the first, and the book will be posted either the first or second weekend (First if nothing goes wrong, second if something does) in September. I'm going to set things up so that the free book thing will be on a Saturday, and give you guys a lot of time to pick up a copy.

Have a good weekend, guys!

Names

I think the thing that creeps me out the most at work is when people use my name. Total strangers whom I have never known before. I know it's better than "hey you", but call it a pet peeve of mine. If I don't know you outside that building and/or you haven't been in there more than once? Don't call me by name. You're not my friend. You're my customer. I am not going to be buddy-buddy with you.

A lot of people ask about naming characters, too. They don't ask me, of course (You gotta have chops for that) but in the forums I visit inevitably they'll ask "What about names? How do you come up with those?" and the inevitable come up: Baby books, fancy names, remember what you like. Ect. Ect. Names are surprisingly important. Just not the way we think of names as being.

People are more likely to be successful if they have a normal name. Jane. Bob. John. Edward. Ana (my reading tastes suck sometimes. Yes. I read Fifty Shades of Gray. Yes. I LIKED Fifty Shades, and yes, eventually I will blog about that series. Someday.) (also, dear readers, never ever ever write a book where ENTIRE E-MAIL CHAINS are reproduced IN THEIR ENTIRETY. It does not work out) It gives us the impression of being solid...and kind of makes it easier for us to exchange our name for theirs.

My favorite book heroine who is not Honor Harrington (Because we can't all be Honor) is named Jane. The only slightly scary vamp in Twilight? Jane. The most snuggable character in Firefly? Jayne, which is one Y away from being a girl's name.

You know when I get annoyed with books? It is when someone starts getting fancy with names. I hated the names of everyone in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy except for Arthur Dent. I made it about three pages into Old Doc Methusulah before L. Ron Hubbard's idea of a good name made my eyes cross, and we are not going to get into what Mission Earth did to me (actually, we will. Very soon. Jesus Christ was that a bad book. I can almost forgive LRH for Scientology. I can't forgive him ever for Jettero Heller)

There are books with non-normal names that I do like. The Belgariad, for example (FYI that stands for every David Eddings novel ever written. They are all the Belgariad, just with the names changed). But he hit on a naming game that kind of eases you into it. Garion is Garion, which looks close enough to normal, Belgarath is Mr. Wolf when you meet him, Polgara is Aunt Pol, Silk is Silk...and in all his other books it doesn't matter because you recognise that Serephrena/Aphrael/Emmy/Mother Goddess Person from Elder Gods is Polgara in a new hat. (I think that he gave up after The Belgariad and didn't bother recycling Garion. Sparhawk/Althalus is Belgarath) BUT! he plays games with the names, gives you something kind of normal (Pol, Wolf, Silk, Errand) to hang your hat on so when the real stuff shows up (Polgara, Belgarath, Kheldar) you're already in love with the character.

Point? There isn't really one. Just a nice rambling for your evening pleasure.

Kitty wars and pickle juice

At this point Chloe has made three incursions into Sofa territory. We have managed to turn her back each time, but our resolve is waning. It's all in those big eyes of hers. This war is doooooomed.

I am having so much freaking fun with this sci-fi story it is unbelievable. Originally I intended to keep it as a once off, but there are a lot of places I could take this. I kind of love this stuff, you know. Yes, dear friends, I am totally obsessed. ETA is still set for the first two weeks of September. Title and sample will be posted here and on DA 9/1.

I spent most of the last two days doing family stuff. I love my family, but sometimes the drama gets to be a little much. Jamming writing time in between work and family the last couple of weeks has felt a little bit like stuffing pages into a dam to keep it from bursting. I guess it's like that for everybody. Except I've noticed most of my friends and family tend to go dancing or party or something, whereas I spend an evening working out imaginary political problems and trying to balance a character's past with their current (traumatizing) events. Which is fun, but it usually means my outward life is boring. People ask "What did you do this weekend" and I can't exactly say, "fight dragons with other dragons, a cannon and a highschooler's understanding of physics" without looking like I've gone completely cracked. So I say "write" and they invite me to go to a dive and get drunk on whiskey sours that taste like pickle juice (Note to all bars everywhere: DO NOT KEEP YOUR SWEET AND SOUR NEXT TO PICKLE JUICE. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, ANGELS AND BAR FLIES DO NOT DO THIS THING. THIS TASTES TERRIBLE. YOU HAVE NO IDEA.) And I have to think up a way to bow out without looking boring because Lowest Common Denominator DJs cannot compete with dragons, and I have better sweet and sour at home.


Also: this is 2012. AC/DC is great and all, but if I hear "All my exes live in Texas" one more time I will begin to scream and never stop. My city needs a pool hall. Not a bar with a shitty coin fed pool table that tilts due south.

State of the CW+Book stuff and SAMPLE!!!

The war of attrition with Chloe continues. She has not made another foray into the house today, but I think she's decided that victory needs time to settle. She did, however, spend a great deal of time on my lap earlier. You know it's hard to make decisive choices when your opponent purrs.

Thomas has not gone toad licking lately. I think because the rats have reproduced, Chloe has eaten all his real food, and it hasn't rained in three weeks, so the frogs are not coming out to be eaten. And my own baby-doll, Abbot, is sleeping on my face every night. Cat politics are fun.

Also, my goal of late has been to update this thing every day. So far, it's worked pretty well. :D

Summer is winding down. The summer people are going home. It feels rather nice to start getting our town back. And I am about one third of the way through a second draft of the next short. Though it's a really long short. More novellette, really. I have several potential titles, finally, and I'll shoot for release in the first week in September, though if something comes up it may get pushed back to the second. I'll post the title when things are a little more firm. Until then, it is The Sci Fi Novelette of Mystery. SFNM.


Now, because these things require a little priming, I am going to give you all a little taste of the SFNM. Not properly edited, of course, but one of the better passages so far. Consider what's after the cut your mid-month bonus:

A further complication of the flora and fauna around here is the pond.

My former stepfather (THANK YOU GOD) (sorry. I have issues) put the thing in the front yard. It holds about two buckets worth of water and has a non-functioning fountain. It breeds mosquetoes and frogs.

You know, the kind that Thomas eats.

Now, the smart thing to do is either 1. rip the pond out or 2. get the fountain working so the fucking vampire bugs can't breed in the water anymore. Instead, we leave it there and hope that the frogs will breed tadpoles and create more frogs.

Problem with this plan? Thomas. I swear to God that cat sits out there and waits for the frogs to show up. And they will show up because this is the only body of water for a hundred fifty feet or so in any direction. I can always tell when he's done the deed, because I find him sitting on the porch staring up at me with this vague, "I'm flying" look on his face. If cats had a theme song, his would be that M83 song about the magic frog that makes you fly (yes. There is a classy techno eighties style song about toad licking. And I like it to death, only it's about toad licking and I don't want to sing along with that.)

 One day that cat is going to grab something more dangerous than tree frogs and get into real trouble.

In other news--I'm about two thirds of the way through project two. It's going faster than I thought it would. It's going to have Faeries and ghosts in it, as well as a certain local landmark. Hey, you can't do a story in corpus without mentioning it at least once.

Sci-fi story does not have a title yet. It's got shades of Cain and Able to it, so I may wind up going in that direction. For the record? I hate naming these things. It always feels far too self-important and melodramatic.

Stay tuned for further updates guys and girls.