At Last!

Please visit the books page to see my wares! 50% of the profits made from sales until Jan 5th will be donated to the Office of Letters and Light, the charity that runs National Novel Writing Month.

Postcard From Nano

It's November madness, as usual.

I've got really into Taliesin, I was concerned that if it wasn't a pastiche of a cop show the words might not come so easily but 22 days in and the finish line has been crossed. I would dearly love to plug on to the end but I have three books to publish, another to edit and, oh, check the sidebar.

So the remainder of the month must be spent marking up, fixing and finalising CS1. Then it's time for an early December release and time off over Christmas. Time off that will include a bit more blogging. Promise.

Nano and Covers

Well, time sometimes just gets away from you, doesn't it?

I'm a little annoyed at myself for not being able to completely finish Chicago Shadows 2 to get it out to beta readers. On the up side for them I will probably manage to finish both 2 and 3 together so those that are going to plough on will get a double helping.

Now that I can consider the beta of CS1 dead and buried I can reveal something to my beta readers that they did not know. They were all part of a small experiment upon the effectiveness of my "Manuscript" software. It is not super-scientific but, of my seven readers, four were given a version of the file that had been through the extra editing layer of Manuscript. Three were given a file made from the manuscript before it had undergone the process.

I have received feedback from three out of the seven beta readers. All three had been given the manuscript that had been reworked using my software (the other person with the "genuine" beta manuscript thought I had written a game manual and apologised that he didn't know much about English so would probably not read it... I did try to explain that if it needed proofing I would have gone a different route but hey ho). None of the people who were given the "alpha" manuscript actually finished it at all. A couple said they were having some problems sitting down to it, time being what it is.

I can't say for certain but I do think that the difference in manuscript appears to have had an effect. I would definitely identify several things about the alpha manuscript that needed fixing, not least a profusion of things having "been" something else, "seeming" as if something being "just" something or being "like" something. In 55,000 words these four words occurred somewhere in the region of 200/250 times each in the alpha. None of them occurred more than 100 by the time I'd finished.

I do believe that sometimes a reader can't put their finger on why they're not getting into a book, they believe it's something they would like to read but they just can't seem to get their head round it. It is entirely possible that having repetitive use of tenses and concepts could well contribute to that feeling. I know that the text that came out post-Manuscript was more dynamic and purposeful. The feedback numbers would appear to bear that out.

Thankfully not all the feedback I received has been glowing praise (although it scored above average on all the scored questions), the chief bugbear is that even given the "Manuscript" spit and polish the manuscripts still need an extra pass purely for proofing. The other thing is that, over my time with my new editing program I have become a better editor. Now I can see all manner of grammar snafus that I couldn't see before. So vol 1 is back on the block for one final tread through, which is slow and painful going but all part of the process.

Nobody said self-publishing would be easy. In fact everyone says it is hard. Harder still if you have become determined to do everything yourself.

CS2 and 3 have had the benefit of a trip through Manuscript, then I read the finished article aloud to Sue and bookmarked in my e-reader any part where I spotted some heinous error. Then I did a final review until I have produced the beta. I know they're a lot cleaner than the supposed beta of Silent Majority that I put out there. Hopefully the proofing score on my next spreadsheet will be a bit higher.

I had better go and get on with Nano now but, to leave on a positive I have managed to design covers for the CS books which I shall now reveal in anticipation of their release, er, sometime before Christmas... Here they are, hope they do the job for which they were designed i.e. I hope you all now want to read them:

Two Down

Pleased this morning to have finished stage 2 editing on Pleasant Rest AKA Chicago Shadows Vol 2. That should be ready for Beta by about the 15th October now, all being well.

Only Street Cleaning to go and we'll be just about ready to rock and roll. Although, November is coming up and that, of course, means all hands on deck for Nano...

Busy, as they say, busy, busy.

Getting Things Done

The last couple of days have been particularly productive. CS1: The Silent Majority has come out of editing and is awaiting my typographical and artistic skills to put together a beta package for my ever-so-kind beta readers.

I was expecting to take a break from editing to iron out a few bugs and add a couple of features in Manuscript. In the end this work took me a total of about an hour and ten minutes, so CS2: Pleasant Rest has been loaded up and is now under the microscope. This also means that Manuscript is ready for alpha testing with my faithful alpha tester AKA my mum.

I wrote the first draft of CS1 in 2010 during the annual nano bunfight. The first draft of CS2 came this year. I've completed a lot of writing in the meanwhile. Some of it is invisible in a fiction sense because it was RP manuals but all of it counts. I'm exactly as bad with my over use of the qualifier "just" when in full flow but otherwise the shape of the language in CS2 is way ahead of CS1.

That's not at all to say that I'm ploughing through at high speed, there are still many gotchas to be identified and corrected. However, I am not finding the same repetitive rhythm that I was shocked to discover in CS1. It could also be the difference between punting out something for Nano and being allowed to get through at my own rate. Even so, I've managed circa 130,000 words of fiction this year so far. Not a bad amount with a day job vying for my attention.

I'm off to indulge my new C&C Alliances habit, cook a spaghetti bolognese, eat it with the Mrs and hopefully unwind. Hopefully I'll be able to link through to my latest BTS article soon, watch this space.

Blogging On The Run... No Surprise There

If you do happen to follow this blog then there's really no point in me telling you where I've been since the end of September as that should be blatantly obvious. Shadow Cities is out on Monday (and as it is, for the most part, a digital entity, the snow will find it hard to stop this) Nano is complete and the brain is therefore in a little pre-Christmas free fall. No bad thing there.

Over this past couple of years I've had ample opportunity to learn some things about the business of writing in the modern world. I'd already learned all the depressing stuff like how sending your manuscript to agents and hoping that it progressed from there to a publishing house to a book store to a career of bestselling blockbusterdom was a recipe for bitterness, anguish and disappointment. Yes, I'd learned all that stuff pretty well.

What I've learned in the following months that is now nearly two years is that becoming a happy self-publisher is maybe not as lucrative as stepping into the world of bestselling blockbuster authors but it a) can be more fun and b) is a hell of a lot more satisfying.

I look back over three years of Nano where I've got some good solid work done, most of a Levercastle novel, all of a Shadow Cities novel and, outside Nano three RP books contributed to and more than that besides and I realise that as a commercial writer these days there's no chance. No possibility in hell that you could produce that much. Even if you wrote it no big house would be in a position to publish it the way they want.

Anyway, I would like to promise more on this topic soon but who knows when I will next have an opportunity to sit at the keyboard like this? Hopefully soon. But that's always the case.

Aaaaaaaand Breathe...

I scraped the 50000 word target. And by scraped I mean I really barely managed it. It's been a busy month. I wanted to get a start on with an RP project called Dreamtime Stories and the episode I wanted to run is one of four between now and February. I didn't want to be cramming it in later so that only left me one option. In amongst that and the regular business of living finding time to squeeze out 50k was no mean feat.

I'm quite happy with the results, however bizarre they might be. The book's a kind of thought experiment I called "Things Everyone Should Know About Computers" and it blends history with opinion and some quasi-autobiographical stuff. In order to qualify it for Nano I changed the name of the narrator. Is this cheating? I don't think this falls outside of the scope of Nano, so I'm sticking with it.

Apart from this the Mrs and I have been spending a lot of time lounging on the sofa gripped, this year, by X Factor. Mrs Monkey is a musical kind of person and she loves to see singers in competition. I have come to be of the opinion that X Factor gets overly abused for being what it is. Nobody's pretending that the show is innovative or that the contestants can do any more than sing songs.

Lot's of people have come away from X Factor moaning that it dominates the music industry (by which they mean the charts) and that it disadvantages "proper" musicians. As the chief commentator on this subject was Calvin Harris author of the deathless pop ditty "I get all the girls" I think that's a bit rich.

Anyhow, that's old news now. It's just that as someone who doesn't really take part in pop music or charts or any of that kind of thing, someone who's more at home with an old Monster Magnet CD and a documentary about Metallica I can't see why people can't see the televised audition that is the X Factor as anything but a good thing. After all the process is kind of definitive. Rather than take a small risk on fifty maybes why not put all the budget behind one person whittled down from a field of twelve finalists? Say what you like about past winners but at least we know they can sing, some of them can even dance.

Contrast that with the days of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the 80s when the fact Rick Astley could carry a tune was seen as a novelty. "A pop act who can sing! Who'd have thought?"

As you may be aware I work for a ticket agency that sells for most pop music events and one thing I'll tell you about last year's admirable runners up JLS those lads are grafters. The amount of touring and promotion they've done tells me they deserved their crack at success. One memorable performance the promoter wanted news of their next gig at a venue sent out via e-mail while they were busy performing the current date.

Anyhow. That's my X Factor rant over with... inconsequential as the whole thing is. Now it's time to slip on my shoes and head off to work.

Nanowrimo Bites

I've been aware that I'm not here...

But it's November and November means Nanowrimo and Nanowrimo means 50000 words. I'm inching towards the end. It'll be a shame if I fail now as I've officially crossed the line into "so near, yet so far" territory.

This brief note just signals my intention to return soon. I think I'm going to attempt to make this a more bloggy blog. It's come to my attention that if people really want to know what I think about role playing there's a 200-page book available which can brief them on the finer points and a podcast along roughly once every three weeks to expand upon these points further.

So the blog really should say something else again. Maybe pull in a little more traffic by being hip and relevant. Well, by referencing the current pop culture buzzwords anyway.

So, in the spirit of times to come, and until December...

Jedward.