I was lucky enough to be invited to submit Aeropolis to a publisher who doesn’t normally accept submissions from un-agented writers, and my initial partial submission resulted in a request for the entire manuscript! This all happened really quickly, and if that wasn’t enough, I heard from their editor in December.

Unfortunately it wasn’t an acceptance. But it was the most positive feedback that you can imagine, short of actual acceptance. The editor said some very nice things about my writing (I just love it when people do that!) and is prepared to look at anything I write in the future, including a rewrite of Aeropolis, because…

Well, here we get to the less positive bit. She felt that Aeropolis as it stands is not a true young adult (YA) novel, because of the way I had written the lead character Joseph: he comes across as much younger. (Interestingly one of my beta readers now says she missed the part where I give his age, and simply assumed throughout that he was much younger than a teenager!) This is not in itself problematic, except that this particular publisher only does YA, not middle grade.

So I have the choice of trying to find a middle-grade publisher, or rewriting to take advantage of the incredibly valuable opportunity that an “open door” with an editor represents. Since the manuscript is out there already, being considered (I hope!) by various agents, in some sense I am already trying to find another publisher. So how can it harm me to hedge my bets and start the rewrite? It will be a good experience in any event, responding to editorial feedback, and an exercise in technical skill.

So I thought when I started the process. But now that I am actually into the nuts and bolts of the rewriting process, I’m having a lot of fun doing it as well! There is something pleasing about going back to a scene and looking at it from a new angle, trying something different, exercising the awesome authorial power to go for something radically different.

Of course there will be difficult points, hard choices, struggles to make it work. But I’m really happy just to be writing again!

Tags: feedback, writing, rewriting, YA

In the first instalment I covered how I actually generate the text that makes up a book, by bashing it out on my iPhone. But of course there is much more to writing than just putting words into a document. I’m not one of those writers who can just start typing with no idea of how things are going to turn out: I need to outline the plot in a fair amount of detail, using index cards (one card per scene, usually), so that when I am writing, I can just concentrate on the description and the dialogue and so on, without also needing to generate the plot on the fly as well.

Obviously I don’t stick to the index cards slavishly: sometimes things turn out differently from the plan, as I realise that a character would behave in a different way, or if something isn’t working. But it’s what I need to get started. I went through the first couple of drafts of Aeropolis with just index cards and the individual iPhone documents, pasting them all into a big Word document when I wanted to revise, or give them to my beta readers (at that stage, it was only my wife). This was a huge pain, and it was then that I heard about Scrivener, through a writer friend.

Scrivener is writing software that was developed from the ground up (by a writer) to be a fantastic writing tool, and it succeeds in this task admirably. It’s an incredibly comprehensive offering, with tools that are useful for a wide range of writing, from journalism to academic articles, to screenplays, and of course, novels. The brilliant thing about Scrivener from my perspective is that it uses a system of individual documents, one per scene usually, that you can split, merge, drag around to put into a different order, et cetera, and then compile into a single complete document at the press of a button. In one of its views, you can even represent the individual documents as index cards!

So it was fairly straightforward, conceptually, for me to transfer all of my individual iPhone documents into Scrivener, and once this was done I was even able to synchronise Scrivener with the Elements folder in Dropbox, so that any writing or editing which I did on the iPhone was updated to my Scrivener project whenever I did a sync. Fantastic!

I was greatly aided in this endeavour by David Hewson’s Writing a Novel with Scrivener. David is the author of the popular Nic Costa thrillers, set in Rome, but his informative blog posts on his writing techniques have fascinated and informed me in equal measure. And this book is just wonderful, setting out in great detail how he uses Scrivener to produce his awesome output, with plenty of invaluable tips and tricks.

Scrivener makes revisions a lot easier, because you can easily see the flow of plot in the novel. You can even track things like point of view, so that you can compile a single point of view into one document, to check that it makes sense on a standalone basis. Structural problems become easier to see and to solve.

I use both paper and Kindle to revise, and Scrivener can output a very serviceable Kindle file, or a Word document. You can choose at the compile stage how the document should flow together, with page breaks and chapter headings (auto numbered if you desire), and of course you can recompile with different settings within seconds if something isn’t quite right.

I’ve heard it said that whenever two writers get together the conversation almost invariably turns, sooner or later, to a discussion of how great Scrivener is. I can well believe it.

Tags: Scrivener, David Hewson, kindle, writing

Well, I finally got Aeropolis finished and sent off to the competition. In January I will know if I made the long list. In the meantime, I’ve sent Aeropolis off to a number of agents and even a publisher who expressed interest via Twitter! Social networking is amazing...

I went to hear Sir Terry Pratchett talk about his latest novel and writing in general at the Theatre Royal on Tuesday night. It was an inspiring and enjoyable experience, and the love and respect of the audience was palpable. Long may he continue to delight us all.

Tags: Submissions, Terry Pratchett, Twitter

I started reading Game of Thrones after watching the Sky Atlantic production of George RR Martin’s epic sword and sorcery reinvention. Despite already knowing what was going to happen, I still enjoyed it immensely. In fact, knowing the story in advance allowed me to spot and appreciate some of George’s foreshadowing, and there was a richness of backstory that inevitably a TV show is not going to be able to do justice to.

I enjoyed it so much that I have immediately moved on to reading the next book, A Clash of Kings, even though production of the second series has barely started, and so I am likely to have finished the book long before it makes it onto our screens. So I will have the opposite experience with the second book and series: watching something I have already read!

By the way, if you read the Kindle edition of Game of Thrones, and possibly the paper edition too, George has included a chapter from A Clash of Kings at the end of the book, which I read. It is not the first chapter, though, and when I came to it in the second book, I decided to read it again. Good thing I did, because George has expanded it somewhat. So don’t skip it!

Tags: George RR Martin, Game of Thrones, kindle

As one tablet manufacturer after another spectacularly fails to achieve what they seem to think should be a fairly simple task -- make a competitor for the iPad that takes significant market share -- I am reminded of an old Yiddish folk tale, that goes something like this:

There was once a poor man, who managed to find a job working as a driver for a wealthy merchant. He spent his days driving the merchant in his fine carriage to his appointments around the town. In the evenings, after leaving the carriage at the merchant's opulent mansion, he walked home to his hovel, where his wife had a meagre meal of barley gruel waiting for him; they had not the money for meat.

One evening, however, the driver came home to his wife in a state of great excitement.

"I know how he does it!" he exclaimed.

His wife looked up from the stove. "What do you mean, Yakov? How who does it?"

"Goldstein," said the driver. "When I drove him to his last appointment today, with Shlomo the tailor, instead of waiting in the carriage like I usually do, I went to the window and watched what he did!"

"You foolish man," said his wife crossly. "If he had seen you, Goldstein would have fired you! And then how would we eat?"

"Pah!" replied the driver. "Now that I know Goldstein's secret, I don't need to work any more. Soon we will be as rich as he is!"

"But how?" asked his wife, frowning. "How does Goldstein make so much money?"

"It's so simple! He has a little book, and I saw him open it, and show it to Shlomo the tailor. In it were little pieces of cloth, of all different types, each bound into the book. Shlomo leafed through all the cloth pieces, and then he pointed at a certain one. Goldstein made a note in his diary, and Shlomo gave him a bag of gold coins!"

His wife looked baffled. "Are you certain that is what you saw?"

"As certain as I am that my name is Yakov!"

She nodded. "Well, I have some scraps of cloth here and there, and we could cut some pieces out of the curtains. I could make you a little book like Goldstein's," she said.

So she sat up half the night making a little book out of all the scrap pieces of cloth that she could find around the hovel, and the next morning, just after dawn, Yakov ran eagerly with it to the house of the tailor Shlomo.

"Who are you?" asked Shlomo blearily.

"I am Goldstein's driver!" said Yakov eagerly.

"Oh. Well, in that case, you had better come in," said Shlomo, thinking that Goldstein had sent him with a message or a parcel.

Once in the parlour, Shlomo turned to Yakov. "So what do you have for me?"

With trembling hands, Yakov handed over the little book. Shlomo looked at it, a trifle perplexed, and then started to leaf through the swatches. He shook his head.

"If Goldstein thinks -- "

Yakov interrupted him. "This is my book. Nothing to do with Goldstein."

Shlomo looked even more perplexed. "Your book? So what do you want from me?"

Yakov clasped his hands together. "A bag of gold, like the one you gave Goldstein yesterday."

Shlomo threw back his head and laughed out loud. "A bag of gold? For these shmattas? You must be joking!"

Yakov shook his head angrily. "No, I am not joking. I want a bag of gold! For showing you this little book, just like Goldstein did!"

When Shlomo saw that Yakov was serious, he sat him down at the dining room table. "My dear fellow. You clearly do not understand. Goldstein's little book is his book of samples. He shows it to me so that I can see the quality of the cloth that he has in his warehouse! All of it is much finer stuff than the scraps in your little book, but even so, I would not pay him a copper for his samples. I gave him a bag of gold so that his warehouseman will deliver five hundred bolts of the finest silk to my shop this morning! No other reason. Do you understand?"

But Yakov did not understand. He became even more angry, shouting, accusing Shlomo of treating him unfairly. Shlomo tried to reason with him, but eventually he lost patience, and had his servants throw Yakov out onto the street, where Yakov continued to rage about how stupid and irrational Shlomo was to anyone who would listen. Few would.

The experience of Yakov the driver is similar to that of the other tablet manufacturers. They see Apple reaping great riches from their little iPad, so they decide to create their own tablet computer. They cobble it together from bits of technology that they have lying around, and they show it, hopefully, to the buying public.

"Look!" they say. "It has all the same things as the iPad! A touch screen, an app store, this Android operating system which is just as good as IOS. It's thin and light. It's just the same! So give us bags of gold!"

But unfortunately they do not truly understand the iPad. They are offering, cargo-cult-like, a set of technical specifications to people who want the finest, most beautifully crafted user experience. They think that they can simply cobble together something that looks like an iPad, and they will instantly reap the rewards of Apple's years and years of painstaking product design and development. They really do not have a clue about the true nature of the transactions between Apple and their customers. And they show no inclination to learn.

Tags: iPad, Tablet, parable