Dead Harvest
One of the more interesting new publishers around is Angry Robot, responsible for Zoo City and Empire State. They ran a Twitter competition a little while ago, and I was lucky enough to be one of the winners! My prize was an advance reading copy (ARC) of the not-yet-published debut novel by Chris F Holm, entitled Dead Harvest. The ARC came together with a cool fridge magnet and bookmark directly from Angry Robot publisher Marc Gascoigne, and it was pretty exciting to get a book that’s not yet available in the shops. I took it with me on my recent trip to Australia to visit my family, and after completing Monsters of Men, the final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, I picked up the shiny new ARC.
I literally had no idea what to expect: no preconceptions whatsoever. I was quite prepared to give up after a few pages, as I have absolutely no compulsion to finish any book, or to continue reading a book that does not grab me within a few pages.
Fortunately, Dead Harvest grabbed me. And how. It’s an urban fantasy, so think angels and demons, but in a modern, realistic framework. Our hero is Sam Thornton, a collector of souls. Not technically alive, he has the ability to inhabit the body of any living or recently dead human in order to carry out his grisly task. Until the day he tries to collect the soul of Kate, a young multiple murderer, and becomes convinced that she is innocent. He is soon on the run from the forces of both Heaven and Hell, trying to prevent a cosmic calamity. I found myself racing through the book in a few hours, completely caught up in the relentless drive of the narrative.
What I really liked about the book was the pitch-perfect evocation of Sam through the first-person narration. Honest and self-deprecating, he wins your trust early on. But we see things only through his eyes. Is Kate really innocent? Is Sam right to go against the angels themselves? We can’t know these things, we have to wait for events to unfold to find out if our fears are realised. And there is a lot of unfolding. Events come thick and fast, nothing is predictable, and the ride takes your breath away.
In short, I loved it and I can’t wait to read the next one! Dead Harvest is published March 2012, but you can pre-order it from Amazon now:
I literally had no idea what to expect: no preconceptions whatsoever. I was quite prepared to give up after a few pages, as I have absolutely no compulsion to finish any book, or to continue reading a book that does not grab me within a few pages.
Fortunately, Dead Harvest grabbed me. And how. It’s an urban fantasy, so think angels and demons, but in a modern, realistic framework. Our hero is Sam Thornton, a collector of souls. Not technically alive, he has the ability to inhabit the body of any living or recently dead human in order to carry out his grisly task. Until the day he tries to collect the soul of Kate, a young multiple murderer, and becomes convinced that she is innocent. He is soon on the run from the forces of both Heaven and Hell, trying to prevent a cosmic calamity. I found myself racing through the book in a few hours, completely caught up in the relentless drive of the narrative.
What I really liked about the book was the pitch-perfect evocation of Sam through the first-person narration. Honest and self-deprecating, he wins your trust early on. But we see things only through his eyes. Is Kate really innocent? Is Sam right to go against the angels themselves? We can’t know these things, we have to wait for events to unfold to find out if our fears are realised. And there is a lot of unfolding. Events come thick and fast, nothing is predictable, and the ride takes your breath away.
In short, I loved it and I can’t wait to read the next one! Dead Harvest is published March 2012, but you can pre-order it from Amazon now:
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Rewriting Aeropolis Some More
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!
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!
How I Write part II
23/11/11 19:11 Filed in: Writing
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.
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.
Aeropolis finally finished
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.
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.
Reading A Clash of Kings
17/09/11 08:38 Filed in: Game of Thrones
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!
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!