news from the trenches

First, the administrivia: I have been a most efficient and dedicated authorly creature and mailed out the giveaway books. They went out in the afternoon post of Monday 21 December (my time). So, winners, eyes on your mail boxes, and please to be ooh'ing and aah'ing over the pretty when it arrives, 'kay? 'kay.

I would like to say that my Christmas has been quiet and contemplative, but as I steal a moment to write this I quite literally cannot hear anything over the bawling and hollering of the two year old and three year old. They're not a patch on the twenty-four year old cousin egging them on, however. I can say my Christmas has been raucously festive, at least ;)

It's also involved edits. Lots of. I'm now about halfway through the first pass of edits on Pledged Book 2, whatever it ends up being called. But as I go through, I stick a post-it note against any fix that requires too much thinking or might result in a ripple of changes back and/or forward through the novel. So the pages I've 'done' usually end up with a minimum 3 post-it notes apiece, and need to be gone back to. They're starting to look like much harder work than the pages I haven't touched yet. Oy vey.

Somewhere along the line I realised I've started talking to the edits. Well, actually, that usually happens from the get-go — but I seem to have progressed to talking aloud to the edits. Can't remember at what point I started talking aloud to the edits of Shadow Queen, so hard to say whether my insanity is progressing faster or not. Probably faster. Accelerated by the Christmas lights, no doubt.

I had more to say, but the squalling has reached epic proportions and if I don't at least make an effort to intervene, I might end up caught in the crossfire. See you all in the new year!

28 December 2009 @ 18:28 | 4 Comments

free book news

The giveaway is ended, and Goodreads has sent me an email telling me the names of the lucky people who'll be welcoming a stray book onto their shelves:

Congratulations!

Goodreads have sent me your postal addresses, so I'll have the books in the mail as soon as I can.

Tomorrow marks the start of potentially intermittent internet connectivity,1, but I'm sure you'll all be far too busy with your own Christmas shenanigans to miss me too much. Hope you all have a great holiday!

  1. Actually, given my home internet connection went AWOL sometime on Friday, technically said period has already started [↩]

20 December 2009 @ 18:59 | 4 Comments

me, a pen, and your books (mark two)

Heads up, Newcastle:

When: Wednesday 30 December 2009 @ 11:00am
Where: Borders @ Westfield Kotara, Newcastle

So, if you want your books devalued scribbled upon, and you can't make the signing on the 22nd, now you have a second chance to stop by and entertain me :)

20 December 2009 @ 18:41 | 3 Comments

normal schedule hopefully to resume soon(ish)

Yesterday hit 39°C1 — and today hovered around 20°C2 and bucketing down. That's … quite a range for 24 hours. Ah Melbourne, city of extreme mood swings. No wonder I loff you so.

I've been a bit silent/absent from the interwebs lately because of, well, because of all the work I'm drowning under, so forgive me if this isn't news to you but I found this so unspeakably cool I had to share: Tool-Using Octopus!

Octopuses have been discovered tip-toeing with coconut-shell halves suctioned to their undersides, then reassembling the halves and disappearing inside for protection or deception

i can see it all unfolding...THESE GUYS ARE THE FUTURE RULERS OF EARTH

  1. At 4pm — right when the broken-down tram stranded me two and a half kilometres from where I needed to be. [↩]
  2. Technically the maximum was 26°C, but that occurred at 12:01am and was actually just yesterday's temperature still dropping [↩]

17 December 2009 @ 19:47 | 2 Comments

true dat

I'm a little broken-brained today, on account of an extracurricular stint at the dayjob,1 and I still have edits and a few more edits to do, so by way of content I offer you Jennifer Crusie — Ten Tips for Writers.

This is some sterling publishing-related wisdom. My favourite is point 5 and/or 6: measure your worth as a writer on your work, not on your ability to publish, or your sales. Because writers are in control of the quality of their work. But the ability to publish, or sales once published, is not, in this crazy-subjective and unpredictable industry, directly correlatable to said quality.

And don't miss the comments, while you're over there.

  1. on a Sunday! I am SUCH a good child, aren't I? [↩]

13 December 2009 @ 19:07 |

who puts a christmas party on a thursday, anyway?

So you know what I did, carrying that decidedly not-large-by-fantasy-novel-standards manuscript home on Monday?

Yup: I wrenched my back, bad enough to spend the next day rather sparky and blurry-eyed courtesy of nurofen. Writing! It's DANGEROUS, people.

Thanks to christmas shenanigans courtesy of the dayjob, I haven't managed to spend as much time as I'd like on the edits this week.1 But I did have to laugh at one comment in the edit letter proper.

Those of you who remember the edits of Shadow Queen will remember that the manuscript I handed in had 10(ish) chapters, and the final published book had over 30 — because with every pass my editor kept patiently requesting "Shorter chapters, please. No, shorter still!"

Well, it appears I learned my lesson rather too well, because the edit letter for Pledged has a note that some of the chapters shouldn't be chapters at all and should be run on to the end of the previous chapter. And in looking through I discovered the manuscript I handed in had over 50 chapters.

Yeah. I run to extremes.

The only other "fun" facts to come out of the edits so far is that my characters are apparently (just a touch) too fond of glancing, looking, gazing, and even occasionally various rarer permutations thereof. Apparently my characters were engaged in some kind of staring competition while I was off busily trying to concoct a plot. Damn them, anyway.

  1. Said shenanigans have left me with some intriguing text messages in my phone. Such as the following: The only reason I have not declared outright vendetta is that this chewie is surprisingly good. You're lucky. This time. [↩]

11 December 2009 @ 17:58 |

cover me: i'm going in

I've just come from catching up with my A&U editor, who said so many lovely things about my writing that my ego is currently too large to fit inside my rather humble apartment and is consequently perched on the rooftop throwing stones at passersby and singing bawdy songs at the top of its metaphorical lungs. Everybody should have the chance to work with such lovely people is all I can say.

Of course, I'm sure I'll be gnashing my teeth over all the squiggly, niggly, consequence-altering changes I'll need to wrangle into submission by the end of the edits. Not to mention all the stupid little writerly habits that plague me. Exhibit A:

first page of the manuscript and already there's a "word rep" reminder - oops!

first page of the manuscript and already a reminder to avoid repetition of words - oops!

I have been so astoundingly successful in not thinking about Pledged that I have genuinely forgotten everything and anything that happens in the manuscript,1 and thus I managed to inspire no small suspicion in my editor that I was simply pretending to be Deborah Kalin and had the real author locked up in a basement somewhere. Er, oops. Still, can't accuse me of not doing my best to come at these edits "fresh"!

One thing I was sorta refusing to think about was how the ending of Pledged would be received. Because I love the ending, love it in a hill-I'll-die-on kind of way, and I so wanted my editor to love it as much as I did, and what if she didn't…?

But look!2

BOOYAH

BOOYAH

  1. Truefax. Just this Saturday gone Tessa eyeballed me in alarm and filled me in on the ending I'd apparently written. I plead, er, distraction. Or something. [↩]
  2. And no, blood is not the last word of the book. No spoilers here. Tess, I hope you're proud of the restraint I just showed. [↩]

7 December 2009 @ 19:30 | 2 Comments

this means i need to remember what happened

Tomorrow, it begins.

"It" in this case would be the publication edits on Book 2 of The Binding series. Just in time for Christmas! Which is good, as it means there'll be a whole week during which I only have one job, not two. Almost like a real holiday ;)

It's also just in time to coincide with a rather high-pressure period at the dayjob, otherwise known as a two-month examination, during which period I need to get a minimum of 95% to pass. This is distinctly less good. But unavoidable. C'est la vie.

This means tonight is (probably) the last night I'll be able to get words on the faerie novel for a whiles to come. Poor faerie novel. It's been picked up and put down so many times now… No wonder I have no idea what's going on in that story.

And, because these articles rock, I give you Justine Musk on why you need to write like a bad girl, part one:

We are all born into ways of thinking that we take for granted. We are raised within certain belief systems. We take the dominating voices of the adults around us and internalize them until those perceptions of us become what we are to ourselves.

But when you become your own rebellion you say a healthy Fuck You to all of that.

And part two:

The double standard for selfishness still amazes me. The same culture that celebrates Ayn Rand’s “virtues of selfishness” will turn around and call women selfish and not exactly mean it as a compliment. Call a man ’selfish’ and he’ll shrug his shoulders; call a woman ’selfish’ and she’ll feel so shamed and cut to the core she’ll twist herself inside out to prove otherwise.

And to be a writer, or any artist, is to be inherently selfish. You must claim time for yourself, away from family and friends and jobs and so-called productive activity. You must claim that your art is important because it is important to you. You must make it a priority even though years will pass before you achieve anything that other people might recognize as ’success’, assuming you achieve it at all.

6 December 2009 @ 19:39 | 2 Comments

wouldn't have it any other way

Yowzer! Can you believe I was worried, when I set up the giveaways, that nobody would actively request my book? Clearly, I underestimated the lure of free stuff.

In the interests of tab-closing, your writerly link of the day is to BookEnds on writers and their process:

What I told her, and what I’m going to tell you now, is that these revisions and working with her editor this way, as well as working with me and her critique partners, was simply a part of her writing process. It was how she worked to create the books she wrote and to make them the best they could be. I also told her that I’ve rarely met an author who was happy with her writing process.

I particularly like that last part. Jessica goes on to compare a handful of different processes (I fall most closely into the latter category she mentions), and once again I'm reminded that my constant carping about the inefficiencies of my process is simply a "grass is greener" malady. The inefficiencies exist in other processes, they're just at different stages.

Writers. We ALL suffer from our own brains.

And, to redress the unbearable cuteness of the kitten video I posted the other day, I now give you cats on a slide:

4 December 2009 @ 21:30 | 4 Comments

just in time for christmas (hopefully)

Today I have most excellent news for people what like free books: I have some to give away!

I found some spare copies of Shadow Queen I didn't know I had,1 and now they must be sent to good homes.

Since we all know what happened last time I tried to choose random winners,2 in the interests of sparing myself some pain, I've set up the competition through Goodreads, who will choose the winners for me. If you're not a member over there, it's free to create an account in order to enter the draw.

I've set up two separate giveaways: one is open to residents of Australia & New Zealand, and one is open worldwide.3 The winners of each giveaway will be chosen by December 20 (Goodreads time), and I aim to have the books in the post by December 22 (Australian time).

There are four books up for grabs, two trade paperbacks and two mass market paperbacks — I'm figuring one winner of each giveaway will receive the trade paperback version and the other will receive the mass market paperback version.

So get to it4 — and good luck :)

ETA: It looks like the actual pages for the giveaway aren't visible yet, hopefully only on account of not yet being approved by the powers that be at Goodreads. That should only take another 24 hours at most.

ETA2: Okay, links are now most definitely live. Go!

  1. they were lurking in a box where I oh-so-conveniently packed them for the move down [↩]
  2. namely, I failed abysmally at it [↩]
  3. because I feel for my poor international friends who want to read my book but can't get their hands on a copy [↩]
  4. at the moment the giveaways are pending approval by Goodreads staff, but as I understand it when they go live, throwing your name in the ring is as simple as clicking the button marked Enter To Win. [↩]

2 December 2009 @ 17:00 |
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