books happen

Lookit!

Just as I was saying that I was coming to the end of the deadline crunch, and thinking about how glorious it would be to read new stuff, I caught up with a friend for dinner the other night and she leant me:

BOOKS! (All my friends are enablers of the worst best kind.)

It is all part of her ploy to bring me to the YA scene, because I happened to express my love for the voice in YA books — if you're looking for whippy narrative tone, with sarcasm and cleverness and sly internal observation all wrapped around blunt honesty, YA is where it's at — and now she has given me homework. The best kind of homework ever.

Naturally, I started reading them on the tram on the way home. There was, after all, a solitary tram ride to be endured, and, well. It goes without saying, doesn't it? This was not the wisest weakness I've ever indulged, because at that point I had STILL not finished the edits1 — but tonight, not half an hour ago,2 that last is no longer true. Edits are done, the corrected manuscript has been mailed to my editor and agent and is therefore officially off my desk, and I am free to enjoy my all-new all-YA reading feast guilt-free.

  1. which, between time constraints and wacky hijinks involving the Accept All Changes button while miles from the latest backed up copy, were, yeah, dragging on a bit… [↩]
  2. I have spent the intervening half-hour looking for icons of Mr Earbrass, or images that could be made into icons of Mr Earbrass, but to no avail, alas alack [↩]

17 January 2010 @ 18:04 |

i swear, one day, i'm actually going to finish them

My Goodreads page shows me as being in the middle of a modest slew of books, which is not untrue: they're all books I've started and not yet finished.1 But whenever my workload gets intense, I have this habit of returning to familiar ground, reading-wise.

So lately I've been re-reading, and my books of choice for this Christmas are Jane Austen's — Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion to be precise. I never can tell which of the two I like best, and whenever I read one I inevitably read the other within a month.

This time, I'm going to follow that up with a little Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, which was one of my Christmas presents, just as soon as I finish the edits. Which may be too much Austen and Austen-imitation even for my taste, but what the hell. I'm up for it!

  1. I never used to read multiple books at any given time. But things change. [↩]

13 January 2010 @ 19:16 |

i'm actually craving vegetables now

Ugh.

For the past … week? has it only been a week? … I've been pulling in 15-16 hour days, between the dayjob and the edits, and the few hours left over afterwards are for scarfing down some trans-fats and/or melted cheese, commuting, and nowhere near enough sleep. I tell you, I am not built for this sort of routine.

My favourite manuscript pages in this whole process were the act breaks. Do you know what they are? FREEBIE PAGES. (I'm gonna write manuscripts with fifty-gazllion acts in future, just so I can have lots of lovely, do-nothing-to-me freebie pages.)

Luckily, as of today I've all but finished the edits on Pledged. The first pass to take care of the line-edit stuff is done, the tags I stuck throughout the manuscript to mark bigger fixes have all been taken care of, the edit letter with its structural problems has been ticked off. I even made a little "It followed me home! Can I keep it?" note in the margin over that made-up word :) Now the only thing left to do is a final sweep for repetition.1 Which is none too soon, really, because the pressure's on at the dayjob and I could really do with a just a smidge more sleep. Like, you know, a decade or so.

One thing I did manage to do in the past few weeks was go to the movies, wherein I was treated to a trailer for Clash Of The Titans. The tagline of which, in a stroke of utter lunacy, is: TITANS WILL CLASH.

To which I say: tagline writers, you have just committed a tautological crime against humanity. STOP THAT.

  1. I tell you, if one of my characters looks, glances, gazes, stares, glares, or fixes their eyes on something ever again, it'll be too damn soon. [↩]

10 January 2010 @ 19:11 | 2 Comments

i may be hooked on guarana

Not dead.

Editing.

Send alcohol. Or cabana boys. Or a TARDIS — time. I need more of it, STAT!

5 January 2010 @ 20:56 |

this time, it will be different

Well! Christmas — and 2009 — is officially over and done with. I won't say I've emerged entirely unscathed, but I and my family appear to have the correct number of functioning limbs and vital organs apiece, and my incipient lunacy has progressed slower than anticipated.

I'm counting it as a win.

Mostly, in between brief bouts with my family and decidedly less brief bouts of flying,1 I spent my Christmas editing. (Oh yeah, I know how to party. Just ask me.) Sometimes, my family helped with the editing. Like the one time I really wanted someone to say that blood did not taste all that metallic, and not one of them would. After that, since they took such glee in ganging up on me, I asked them "Well, what tastes like iron, that isn't blood, and isn't iron?"

Their suggestions included blood sausage, cranberries, and Deep Heat. None of which, you know, make for great similes.

I've made a first pass through every page of the manuscript, so all the little fixes should be taken care of and only the fiddly larger fixes remain. Oh joy. My all-time favourite blooper in the manuscript was when the character Xaver suddenly and inexplicably, for one line only, became Xander. WTF? My all-time favourite editor's note in the margin of the manuscript was this one:

a nice word – but not a real one??

Obviously my editor is a woman after my mother's heart, who is convinced I am engaged in a single-handed attempt to pervert English by (gasp) making up new words.

And now, after all the editing I've done this weekend, I think it's time for pizza. Or oblivion. I can't decide.

  1. Three out of five of my flights were heinously delayed, courtesy of Brisbane Airport — even when I was nowhere near the place! Damn flow-on effects and low-budget airlines not having any spare planes, anyway. [↩]

3 January 2010 @ 15:52 | 2 Comments

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

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

why yes, i am indulging in a medicinal bourbon

The ironing of bedsheets, followed by silence on the blog? You guessed right, I had house guests this weekend. I'll spare you the details, except to say 3 year olds, even when sick, have enough energy to power the turning of the world.1

Today started with a visit to the post office to pick up a package which turned out to be from Allen & Unwin, and to have the size, shape and heft of a manuscript. Edits on Pledged, I thought, and dutifully lugged the package in to work so I could lug it to the library after work and get started this very night. I'm smack in the middle of a persnickety, detailed, involved and quite frankly annoying report at the dayjob, and between trying to sort that out in time and the distracting thought of the edits lurking unstarted on my desk, the inside of my head today has been a bit of a warzone. Concentration and focus were the first bystanders caught in the crossfire; coherence has been mortally wounded, and cogency currently thinks it's a duck.

Luckily for the sake of my sanity, when I knocked off work and opened the package I found, not the edits, but the edited manuscript for Shadow Queen, coming home to roost.2 So glad I carried that halfway around Melbourne and back today.

  1. In fact, have scientists investigated this? It's not the vestiges of the Big Bang, or gravitational forces, or the great battery that is the sun pouring energy through the world that keeps us spinning — it's all those blasted 3 year olds. With their running and dancing and gasping and jumping and squealing and singing and just the sheer, impossible wide-opened-ness of their eyes. [↩]
  2. Er, what do you do with these things? So far I've abandoned it on the living room floor. This should remain the status quo for, oh, at least a week. [↩]

27 October 2009 @ 18:57 |
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