Month: September 2021

So, earlier this week, I finished the final (for now) V______ R___ edits. The estimable Brady reckons that unless I’ve scattered typos all over the place, the manuscript will soon be ready to try its luck in the market. Typos are always a possibility with yours truly, so I will keep my fingers crossed!

Keyboard incompetence aside, I have now gone through all but one of the daunting list of to-dos that were jeering at me back in August. I am now free to start work on E________! As finishing the outline of E________ was item number one on said to-do list, all I have to do is sit down, crack open my laptop, and start typing. This, coincidentally, puts me pretty much in sync with National Novel Writing Month, which starts (as it does every year) in November. The basic idea of NaNoWriMo, as people insist on calling it, is deceptively, seductively simple: drop everything extraneous in your life and commit to banging out 50,000 words of that novel you were always going to write but have never got around to. Don’t worry about the quality, just get it on the page. You can always edit later.

NaNoWriMo is, by all accounts, an excellent way to get budding authors onto their backsides and typing. After all, once you’ve hammered out your 50,000 words, are you really going to stop? It’s reported that The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, and Cinder, by Marissa Meyer, among others, owe quite a lot to the turbo boost that NaNoWriMo gave their manuscripts.

NaNoWriMo has a ton of resources attached to it. There are inspirational websites and opportunities for writers to get together to bond over their various projects. Here in Pittsburgh, where I am sitting out Covid pending my indefinitely delayed transfer to Edinburgh, the Carnegie Library is having write-ins, with free coffee and stuff, pretty much every Saturday in November. And here I am, perfectly positioned to take part. For a novel like E________, assuming I start writing it next week, NaNoWriMo could rocket me to the 70% line.

But. To hit 50,000 words in 30 days, you have to aim for 2,000 words a day. I know that comes out at 60,000, but you need a safety buffer against life as we know it. As a general rule, though I’m not fanatical about it, I aim to write two-and-a-bit double-spaced pages a day (the “bit” part of that formulation allows me to pretend I’ve written three pages). Two-and-a-bit pages generally comes in at something over 600 words. For me, that’s usually one to two hours of typing. If you assume a SF novel is around 100,000 words, that’s roughly six months to a first draft, allowing plenty of time for editing, pitching, etc. if you are aiming for a book a year.

To do NaNoWriMo “properly” I would have to find about four hours every day for 30 days. Nothing to a full-time writer but, for me, it would be brutal. I’m pretty sure if I tried it I’d become burned out and divorced: not necessarily in that order. I think I’ll just plod along in the slow lane while my NaNoWriMo colleagues blast past me, flames bursting from their exhausts.

I might wander into the library, though. I may not want to take part, but it will be fun to watch.

Here it is!

Many thanks (again!) to Kekai Kotaki and DAW Books for pulling this together! The cover was released on io9.com, who were kind enough to say nice things about it. The first time I was aware of io9 was when they wrote a review of Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (who is actually two people!). As that book was followed by numerous sequels and eventually became The Expanse on SyFy and then Amazon, I’m going to take it as a good omen!

All we need now (fingers crossed!) is a kick-ass quote for the top of the page….

As a coping mechanism for the endless lockdown that is Covid, I have taken to alternating genre books that I like with pieces of literature which are “good for me.” Such is my excuse for having a crack at The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Written toward the end of the 14th Century, they are a collection of stories told in (mostly) rhyming verse, the conceit being that a bunch of (not necessarily sober) pilgrims gathered together in a London pub agree to a competition to tell the most entertaining story during a trip to Canterbury and back. Nowadays, London to Canterbury is about an hour and a quarter in light traffic. But in Chaucer’s time it was a five-day journey on a gently-ridden horse. Needless to say, the pilgrims’ tales are not flash fiction.

As you would expect from a medieval tome, there’s a fair bit about beautiful maidens, modest and chaste. Chaucer on wives, though, is a bit more interesting. Chaucer’s wives have minds of their own, don’t take nonsense from their husbands, and are not above the odd dalliance should it take their fancy. They also expect to be properly provided for. Chaucer has one wife, while telling a tale, say the following.

“The silly husband always has to pay,
He has to clothe us, he has to array
Our bodies to enhance his reputation,
While we dance round in all this decoration.
And if he cannot pay, as it may chance,
Or won’t submit to such extravagance,
Thinking his money thrown away and lost,
Then someone else will have to bear the cost”

Think of that what you may, it isn’t dry and it isn’t boring. What it is, though, is a crass editing error. The speaker here is clearly a wife, but these lines appear in The Shipman’s Tale, a (very male) sea captain’s story about a merchant’s wife and an amorous monk. Chaucer, in all probability, originally intended the story to be told by a woman but then changed his mind. And, having changed his mind, he missed this in his revision. Rookie error! At least my editing is better than Chaucer’s!

Except it isn’t. Having sent off my final edits of Braking Day to the redoubtable Leah, I have turned my attention to the V______ R___ manuscript. Having not looked at this for months and months, I thought I’d give it a complete read through before tackling the edits suggested by my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant, James.

Not having read it for so long, it was almost like coming to it as a reader. And, even if I say so myself, it’s not a bad read. Unlike Braking Day, V______ R____ is told from two points of view rather than one. In the middle of the book, D is working with M on a project. M tells D to go home and D does so. End of scene. I then cut to a different point of view and return to M, still working on the project an hour after we last left him. Shock horror, D is still there! Even worse, M tells D to go home. Again!

On the plus side, I’m in good company. Neither Brady nor James nor any of my beta readers picked up on this. So, this egregious error will be our little secret. Besides, doesn’t this make me a tiny, tiny, little bit like Chaucer?