Month: November 2021

(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).

As close readers of this blog will know, since the beginning of Covid I have been alternating my reading between genre books that I enjoy and “posh” books (many also enjoyable) that are meant to be good for me. I have lapsed on several occasions, squeezing in a couple of genre novels before plunging into the next classic. Over the last two or three weeks, however, I have completely fallen off the wagon. After reading The Tempest by William Shakespeare (and feeling much aggrieved by the plight of Caliban), I not only read A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas but have also been working my way steadily through every single one of Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories. I am presently (re)reading Network Effect and need to swing by my local bookstore next week to pick up the latest novella, Fugitive Telemetry. If pressed on why I am doing this, the short answer would be that I love Sarah J. Maas and Martha Wells. A more honest answer, though, involves a dread of what comes next.

I don’t have a system for deciding what posh books to read next. It’s literally whatever title pops into my head, and what pops into my head tends to be titles of books that I’ve heard posh people (not me) talking about at parties, or that have been mentioned in passing in the literary and/or lifestyle sections of upscale newspapers.

Enter The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevksy. It’s Russian and from the nineteenth century, so I knew it was going to be long and (I’m guessing) probably a bit of a downer. I was OK with that, though. Winter is here. A long read with a grim beginning, middle and end is entirely in keeping with the season. What I’m less OK with is my choice of print copy. I went for the only one my bookstore had in stock: the Penguin Classics paperback. At 985 pages it is predictably massive, but the problem I have – and I’ve always had – with Penguin Classics is that I find them very hard to read. Not because of the language but because of the tiny print and the narrow margins. The margins are a particular source of grievance because, having spent far too much of my childhood reading paperbacks in bookstores without actually buying the book, I can’t stand “breaking” a book’s spine so it will lie flat on the table. Look at my bookshelves and most of my paperbacks look as good as new. Look at my Penguins and every one of them has a badly creased spine: there’s simply no other way to read them because the words start so close to the middle of the book. What has put me off starting on The Brothers Karamazov is the knowledge that the mechanics of reading the thing are going to be so unpleasant.

Which brings me to the subject of book design. Penguin Classics are presumably made harder to read because it saves paper. A lot of classics are long, they are never out of print, and Penguin always includes a lot of high-quality academic commentary, so I imagine the cumulative savings in production costs are enormous. Also (and now I’m just being cynical) because so many Penguin Classics are compulsory reading at high school and college, I can’t help thinking that design aesthetics is lower down the list of priorities than it usually is.

I’m peculiarly sensitive to design at the moment because DAW has just sent me a pdf of the proof of Braking Day for – wait for it – proofreading. This is a copy of what the inside of the book will look like when it hits the shelves in April. My job is to make sure that what’s in the proof matches what I wrote in the original manuscript. I also get some input into how it looks (awesome, by the way! Apart from changing the dedication font to something less “shouty,” there’s absolutely nothing I would want to change). The format for Braking Day is the standard hardback size of six by nine inches. The font size is such that there are 36 lines on a full page and the whole book (130,000 words) will come in at about 360 pages. A couple of DAW hardbacks I’ve plucked off my bookshelves are broadly similar.

Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, has 35 lines to the page and is 456 pages long (it didn’t feel that long when I read it!) which equates to a wordcount of (very roughly) 150-160,000.

Alliance Rising, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, has 40 lines to the page and is 346 pages long, so the wordcount will be in the 130-140,000 range.

By comparison, The Brothers Karamazov also has 40 lines to the page but those 40 lines are crammed into a paperback format of five inches by seven and three-quarter inches (I don’t even want to do the wordcount). Which looks, predictably, like this.

And if you’re having trouble envisaging the size difference between a DAW hardback versus Penguin Classics, this is what it looks like. It is significant.

All told, design can have a significant effect on how “readable” a book is. Right now, I am grateful that being a classic author is not in my future!

(E________, first draft: 17,600 words)

Book titles change for a variety of reasons. British readers, steeped as they are in medieval culture, know a little bit about alchemy. As such, they are reasonably familiar with the concept of the philosopher’s stone, a prerequisite for the elixir of life or turning lead into gold. American readers (for whom, the British will tell you, history starts in 1776) have no such advantage. Accordingly, while Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was viewed as an acceptable title in the UK, in the US it was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone instead. (Incidentally, if you want a glimpse of how nonsense like alchemy managed to survive for so long, you could do a good deal worse than read the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is a brilliant documentation of medieval fraud.)

In similar vein, it is said that Joseph Heller wanted to call the book for which he is most famous Catch-18 but didn’t want it confused with Mila 18 by Leon Uris. He then considered Catch-11 but ran into the same problem because of Ocean’s 11 (the 1960 Frank Sinatra movie, not the George Clooney remake). His editor settled on Catch-22 because 22 was a “funnier” number than 18.

Some books, however, get their titles changed because the author’s original choice was replaced by something better. Jane Austen’s First Impressions is better known as Pride and Prejudice, no one has read The Last Man In Europe by George Orwell, although they are familiar with 1984, and John Steinbeck eventually decided to go with Of Mice and Men instead of Something That Happened.

And then, there’s yours truly. While I am reasonably confident that I am an OK writer, it is becoming more and more clear to me that I am absolutely terrible at book titles. My original title for Braking Day was Starship 4. Almost the first thing my original agent said to me when I spoke to her on the phone was, “How do you feel about the title?” I took the hint.

One of the reasons I use initials to identify works in progress is that the working title I love so much is probably cringeworthy. I am very pleased with how my second novel, V______ R___, has turned out. But when my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant James came back to me the other day with some very minor edits, they also appended a list of 25 (twenty-five!) alternative titles.

Having read through them, I was left with the distinct impression that the two of them had cracked open a bottle of vodka, come up with a list of titles ranging from sensibly sober to bombed out drunk, and then rearranged said list to disguise the progression. Unfortunately for me, but not surprising in any way, at least half of them (including some of the bombed out drunk ones) were way better than V______ R___. Having consulted with my family (who treacherously side with my agent), V______ R___ has now become T__ S__ W__C___ I___ T__ C________, a terrible acronym but a great title. TSW for short (and still initialized because, who knows, it might change again!).

Despite what I’ve just said, I fervently believe that E________, the novel I’m working on at the moment, is a really good name for a book and will stand the test of time. However, as my fervent belief has never survived contact with reality, E________ will remain E________ only until further notice.

(E________, first draft: 13,600 words)

When the good folks at DAW sent me the copy-edited version of Braking Day, it contained detailed instructions on how to review, so that if the copyeditor’s suggested amendments conflicted with my preferences, I could change them in such a way that the final version actually reflects my wishes.  So focused was I on following DAW’s granular guidance on editing the copyedit, I almost missed the following.

“If you would like to have a dedication and/or acknowledgments page in this book, or any other front or back matter, please send those to me at the same time as the reviewed manuscript.”

Yikes!  I hadn’t even thought about this.  I am not the sort of person who even thinks to send out thank-you notes (though I am always tickled pink when I receive one), so expressing gratitude in written form is not one of my strengths.  Although the principal reason for this failure is congenital bone idleness, a lesser ground is this: most people will overlook a failure to offer written thanks.  They will not, however, forgive a written thank-you to a third party when they themselves have been left out.  Acknowledgments are a social minefield.  One false step and you are dead to someone.

Being a man of immense bravery, my immediate reaction was to duck the whole issue and not write one, like C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher in Alliance Rising, or maybe do something super-short and high level like Martha Wells in Network Effect (I worship at the altar of Murderbot!) but these are all established writers who can get away with that sort of thing.  Mine is a traditionally published debut novel.  And I am incredibly lucky to be in a position to write the previous sentence.  It really does feel like winning the lottery and it would be churlish in the extreme to not at least try to thank the many, many people who have helped make that happen.  So, if you get to the acknowledgment page, and I have forgotten to mention you, I am really, really, really sorry.  Braking Day went through eight rounds of edits.  I only had one shot at the acknowledgment.

I don’t want to be dead to you.