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So Leah, my redoubtable editor at DAW Books, has just sent me her suggested final edits for Braking Day. “Polishing” she calls it. She has a couple of asks. Both are small in terms of words to be written, but one is significantly trickier to accomplish than the other. Doing edits gets harder as a book progresses. It’s like dressmaking, I suspect. When you just have a bolt of cloth you can cut it pretty much anyway you like, but when you’re taking needle and scissors to something that’s practically ready to wear, you are very much constrained by what you’ve already done. You don’t want your last piece of work to look like your last piece of work: like something you just tacked on at the end. It has to look seamless. Not easy!

On the other hand, like virtually all of Leah’s suggestions, I have no doubt it will make Braking Day a better book. I remember the first time I spoke to Leah how shocked I was at how deeply she’d read it. She’d given far more thought to the words I’d written than I’d ever given – or could have given – to writing them in the first place. It was a genuinely enthralling experience. Followed by four months of heavy lifting.

I also remember telling her that while I was presently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plans were afoot to move to Edinburgh, Scotland, on account of the day job, at which Leah mentioned she was working with two American women who now lived there. I thought no more about it until I was browsing the SF section of my local bookstore the other day and I came across a DAW hardback with two female authors from California who had settled in the Promised Land. Clearly, sunlight can have no appeal for either of them. Further digging confirmed that Leah had indeed edited the book, which has the following opening line:

“Eris got the call from her commander while she was killing a man.“

How can you not buy a book that starts like that? Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, is an unabashed, fast-moving space opera, chock full of some very angry women, who, believe you me, have a lot to be angry about. It’s published by DAW here in the US and by Gollancz, I think, in the UK. It has a very high body count. Honestly, I had no idea the redoubtable Leah was so bloodthirsty. Did she suggest that the authors kill more people, or less, I wonder? Enquiring minds want to know!

Chatting with Jo Fletcher, my UK publisher, about Braking Day. More particularly about what to put on the back cover. What, she wants to know, is the book about? More accurately, what do I, the author, think it’s about? Fortunately, because I am a simple soul, there is a simple answer: it’s an adventure/mystery set on a sub-light starship. Thrills! Spills! Suspense!

Yes, of course. But what’s it about?

And there’s the rub. Because with SF, perhaps more than any other genre, there’s always something else going on. It’s not simply about the story, it’s about the other stuff: the thread forever woven through our fireside tales of vacuum-stranded souls, alien princesses, and starships. SF has the power to make readers think about stuff they would otherwise refuse to, because you can take it out of the everyday context. It’s a wormhole for the mind. A shortcut to a completely different perspective.  One of the underlying themes of BRAKING DAY, for instance, is what it means to be “other”. The “other” here has nothing to do with the here and now.  But we could just as easily be talking about race, or gender, or religion: whatever tool the natives of Sol III need to turn their fellows into “them” and not “us”.  This SF tradition, this let’s-talk-about-something-else-so-we-can-talk-about-this, is an old, old tradition that goes back pretty much to the beginning of the novel in the 18th Century. I’m thinking about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu. A war that begins with disagreement about the correct way to crack open an egg.  I’m pretty sure Swift’s point had very little to do with, you know, eggs.

Which still doesn’t help with the back of the book….

“Deep Space is getting shallower by the light-year.…” Thrills! Spills! Suspense!

Was chatting on the phone yesterday with my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant, James. They were providing feedback on the manuscript of what I hope will become my second novel. Like most writers, I guess, I have received literally hundreds of rejection emails with pro forma best wishes and anodyne phrases like, “just wasn’t for me,” or “I couldn’t connect with the main character” (ouch!). While you have to be professional, take these things on the chin, and move on, part of me is desperate to know why it just wasn’t for her, or why he couldn’t connect with the main character. In short, I was desperate for feedback. If you don’t get it, how can you get better? So when professionals like Brady and James take the time to read something I’ve written, think about it hard, and then give me the results of that thinking, I gorge on it like manna from heaven. Ninety percent of what they had to say will undoubtedly make for a better book and I can’t wait to apply it to a new draft. Just between thee and me, that’s probably true of the remaining 10 percent also, but I’m not telling them that!

As always after calls like this, I wandered about the house on an energized cloud nine, going over what had been said and thinking about the most elegant way to execute. But then, after a while, my steps grew leaden and I found myself sitting on the front porch staring mindlessly into space. Brady’s and James’s enthusiasm had made it real. I had written a second book. There is a decent chance that I will sell a second book. I might actually become, you know, a “proper” writer. I felt like the dog that had caught the car. I want this. I’ve wanted this for years. But now that I’ve got it, can I handle it? Am I good enough to handle it? What if I’m not?

Fortunately, tea arrived and cloud nine returned. Either I can, or I can’t. Only the future will tell, so why worry? It’s not like I’m going to stop writing, whatever happens. And in the meantime, having sunk my teeth into a shiny piece of chrome, I’m going to hang on for all I’m worth.

Sometimes you think you know all there is to know about something, and you don’t. I thought I’d read Robinson Crusoe as a child, when it turned out I’d read a sanitized kids version. As an adult, reading the original by Daniel Defoe (first published in 1719), I discovered that Mr. Crusoe was a slave-dealing chancer, who kind of deserved to get stranded on a desert island.

Similarly, I recently finished reading another novel I thought I’d read as a child: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (who was bi-racial BTW). If like me, you associate The Three Musketeers with old-world gallantry and swashbuckling adventure (“all for one and one for all!”), it’s a bit of a surprise to discover that the musketeers are little more than spendthrift, womanizing gamblers, who are constantly in debt and mooch off other men’s wives to keep their financial heads above water. The most eye-opening chapter for me was the one titled, “At Night All Cats Are Grey” in which D’Artagnan, knowing that a particular young woman was expecting her lover to visit her after dark, takes the lover’s place, fools her into thinking he’s the man she was expecting, and has his way with her. Dumas, writing in 1844, did allow that D’Artagnan’s behaviour was a bit shady. Here, in the 21st Century, it would be rape. Or, if you are a follower of English criminal law, burglary. The Three Musketeers remains one of the great early adventure novels, but it’s “heroes” are not heroic at all.

Taking time out to revisit The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. It’s over 40 years’ old now and one of the great SF novels of all time: multi-layered, thoughtful, and beautifully written. And nearly all the major characters are female. I remember picking it off the bookshelf as a teenager: and I remember why. I had never come across a SF novel written by a woman. I was curious.

Of course, I had read SF books written by women, I just didn’t know it. They hid themselves behind initials (C.J. Cherryh, for instance) because publishers felt that readers (young men like me, in particular) would not pick up a book that had a female author. Of course, it was the 80s, so everyone was sexist, right? But moving forward in time we have the Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling, who was apparently advised to use initials for exactly the same reason. And right now we have triple Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin, not to mention the recently published (and totally excellent) The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes. I don’t actually know whether fear of reader sexism prompted these latter two to take the initials route, but I strongly suspect it had something to do with it. So, two things: first, kudos to Joan D. for not being J.D. and opening my eyes to a new realm of possibilities; and second, shame on the rest of us for tolerating a situation where too many female SF authors still feel the need to camouflage their gender when they should be free to shout it out from the bookshelves.

Well, time is moving on and we are edging closer to publication. DAW Books has almost finalized the cover and it is looking awesome! Thanks Kekai Kotaki! To be honest (interesting… how often am I not honest?), I didn’t expect to have as much input into the cover as I actually did. DAW asked me for my thoughts on what I would like to see on the cover. I consulted with my agent, the estimable Brady, who is way better at visualization than I am, and we sent our thoughts over to DAW. Kekai came back with some sketches reflecting various thoughts and demonstrating that some thoughts were definitely better than others. We picked one, Kekai fleshed it out, and then Brady and I rudely picked it apart. Kekai went away, tinkered with it some more and voila! an awesome cover treatment! I took an iPad with the cover image on it and propped it up on the shelving of my local B & N to compare it with its peers. It holds up pretty well, even if the electric glow of pixels gave it an unfair advantage. If Braking Day is a monstrous flop it won’t be because the cover was bad! At least I still have the day job….