*** Blog on hiatus – two weeks ***

The Chronicle Review features an article on reading a book in four different ways (hard copy, audiobook, dedicated ebook reader [Kindle], and iPhone reader [eReader]). You can also hear the writer discuss her experiment at ABC’s Book Show. Big call: she says iPhone is the Kindle-killer. I concur. There’s a reason Amazon bought Stanza and has made Kindle-purchased books available on the iPhone…

I really liked this: “Tomorrow’s readers will immerse themselves in their favorite books…based on deeper needs. It will be just the sort of seamless decision we make every day when we decide whether we will place a phone call, send an e-mail message or text message or photo or video, handwrite a note, or make a personal visit.” Nice.

Um, David Eddings died. A month ago. That bit of news just whipped right past me.

The biweekly Writing World newsletter features a good article about midlisting in its first July newsletter. It kind of matches what I’ve been saying about writing and commercial success lately, except the professional writers interviewed here are do move with market trends – but they have the contacts that let them know what those market trends are in advance. New writers without contacts are going to struggle to do that, but the rest of it – be prolific and flexible, have a very thick skin, and understand that most writers won’t be massive bestsellers but can still make a living – is all good advice. Read it in the archives.

So, who DOESN’T look at a screwdriver and thinks ooh, this could be little more sonic? Captain Jack Harkness, that’s who. Torchwood’s back on tonight in the UK.

44,000 words. That’s not quite 2000 words a day – I did only 8000 words for the week, not 10,000. It wasn’t that I skipped a day, it was just that on a couple of days I didn’t quite manage 2000, and then couldn’t quite catch up for the rest of the week.

The writing itself began to improve later in the week, as plot lines and character motivations became clearer. Certainly, the instant I got to writing Rana’s first day (Jannin and Rana spend three days doing separate activities in the cursed palace before they reunite), I saw what Jannin was supposed to be doing on his own first day, and had to go back and fix that up.

This is by far the messiest first draft I’ve ever written, with notes to myself everywhere about changing scene order and deleting characters and switching outcomes. But then, I rather suspect I always forget how hard a first draft is, once I’ve done the second and then the last.

I also managed to write 6000 words on a different project. I don’t normally split my attention, but I figured if I wrote out what these other characters wanted to say, they would stop talking to me and let Rana and Jannin have a turn.

And my last writing-related activity for the week was doing the final edits to the first Rana book, to be published soon.

So in all, though I didn’t make my target word count, I had a pretty productive week. Next week, though, I’m looking forward to having a bit of a break.

For the last few weeks, I have been discussing how the art of writing intersects with commercial success. First I said that it’s already hard to write, but even harder when you choose your genre solely based on what you think will sell, rather than what you love. Then I pointed out that most writers don’t make a lot of money from writing anyway. And then I used actor Marcus Graham to prove that you’ll be happier if you moderate your ambitions to something realistic.

In all of this, how do you measure your success as a writer? Using how much money you make, as I’ve tried to make plain, is a poor measure. Using the number of sales is only slightly better, because it’s still directly correlated to how much money you’re making. There’s plenty of writers who have released a decent body of work, with large mainstream publishers, have had sales, and who still cannot give up the day job.

For example, there’s Tony Shilltoe, an Australian fantasy author who has “enjoyed moderate publishing success” with more than a dozen books, and who still cannot give up the day job (though maybe he doesn’t want to). The key point for him is that he has not broken out of Australia into overseas (the giant US and UK markets).

I cannot speak for this writer and how he feels about it; I’m just using him as an example – a writer who has, at least since 2002, produced one to two publishable books a year – and that’s pretty impressive for someone with a fulltime job.

So how would you measure your success? Measuring it by money will only make you unhappy. Choose other measures, and make them correspond to where you are in your writing life.

If you’re just starting out, your measure of success could be twofold: Do you sit down and write every day? And are you able to complete an entire book-length story? Plenty of ‘writers’ undertake lots of stories and never have the willpower to work through the mid-book grind to finish a complete draft, so you can be proud if you have.

If you’re further along, you might make your measure of success whether you write a certain number of words every day, and whether you go back and edit that first draft until it becomes something better.

And again, you might be further along than that, and measure your success in publishing credits – with small publishers or large, with short stories or longer works, with fiction or non-fiction. Or it might by awards and good reviews (though that is relying on external factors and opinion and I would not recommend it – other peoples’ opinions matter in terms of deciding if your work should be published or not, but they should not be used to determine how you feel about it). Your goals depend on you.

My measure of success is simple, but less quantifiable: Am I happy? Do I look forward to my day? Do I go eagerly once more unto the writing breach, dear friends (even when I “close the wall up with our dead English” words; ie when it’s not going well)? Yes. Then I am successful.

Last week, we finished off the prologue. I did intend to re-write the prologue with the changes I have specified, and post it for your edification, but I haven’t got around to that yet. So let’s just move straight into the body of the book.

Remember, the first half (before the execution) is from Ro’s point of view. The second half (after the execution) is from his daughter’s point of view. Ro dies. The reader should be very clear on that. There is no ‘hey, we swapped the bodies’ nonsense, he dies.

Ro Manus rode back to the City of Brass almost one year after he had left it to go south, further even than the Citadel of the Dog-Headed, which was now just a jackal-haunted ruin.

As his caravan came out of the foothills to the east and entered the Forest of the Dead which sprawled now for long miles on either side of the main road, he left the train of camels to his eminently capable assistant and the full complement of guards, and walked through the forest northwards, but not as far as the river.

Plenty of new trees, he noted, but not unduly many for a full turn of the seasons. He reached that section of forest where all the trees, hundreds upon hundreds, were of a height and crowded close together.

Ro pushed his way through the trees. He was ashamed that he would not have found the right tree if not for the unmistakable landmark of the tight circle of seven trees that stood just that much taller than the rest.

He knelt before his tree, kissed the soft mulched soil and breathed the words of a prayer meant to be chanted. He sat back on his heels and looked up at the tall silvery trunk and dry green leaves of the tree. Beyond its crown, the eternal sky sought to crush him. He looked down again.

‘Has it been this long?’ he asked. ‘It was yesterday, my love.’

In saying it, he had a spasm of guilt and closed his eyes. His thoughts had already turned ahead to the City of Brass, to Ninevah whom he saw as frequently as he visited this tree – once yearly.

With his eyes closed, Ro clearly saw this slope as it had been fifteen years ago. Women clad all in black, from head to wrist to toe, and even their hands and fingernails gone black with soil and ash. Some wept, but many did not. They buried their husbands, their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, even their cousins and nieces and nephews if the extended family had no other woman surviving to do it. Only the men who had no female relatives to do this task, like Ro, ventured the Forest of the Dead, and he had been the only man on that slope.

He had not chosen his place wisely, for his single tree. Beside him, a woman, tears falling into each hole, mixed ashes and soil for seven trees, seven. Ro had no words to say to that, and could not find the way or will to prevent her as she dug her holes and planted her trees in a circle she formed the centre of.

Now those seven trees grew just a little taller than the trees around them, and Ro was never at all curious, each year he visited, to peer between their trunks and see what he might see.

But the plague had passed, as all curses of the gods passed eventually, and the City of Brass had not yet seen a recurrence. It would eventually, Ro knew, traveller who had seen other cities come under the blight time and time again.

First, the name has to change – not through any fault of Ro’s but I used the name in another book before I got around to start editing this one, and I prefer it over there in the other one. So first step, change the name.

Secondly, the tone is wrong. It’s a bit formal or stilted or whatever, and I pretty quickly relax from that (as I noticed in my first comple re-read through before I started this editing process).

Thirdly, as an opening to a book, it’s probably a little too meandering. OK, so we find out that he’s returning from a successful trading year, had a wife, she died in the plague, and he has a thing for another woman now. We also learn something of the customs of the City of Brass (that they mark their dead by planting trees).

You know what would be better? We find out later that the Shah, the king of the city, is planning to plough under these trees because the city needs room to grow. (A lot of the time, Ro spends his time wondering if the Shah is actually a tyrant, or just extremely practical; that’s why he vacillitates about whether or not to join the people planning to overthrow him, and why he doesn’t pick a side – which in turn is why he kind of deserves what he gets. No place for fence-sitters in this world!) So, wouldn’t it be better if the trees are already ploughed under? If Ro comes home to bare earth where his wife’s grave once was? That would be better.

I don’t know if that image of the woman surrounding herself with her dead should stay. Maybe it can be slotted in somewhere else later.

Remember I was writing this for NaNoWriMo, so there’s going to be scenes that I lovingly dwell on, just to get my daily word count up. I think this was one of these scenes and it needs to be much shorter and with more stuff happening in it rather than remembrances that amount to backstory.

Writers often start the story too early, and I think this is one of those times. The huge benefit of putting distance between yourself and one of your stories is that you are more able to look at a patch of writing, even a patch that you’re fond of, and say – that is unnecessary. Delete it.

Next week, the next page…

Aside from the fact that I can never remember which way round her double surname goes, Bujold is one of my favourite fantasy/SF writers, particularly for her Miles/Vor series. A Civil Campaign comes a long way into the Miles book, and is one of most openly romantic of the series, being the one in which Miles courts and wins the fair Ekaterina.

I listened to this as an audiobook rather than read it, and because of that it did take me some time to get into it – it was my first audiobook experience and it took me a while to learn how to listen properly. But by about a quarter of the way through, the audio experience was a bonus: I could start it playing and sink into the familiar tones of the very good reader, like sinking into the familiar world itself.

The other limitation was that I hadn’t read the book in which Miles actually meets Ekaterina, and so was missing quite a bit of backstory. At first I was a bit dismayed with how shy and retiring Ekaterina is – I wanted a strong, bold woman for Miles. But as the story progresses, it’s made clear why she is that way, and her strength also shines through.

The subplots, with the bugs and the transexual and the other pairings, are all a lot of fun, and the resolution of the main romance plot, in the council chamber, is a great moment.

As a straight fantasy genre romance, I think the very early (first?) book in the Vor series which is the meeting of Miles’s parents might work better – there is less backstory and complicated relationships to manage for the reader. But as a romance for Miles, with his readers behind all the way – slapping their foreheads at his stupidity for that garden plan and cheering him on when he starts making progress – this is a great read – lots of banter, lots of fun, and some very telling character moments.

Following on from my mention of the Bryon Bay Writers Festival, also coming up soon is the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Aireys Festival of Words, both in August.

Locus Magazine has announced its 2009 award winners. Anathem and the Graveyard Book, both of which I enjoyed reading earlier this year, both won awards, as did Le Guin’s Lavinia, which I am really looking forward to reading (it’s on the list. The very, very, very long list).

This site does writing news so I don’t have to come up with it…

I did my 2000 words a day this week, some days very easily, some days…not so much (wasn’t this meant to be fun?). I’m at 36,000 words and have moved into the second phase of the book, told from Rana’s POV. I was meant to get to 40,000 from Jannin’s POV before switching to Rana, but his part finished early. I’m not concerned – I skimped on some of his scenes (often because they were just going in very stupid directions), entirely skipped others as being too hard to write before I know Rana’s half of the story in detail, and also know there’s at least one more scene I have to add in, so he’ll easily make 40,000 on the second draft.

This is my first sustained experience in writing a sequel, and it’s been enlightening. I’m trying to keep developing characters but stay true to their personalities from the first book (due to be published in the next few months).

It’s been especially hard to do this with Jannin, who was the young wizard-villain in the first book. In the first book, he gets to literally pop in, flirt with our heroine Rana, say something enigmatic which not conincidentally moves the plot forward, and pop out. For a major character and plot-driver, he has little to say and little page time. As a POV character, he’s not nearly so much fun to write – turns out the guy’s got problems, who knew?

The other issue I’ve found has been in leaning too hard on the first book, especially in assuming knowledge of the relationship between Rana and Jannin. In this first draft for the second book, they barely interact, because, hey, the first book showed Jannin loves Rana and why, and her ambivalence about him, so no need to demonstrate it again…except for readers who won’t read that first book, of course! At the moment, they barely exchange two words before haring off to pursue their two different but intertwined narratives, so it would seem to new readers that a) Rana’s really mean to Jannin and b) she’s awfully keen to rescue him given how mean she is to him…

But that’s a goal for the second draft. For now, I’ve got another week coming up of 2000 words a day…

I love Elvis…um, Marcus Graham.

In this article, Graham talks about his career trajectory. In particular, and in relation to my last few weeks of posts, the article begins:

MARCUS GRAHAM tells a funny story about the moment, many years ago now, when he gave up on Hollywood. It meant, as for any actor, letting go of a big dream and, like any adult, discovering that the dream wasn’t what you thought it would be. But in that pivotal moment in Graham’s life, he grasped the seeds of something else.

“I’ve learned that the less the ambition, the greater the happiness,” Graham says cheerfully.

And then later: “Letting go of the blind ambition of his 20s and 30s made him happier and calmer.”

Life today creates strange pressures: it’s not admirable anymore to just be quietly good at something that you’ve worked away at for years. You have to be the best! And do it really young! And really quickly! In writing, that’s first-time authors winning the Booker or 16-year-olds writing bestselling fantasy novels that get made into movies and spawn lots of sequels (though, hey, it is fantasy, so there’s got to be at least three books).

It leads to expectations that work against new writers. They expect too much of themselves, too quickly, and too much of the publishing industry, and others expect too much of them too. Something like Harry Potter or Twilight….those are bolts of lightning. Those authors themselves were under pressure to re-create the phenomena with every new book. How can a new author expect to create the next phenomenon when it is unpredictable, crowd-driven, faddish? How can a literary author aim to win the Booker when the judges’ tastes change every year and their decision-making is often obscure and apparently random?

Becoming an A-list movie star in Hollywood is the pinnacle for many actors. Wanting to be the next Rowling appears to be the goal for many fantasy writers. Winning the Booker is the dream for many (British Commonwealth and Irish) literary writers. Those are the sorts of big and glorious ambitions that might set you on your path, whatever it might be.

But to paraphrase the article, the dream is not always what you thought it was going to be. The amount of publicity, pressure, and sheer fan obsession must have given Rowling cold sweats. In this discussion, a Booker prize winner complains of having no time to write because of the touring expected of her since she won. And Marcus Graham woke up in Hollywood one day, and thought:

‘Bloody hell, here I am getting paid all this money to not work, while I wait for a job that I actually don’t want. What the f— am I doing here?’ So I took the $US10,000; they decided I actually was too mysterious [for a show called Mysterious Ways] and I left town.”

But: “despite letting go of ego, he still has the drive to act.” A writer can let go of unrealistic dreams of fame and fortune, and still want to write and be motivated to sit down and write (rather than daydream about having already written and receiving the accolades). It’s about deciding on workable goals, realistic goals.

For me, it’s regular publication for a small, niche audience. I don’t want lots of money, I sure as hell do not want fame, I don’t need critical recognition in the form of awards and prizes. I want to say, here, here’s a fun book, hope you enjoy it (and I want my small audience to say, thanks, I did, when’s the next one coming out? Write faster, lady).

We’ve all been trained to think of sensible, achievable goals as giving up. It’s not. It’s reaching for the happiness, the satisfaction, the contentment within your grasp, not those fabled distant stars that are so far away that their light takes millions of years to reach us. Reach for the Sun instead; its light only takes 8.3 minutes – a star less daunting to reach for.

There’s a greeting card in that, somewhere.

Last time, I decided it would be cleaner to keep out some backstory details to keep the focus of the scene on the execution.

The rest of the prologue introduces characters and relationships:

Such was the crime, and the Shah had come to watch the punishment carried out, standing elevated at the execution gate with the Shah Consort at his side. The Shah Prince was, as ever, not in evidence.

Also in the silent audience as the camel was led on its display around the City of Brass was a true Consort, wearing the red leather and carrying the small silver dagger. Even without the stories she might have excited notice, with her black rich hair curled about her face, and her eyes of the gazelle.

But, the stories said, Ro Manus had handed her a full golden cup of vinegar-and-pearl in the instant before his arrest. It had happened only once in all the history of the Consorts in the City of Brass, and that had also been a dying man to his lover. The half-cup happened a good deal more frequently, that which was an offer of marriage, but even that was still accounted rare.

But the full cup gave everything the man owned to the Consort for a single night of her company, and that simple gesture from Ro, if he had really done it and the thunderous faces of the Shah and his Shah Consort hinted he had, took everything of his that might have been confiscated on his arrest as a traitor, and put it into the hands of the Consort.

That included the secret of making paper, which Ro had brought back with him from his latest journey. And it included the last great artwork of old Nabadiah, whose daughter and apprentice had escaped the Citadel of the Dog-Headed with it, and given it to their son, whose vinegar-and-pearl drink had gifted it to the Consort. The Consort wearing red leather amongst the crowd was the richest woman in the City of Brass.

But she left the square when the camel did, and did not return. The young girl in the white robe of the Scribes watched her go. They said she was Ro’s daughter and she had his colouring but Ro had never acknowledged her and his vinegar-and-pearl gift left nothing for her even if he had. She stayed in the square, waiting like the rest of them for the return of the white camel and its agonised passenger.

Beside the Shah and the Shah Consort waited the Lady Physician to the Shah Court She wore the yellow of her profession. Her eyes marked the departure of the Consort and the stillness of the young Scribe but she said nothing.

Normally the cries and jeers of the citizens would have signalled the progress of the camel along the circular streets of the City of Brass, but the crowd at the execution gate waited in the heat of the early morning sun and heard nothing. The rest of the city mourned as they did.

But when the camel at long last returned via the third bridge to the execution gate, a great cry when up from the crowd nearest the beast. For Ro Manus, who had taken all that had befallen him in stoic silence, lay with his head slumped upon the back of the camel. The breaker of ties had claimed him, said the crowd, dead mercifully and spared the indignity of dismemberment.

The Lady Physician of the Shah Court fought her way down from the dais and through the crowd until she reached the white camel. She confirmed what the crowd already knew, and turned and shook her head at the Shah. The man was dead, that signal said. Leave him be.

But the Shah must have his revenge, and the body was duly torn apart and beheaded. That too, the City of Brass witnessed. Then the tide changed and the City went on as it always did.

But the young scribe, her white robes muddied with the water and soil as she planted a karri sapling in the Forest of the Dead for her father days later, knew only that he had died intact and with his own personal honour.

She had none of his ashes to mix with the soil as she planted his tree among the stumps of other karri, but here, with no witnesses under the enormous sky, she let tears mingle with it instead.

Now the execution’s being told from the point of view of an attendee, some of this information logically can’t be put in, as he wouldn’t know it or have the opportunity to observe it. And some, as before, needs to be removed to make the execution scene cleaner and more gripping. I find, re-reading this prologue, that it has a very distancing effect, a very poor effect indeed for something meant to draw a reader in. In re-writing, I will be looking for something with more flavour and impact.

What a strange and entertaining book this is. It consists of three intertwined stories, but you only fully find out how they are related at the very end, and in the meantime, all three are funny and clever in their own ways.

First, we meet Mr Mee, an exceedingly innocent old man, so innocent, in fact, that it’s hard to believe he’s not winking at the reader as he po-faced describes the internet porn he is so unknowingly poring over in his quest to track down an obscure work known as Rosier’s Encyclopaedia. The naked women on his new computer screen drives off his housekeeper of many years, and before he knows it (and who could believe that a coincidence of a flat, tyre, a downpour of rain and a visit to a computer store could lead to all this), a young lady has moved into his house and is giving him little pills to help his headaches and practising her life sciences homework on him.

Next, Minard and Ferrand are introduced. Now, these characters are mentioned, in passing, for real in Rousseau’s Confessions (as the third narrative informs us): “he one, tall, smooth-tongued, and sharping, was named Ferrand; the other, short, squat, a sneerer, and punctilious, was a M. Minard…As they thrust themselves into all companies, and wished to intermeddle in everything, Theresa called them the gossips, and by this name they were long known at Montmorency.” Crumey has made up a fictional backstory for the gossips, and they provide the overt, slapstick, odd couple style comedy of the book, as they take on some mysterious copying work which results in a murder and their flight from Paris to Montmorency, where they become the neighbours of newly-renowned Rousseau.

The third narrative is a middle-aged university professor, in the midst of that most trite of literary devices, an infatuation with one of his students (seriously, do a survey – how many male middle-aged literary writers write about middle-aged men having affairs or becoming obsessed with younger women; I know the advice is ‘write what you know’ but come on, it gets dull). However, this one is not going to turn out how you think it might, and in the meantime, we get philosophical musings on Rousseau (very handy for following the other threads if, like me, you know little about the man except that he was French and unpleasant), other French writers, the Encyclopaedia, and the general foolishness of life. Compared to the other strands, this one is the least laugh-out-loud funny, but the most intellectually amusing and ironic.

Each narrative voice is distinct and appealing; the book is well-written, a fascinating blend of real anecdotes and fictional events. Unusually for me, it left me wanting more.