Barry Kirwan's Blog, page 16
July 8, 2012
Eden's Revenge Cover Design
Here (left) is the front cover design for my third book due out Xmas 2012, Eden's Revenge , in the Eden Paradox series. The publisher and I wanted to go a bit more 'up-market' and found this design by Science Fiction illustrator and artist , who has illustrated for some of my SF heroes like and his 'Firebird' novel.
As soon as I saw it I fell in love with it, as towards the end of the book there is a pretty substantial battle scene, involving two large destroyers (one a 'Crucible', which is a planet breaker, the other a 'Marauder') hunting a smaller ship - no prizes for guessing where the good guys are.
It's a bit of a departure from the covers of the first two books, The Eden Paradox and Eden's Trial , whose central icon is the ankh, an ancient Egyptian symbol of life and water, whose origins remain shrouded in mystery. The ankh will be on the reverse cover of Eden's Revenge when it comes out in paperback Easter 2013. Fans do keep asking me what is the significance of the ankh in the books, and all I can say is that the answer is given in chapter 14 of book 3, and it's pretty major.
As a reader myself, I love science fiction front covers, some of my favorites being the Dune ones, and I have to say Iain Banks' Surface Detail 's front cover is pretty cool, though in my opinion, you can't beat a good space-ship...
The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook from , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones
Eden's Trial is available on ebook from , and from Fall 2012 in paperback
Eden's Revenge is coming Xmas 2012...
July 6, 2012
Who are the gate-keepers in publishing today?
The Paris Writers Workshop 2102
A couple of weeks ago the Paris
Writers Workshop (PWW 2012) was held in the 7th arrondissement, a couple of blocks back from the Seine, in the middle of a sweltering Parisian summer in a city yet to discover serious air conditioning. I wasn’t well, so missed almost all of it, except
armed with some morphine managed to make it to two one hour lectures when I had
medical appointments in Paris the same day anyway. I’m a fan of these and other
Writing Conferences, because they can be instructive and inspirational, can
tell you when you’re going right, and when you’re wasting your (and everyone else's) time. I had the
honour of going to one about six years back with Michael C Curtis, Atlantic
Fiction Editor, and it led to my first book being published.
There was an interesting discussion on publishing,
self-publishing and �gate-keepers�. A gate-keeper is someone there to assure
the quality of what is out there in retail and online bookstores. It means you
don’t pay for something (or simply download something free) and then realise it
is badly written, so it’s for all readers.
The
Traditional Model
Not that long ago, to get published you had
to spend years learning the craft, slogging over a manuscript, sending out
letters to agents and getting rejected, finally getting an agent, then spend
another year hearing from publishers saying it wasn’t quite for them, then
finally one would take it, you’d have to make major changes and agree to a
front cover you hated, and then it would be published with a champagne book
launch and much publicity, and in the haze of the next morning you’d realise
that you had to write the next book pretty quickly to maintain the momentum.
The gatekeepers in this model are the
agents in particular, who act as filters, determining if someone can write, and
if what has been written has market potential. The editors and others at the publishing houses are
also gate-keepers, and will add in the cost projections which can also unfortunately
prevent a really well-written book from ever seeing the light of day.
The
Dream, and the Reality
Of course there are success stories,
overnight sensations, and seven figure advances for people whose first book,
which took six months to write (we are told), sells millions of copies. But the
reality is that this remains extremely rare, and often the ‘overnight
sensations� are in fact people who struggled for years trying to get anything
published, and had to persevere through piles of rejection letters. Often, even
those talented writers who flare so brightly at this stage, then find it
difficult to repeat the performance, and become mid-list writers who after a
few years cannot survive purely on a mid-list writer’s salary, and so start
doing other jobs, preferably linked to writing, but maybe not.
How self-publishing
is changing all that
Things have changed incredibly in the past
few years, with Print-on-Demand, Ebooks, Amazon, and the economic crisis.
First, a lot of publishers have lost a lot of money with the rise of online
marketing and e-distribution, and a lot of editors have lost their jobs. The
big publishers are understandably risk-averse, and so tend to rely on ‘stable�
authors who already have a huge following, so printing another book of theirs
is guaranteed to make money. With the reading market so unpredictable these
days, the big publishers are hesitant about trying somebody new, knowing that
perhaps after an investment of $10,000 - $50,000, they may fail to recoup half of it.
Hocking
and Locke � busting the traditional model
Meanwhile, some people have self-published
and used social media to catapult their books to millions of readers, Amanda
Hocking and John Locke being two of the most obvious examples. But bear in mind
that these also were not ‘overnight successes�; John Locke spent $27,000 on
various forms of advertising, getting nowhere, and only took off after having
already produced five books, and came up with a blog/twitter formula called
the ‘loyalty blog�. But the trend continues, with �50 Shades of Grey� tearing
through the charts at the moment, and such successes often lead to contracts
with big publishers who know a good thing when Amazon finally brings it to
their attention.
Self-publishing
is not a bad thing, right?
The great thing about self-publishing is
that anyone can now get published. We might as well write it into a global
constitution as a basic right. There are companies who will help you get
published, see your work in press, for a price which is often commensurate with
a person’s dream to be published. But here is where you need to decide what
that dream is, exactly.
If, like a friend of mine, you just want to
publish something for your friends and family, and have in mind selling a
hundred copies in total, and it is just something you want to do in your
lifetime, then great, go for it. You can either do it yourself on Smashwords or
other similar media sites, or else go to a vanity press and get them to set it
up for you. By the way, I hate the term ‘vanity press�, and hope it will
disappear in time; we should accept it as a valued service. Just one thing,
though; if you are doing this, printing your dream, please don’t afterwards
call yourself a ‘writer�. That’s unfair to those who dedicate their lives to
this ill-rewarded passion.
Some good
writers feel locked out�
There are many writers who have good
manuscripts and who cannot get an agent, because the industry is ‘locked down�
right now. A friend of mine has a brilliant novel, and actually has a good
agent, but still can’t get a publisher, and they are slowly lowering their
sights from the big ones to the medium-sized publishers, then to university
presses, and eventually independent small publishers. I know this path well,
having had an American agent and an almost-contract with Harper Collins, but
then we fell foul of economic predictions for the book just as the global
economy began to crash July 2008, and we slowly spiralled our targets down until
I went for a small independent publisher in 2011, because I wanted to get off
that particularly painful merry-go-round and get back to writing book 2.
So,
go it alone..?
So now, and I saw this at PWW, people are
starting to say “well just self-publish, put it on Amazon using CreateSpace and
get 80% of the profits in stead of 10%. It’s tempting, right, particularly if
people keep telling you how good your work is, and you see other self-published
books making six figures when it’s not that well-written in the first place?
Before
you do that�
Here is where you need to stop and pause
for thought, and here is where we come back to gate-keepers, and what you want
out of life. If you go the self-publishing (Print-on-Demand and/or ebook being
the most viable options) and Amazon route (okay, Barnes and Noble, Omnilit and
a few others are in there, too), who are your gate-keepers? Who will assure you
that what you produce � because it will be linked to you forever (even if you
use a pseudonym, you’ll know) � is quality material, good writing? Does it matter
to you? Do you want to produce the best book you can, or just get something out
there? Are you going to write one book, or would you like to write more, become
a writer, even if not full-time (very few can afford to be full-time writers)?
Noise
and visibility
Roughly half a million books are produced
each year. How will your book get visibility amongst all that noise? People
will tell you that you can make it work with social media and twitter etc., but
everybody is already doing that, so it doesn’t get any easier. Once there is a
sensation like Hocking or Locke, within months thousands are doing everything
they did, but of course do not ‘make it�. What works once doesn’t necessarily
work twice, especially in connection with creative arts.
Fake
it till you make it?
At PWW 2012 Stephen Clarke who wrote the
‘Year in the Merde� series of books, amongst others, was jovially advocating
the ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it� approach, saying that people often fake reviews
and put a lot of positive spin on things, so just do whatever it takes to get
your book noticed. I actually enjoyed his first book immensely, so am glad he
‘made it�. But I can’t personally agree with that approach, even if it means
I’ll never ‘make it�.
Write
the best novel you can, then edit, edit, edit�
The general advice that kept coming out
from PWW, and of course it would since they are mainly writers talking to
writers, is to make sure your manuscript is the best you can produce. My own
book was ‘ready� in 2008 (by which I mean the chief buyer for science fiction
at Harper Collins wrote to us that she liked it and would table it to the team), but
as the contract didn’t materialise, I inevitably carried on editing it. It had
a total of 20 revisions in five years, I’m not joking (version #1 back in 2006 was
pretty awful writing, I still have it�).
Many writers, most I know, already do this.
They spend about five years on their first book, learning the craft, going to
courses, joining writing groups, getting their work critiqued, polishing it, hurling
it into a drawer at some low point and starting something else, coming back to
it, editing, editing, editing, and finally saying ‘it’s done� more out of
despair than conviction, and then sending it off to agents. We drink a fair
amount of wine at our writing group meetings (called Men with Pens,
incidentally, though we’re evenly split gender-wise)�
The
gate-keepers for would-be self-published writers
But at PWW, new writers wanted to know how
they could be sure they are ready. So, here is the answer. There are literary
consultancies who can tell you. They cost money, but they are not going to rip
you off. They have either anonymous readers who have worked in the industry as
agents, or published writers, or editors who know what it takes to be a writer,
and know what the required standard is. I’ve used three of these, plus a
‘writing doctor� earlier on, and they work. Typically for a novel, you might
pay £500 for a review, which will take a few weeks to complete. You’ll
typically get an eight page report back on your manuscript (you can also send
the first few chapters for a quicker and cheaper review, or get a more in-depth
editorial review where they will do line corrections etc.). What you will get
back is a judgement about whether your writing is up to scratch or not. The
first two times I did this, the clear answer was no, which was tough medicine
because my writers group loved it, and already a few people had read and loved
the draft mnuscript. But I took the advice on board (well, most of it), and
produced a much better book, and my writing improved. At my paperback launch in
October last year, I told a bunch of writers that not getting the Harper
Collins contract had led to me becoming a better writer, with a better book as
a result. They didn’t look convinced, I have to say.
Will
your writing improve after your first book is published?
One of my favourite authors is Iain Banks.
Like a number of authors I like, it took him a long, long time to get
published. His writing is sublime, I just read some of his Science Fiction last
night and it almost makes me think of giving up, except of course I don’t,
instead I just try harder. I’m reading one book by a friend right now, and it’s
not bad, but I can’t help think he published too early � another few rounds of
edits would have made it a much better book, one that would have ultimately
gotten more notice.
So, if you just want to see your name in
print, then go for it. If you want to be a writer, and if you’ve been going to
courses, maybe even done an MFA (Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing etc.),
belong to an established writing group where people tell you when your writing
sucks, and have finished your manuscript and edited it at least six times, then
you can try these gate-keepers, or try getting an agent, or do both at the same
پ.
Agent
or Gate-keeper first? A salutary lesson�
I sent around my query letter, synopsis and
first three chapters to all the SF agents in the UK, and got rejected by all of
them, some were quite nice about it, most it was a ‘form� response. It’s okay,
they’re busy, I know. Then I contacted one of these literary consultancies
(Cornerstones, actually), and sent them what I had been sending the agents.
They said the three chapters were pretty good, and had market potential, but
they’d be surprised if any of the agents got that far, as my query letter and
synopsis were unnatural disasters. I couldn’t go back to the UK agents, because
you can only really apply once. I made the changes requested, and within one
week I had two US agents interested, and chose one. Not that it got me a big
publisher in the long run, but I felt I’d crossed a threshold and was now being
professional about the writing; after all, it’s an industry.
Here are links to the UK ones I’ve used
personally, as I know them and trust them. There are doubtless similar services
in the US and elsewhere. There are also book doctors galore, especially since
so many editors have lost their jobs in the past few years, and such people can
really help you.
Reading has always been a passion for me.
Our fantastically diverse literature defines us, and we as writers define our
literature. So, tell me, tell me you get it, tell me who are the ultimate
gate-keepers?
The Eden Paradox is available in paperback
and ebook on , Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and Ampichellis
Eden’s Trial is available on as
ebook, and will be in paperback in Fall 2012.
Eden’s Revenge is coming out in ebook Xmas 2012, paperback Easter 2013.
July 2, 2012
Tips for the first scene in a book
The first scene in a book is incredibly important. Many people will read the first line, paragraph, page or few pages, to see if they like a new author. Your strongest writing must be right up front. When I hear would-be writers say that some of their later chapters are better, well, dammit, put them first somehow.
Here are a bunch of rules I’ve borrowed from Nancy Kress’s various works on writing. It’s a list, which makes it sound simple, but of course it isn’t. If you like this list, it’s mainly from her book ‘Beginnings, Middles and Ends�, my bible for several years.
Notes from Nancy Kress � Beginnings, Middles, Ends
Prologue
Must be interesting in its own right, separated from first scene in time or place
A Prologue doubles the reader’s chances of saying ‘no�.
First Scene
1. Does the first sentence hint at some (future) conflict?
2. First paragraphs � an individualised character, with fresh, specific details, in conflict? Telling details, telling us about the character.
� Not the first details that come to mind; not more of the same old thing
� Specificity (the reflected police lights on Lily’s hands)
� Reveal that the writer has a fresh and meticulous eye
� Details that convince the reader/editor you know what you’re talking about
� Details anchor your story in concrete reality
� Good (fresh, assures) diction, no clichés
� Would 9 out of 10 people behave like this?
� What’s interesting about this person?
3. Last paragraphs of first scene � evoking an emotion relevant to what the book is about, through detail or dialogue?
4. Hold the first scene to three named people
5. End of scene � something changed from the beginning?
� A character discovers something is more complicated than he’d hoped
� A character learns a disturbing piece of information
� A character arrives some place new
� A character meets someone who will significantly alter his life
� An event occurs that will lead to a significant change
6. What kind of book does this first scene promise?
7. Do you set the tone for the rest of the book, and stay true to that tone?
Prose
8. Write economically � show you are in control
9. Credible prose varies sentence length
10. Don’t overload with adjectives and adverbs � strong nouns and verbs instead � adverbs are the hallmark of an amateur
11. Show the emotion in the dialogue, so don’t need qualifier (adverb)
12. Resist the temptation to overwrite through clever asides, grandiose language, overdoing the punctuation!!!
13. Tell the story in a straightforward way, keep yourself out of it
Here's the Prologue from my second book, Eden's Trial. UK SciFi Agent John Jarrold reviewed it for me. The book wasn't quite his style, but he did comment that this was a strong first scene. I'll let you be the judge.
Prologue
General William Kilaney awoke, disappointed to find he was still alive. He tried to raise his head, but a metal rod pressed the back of his skull, forcing his gaze to the floor. He knew this interrogator’s trick � bend the body as a prelude to breaking the spirit. He willed his arms and legs to tug against the restraints, but whatever had stunned him on the space station had his limbs locked down cold. He’d seen his crew killed, and he had no false hopes about his own fate. He listened to his captor’s footsteps. He had a hunch who it was.
“Why am I here, Sister Esma? That is you, isn’t it?� The Alician High Priestess herself. He prayed the four transports off Earth had escaped. He’d told Micah to leave just before they’d lost communications. If the ships hadn’t left in time, it had all been for nothing.
“If you’re after their flight plan, I never saw it. Torture me if you like, but it won’t get you anywhere.� It should be over quicker if he pushed her, if she lived up to the reputation she’d gained during the four-day assault on Earth.
He heard a faucet, the rinsing of hands: blood, probably his own. Steel boots clacked across the metal floor towards him. He glimpsed them underneath drug-heavy eyelids: blue flow-metal with steel stilettos. So, not above vanity. Life held so few surprises.
Icy water drenched his head and neck. He gasped, shaking off as much as he could, squeezing it out of his eyes.
“Your battle tactics were quite unorthodox, General.�
Her voice carried all the arrogance he’d imagined from the leader of the terrorist sect who’d plagued Earth for the last decade. But he allowed himself a smile.
“Gave your Q’Roth locust friends a run for their money, did we?� While the rest of the world had been frozen by fear and panic, his forces had accounted for a quarter of a million Q’Roth dead in five separate hits. It paled in comparison to humanity being all but wiped out, but it was something. He’d put up a fight and � he hoped � four ships had escaped with their precious human cargo.
“What do you want, Esma?�
Her cool fingertips anchored themselves on the back of his neck. Pain punched through his head as something was wrenched from the base of his skull. He blinked hard. A wave of nausea gripped him, then flattened out, dissipating. The skin on his hands and feet prickled as his muscle control returned. He flexed stiff fingers. Curiosity got the better of him. “What was that?�
“A device to download your recent memories, in case you were lying about their flight plan.�
They made it. He hadn’t admitted how much he’d needed to hear this sliver of good news, and let out a long breath. He hadn’t been lying about not knowing their destination. When Micah had almost told him, he’d cut him off immediately. Twelve thousand had escaped. He drew comfort from that. But he’d been in pain from cancer for years. Truth was, he couldn’t face any more.
“You have what you want. Let’s get it over with, shall we?� He waited. She reminded him of a cat playing with a mouse.
“The Q’Roth Supreme Commander wants you.�
Kilaney wished he’d gone down with his men. He’d damned well tried to. “For torture or a light snack?�
She snorted. “You should have worked it out by now, General. They do not eat human flesh � they feed on bio-psychic energy. It is a critical part of their maturation process. But to answer your question, neither. She wishes to recruit you.� Esma sounded bemused.
He laughed; life held a few surprises after all. “Let me get this straight: I just nuked five of her ships and she wants to offer me a job?�
“She said you showed potential. The Q’Roth are consummate soldiers, like you, General. They respect your tactical ability.�
The disdain in her voice didn’t go amiss. He knew now, between the Q’Roth aliens and the genetically-altered Alicians, who his worst enemy was.
“Well, Esma, I’m Stage Four. The cancer’s all that’s holding this sad bag of bones together. Can’t blow my nose without a transfusion. I have a couple of weeks, max. Anyhow, not sure it would look good on my resume.� He wanted this over. He’d done his part.
“They can cure your cancer, extend your lifetime by decades.�
She said it matter-of-fact, and he realised she wasn’t lying. They could cure cancer. He felt as if she’d kicked him in the stomach. The disease had eaten away at him for four years, robbing him of everything he once was. Being offered a cure now was the worst torture he could imagine. He clamped his lips.
Her voice became earnest. “You have seen the Q’Roth in action, but that is nothing compared to what they can do. All you have witnessed are freshly hatched warriors � newborns, primal rage instilled into their genes. But now they have fed, they will mature into the most potent armed force you could envisage. They are the foot-soldiers of the galaxy, General, respected by hundreds of races.�
And feared by most of them, he supposed. But despite himself he had been impressed. He’d seen them tear down a whole planet in a matter of days: shock troops, destroying infrastructure in the first wave, dismantling communications, reacting so damned fast to every counter-measure; all of this immediately after being hatched. He jammed his lips tighter and thought of his wife, taken by cancer four years earlier, of the thousands of soldiers who’d served under him over the years, all killed in the last days� carnage. All except Blake.
So there was still a chance.
“General,� she continued, pacing in front of him, “A war is coming. Not like the one you have just fought and lost, barely a campaign in Q’Roth terms. The Commander assures me it poses a threat to hundreds of races, maybe even the galaxy itself. She is interested in the creative tactics you demonstrated. She feels they could be developed. You are a soldier, General, and –�
He had to stop this. “The answer’s ‘no�, Esma. That’s final. Now, I’ve shown you respect, you show me some.�
The boots disappeared from view. Involuntarily, he tensed. A section of the metal floor beneath him receded to reveal a window. The sight unpeeling before him snatched his breath away. Earth hung below, a dull orange ball speckled with boiling clouds and glowing embers where the nukes had gouged his planet’s flesh. Even the oceans had taken on a sickened pallor.
His muscles fought against the restraints. He was furious to have even listened to her poison. Eden, he reminded himself. This had all been about Eden, and where there’s the promise of paradise, there’s always a snake.
“One day they’ll find you, Esma; Blake, Micah and the others. And when they do, they’ll shoot you like a rabid dog.�
She walked in front of him, so that her boots appeared to be standing on top of Earth. Her tone sharpened. “A task force is already hunting them down and will destroy them. But even if they do escape, General, humanity will perish.� She bent forward, her cheek level with his. “Do you know why?�
He preferred it this way, niceties and bullshit expended.
She whispered. “If humanity escapes � a very small if � they will undo themselves.� She stood up, grinding her heel against the glass, as if she was stubbing out his native North America. “It is only a matter of time before your valiant refugees do something wrong, and are cut down like the weeds they are. Galactic Society values intelligence above all else, General. I do not mean the odd genius here and there, but coherent intelligence at the species level. Now, does that description fit humanity’s resumé?�
He bristled. “If we’d known there was sentient life out there � especially a society � it could have changed everything.�
She tapped her toes on the glass. “I told them you would say ‘no�.�
He was about to respond when he noticed something. It was as if the world was changing colour, morphing into grey sepia. “What’s happening, Esma?�
“The Q’Roth have finished. They do not believe in leaving loose ends. It is one of the galactic rules. After an incursion, the planet’s atmosphere is removed. It is for the best, especially following nuclear detonations on this scale.�
His eyes widened as whirlpools of smoke, like massive hurricanes, mushroomed around the globe. Glittering nuclear sparks snuffed out one by one, deprived of oxygen. The last whorls of atmosphere lost cohesion and flashed into space in a series of bursts which pricked his retinas. When the blotches in his vision faded, he saw Earth as no one ever had, as no one ever should. The oceans had boiled off into space, leaving smooth basins bordered by stark continental ridges. The planet was barren, dark, moonlike. Earth was� he didn’t even want to think the word.
“Earth must lay fallow for ten thousand years. No race will be allowed into this system during that period. Which is why humanity never encountered anyone from Grid Society � Mars was also culled, not that long ago by Galactic standards. The ban on entering the sector was lifted only a thousand years ago, and the Q’Roth were first to stake a claim on Earth.�
He heard a click, and the metal rod behind his head eased back. He raised his chin despite the stiffness in his neck. She was tall and long-necked, wearing a simple grey robe with the hood down. Her skin was pale, framed by jet black hair pulled back into a tightly braided ponytail. Broad, menacing eyes stabbed down at him over a hooked nose.
She spoke slowly. “You should thank me, General. You should actually thank all Alicians.�
The conviction in her voice almost made him retch. He tried to gather enough saliva for the only fitting response he could think of, but his mouth was dry. He watched her strut in front of him. What he wouldn’t give right now for a grenade.
“The Q’Roth first visited Earth a millennium ago on a scouting mission. Their intent was to return and harvest all of humanity, after their long hibernation period. But they needed an ally to fine-tune the attack nearer their waking period. They found my ancestor, Alessia, and the Alician order was born. The Q’Roth re-engineered a few of us, and then left. We patiently awaited their return, and now we will have a new home, taking our place amongst Grid Society. We are humanity’s evolution, General.�
He took one last look at Earth, then faced her, speaking on behalf of his dead world. “You’re an abomination, Esma, and Alicians are humanity’s bastards. What’s to stop the Q’Roth feeding on you and your sect, now you’ve helped them?�
She looked away. “We have an agreement, a contract, you might say.�
He scrutinised her � there was something she didn’t want to admit, a secret too important to confess even to a dying man. He shrugged. “Watch out for the small print, Esma. In my limited experience, deals with the devil go south sooner rather than later.�
A bell chimed somewhere deep in the ship, and she glanced at her wristcom.
“Your time is up, General. As you do not wish to come with us, I am going to send you home.� She touched a panel and a glistening shroud ballooned around him. The glass beneath his feet slid away. His feet didn’t fall, supported by some kind of force-field. But a savage, biting cold gripped his soles, coiling around his ankles, drilling into his bones. He cried out with pain.
“It will actually feel warmer outside, believe it or not. Right now the field in contact with your feet is conducting your body heat to the outer hull, which is in darkness, fractionally above absolute zero.�
A steady hiss forewarned him of the dizziness he began to feel. His thighs and arms struggled against the restraints, trying to lift his feet. Her voice sounded fuzzy.
“You see, General, even if humanity escapes, the only way they can hope to survive is to evolve beyond what they are. And the sad truth is that humanity would choose to die as they are, rather than evolve.�
His eyes fogged as their water vapour evaporated. He closed his mouth. She touched another panel and his leg and arm straps released. He fell forward, the skin of his palms and outstretched fingers welding to the freezing layer separating him from hard vacuum.
His body wracked with shivering, knocking his teeth together. When he spoke, it sounded like he was underwater. He shouted to compensate. “They’ll� survive.� His arms were numb. Through slitted eyes he watched his hands turn a sickly wax colour. His breath ran out, his throat asteroid-dry. He hunted the last oxygen molecules inside his shroud. Her voice was distant, fading.
“I can see why the Commander was interested in you. Goodbye, General. Oh, and a word of advice: do not hold your breath.�
Out of the corner of a frosting eye, he saw her hand, as if in slow motion, move to activate another control. He had no doubt what it would do. The force-field cracked apart beneath him like an eggshell.
As he tumbled into space, he knew he had only a few remaining seconds of consciousness. As the residual air in his lungs expanded to bursting, he let out a space-silent yell of rage. He squeezed his eyes shut to protect them as long as he could, suppressing needle-like pains as nitrogen flashed out of his bloodstream into his joints, competing with the grinding ache from his bloating limbs. The naked glare of the sun slammed into him, searing his face like a whip with each turn of his somersault. None of it mattered anymore. As his body convulsed, venting blood at every orifice, he choked off the idea that she might be right about humanity. Instead, he willed his last thought out into the void: Prove her wrong, Blake. You and Micah can do this. Wherever you are, for God’s sake, prove �
The rest is on Amazon...
Here are a bunch of rules I’ve borrowed from Nancy Kress’s various works on writing. It’s a list, which makes it sound simple, but of course it isn’t. If you like this list, it’s mainly from her book ‘Beginnings, Middles and Ends�, my bible for several years.
Notes from Nancy Kress � Beginnings, Middles, Ends
Prologue
Must be interesting in its own right, separated from first scene in time or place
A Prologue doubles the reader’s chances of saying ‘no�.
First Scene
1. Does the first sentence hint at some (future) conflict?
2. First paragraphs � an individualised character, with fresh, specific details, in conflict? Telling details, telling us about the character.
� Not the first details that come to mind; not more of the same old thing
� Specificity (the reflected police lights on Lily’s hands)
� Reveal that the writer has a fresh and meticulous eye
� Details that convince the reader/editor you know what you’re talking about
� Details anchor your story in concrete reality
� Good (fresh, assures) diction, no clichés
� Would 9 out of 10 people behave like this?
� What’s interesting about this person?
3. Last paragraphs of first scene � evoking an emotion relevant to what the book is about, through detail or dialogue?
4. Hold the first scene to three named people
5. End of scene � something changed from the beginning?
� A character discovers something is more complicated than he’d hoped
� A character learns a disturbing piece of information
� A character arrives some place new
� A character meets someone who will significantly alter his life
� An event occurs that will lead to a significant change
6. What kind of book does this first scene promise?
7. Do you set the tone for the rest of the book, and stay true to that tone?
Prose
8. Write economically � show you are in control
9. Credible prose varies sentence length
10. Don’t overload with adjectives and adverbs � strong nouns and verbs instead � adverbs are the hallmark of an amateur
11. Show the emotion in the dialogue, so don’t need qualifier (adverb)
12. Resist the temptation to overwrite through clever asides, grandiose language, overdoing the punctuation!!!
13. Tell the story in a straightforward way, keep yourself out of it
Here's the Prologue from my second book, Eden's Trial. UK SciFi Agent John Jarrold reviewed it for me. The book wasn't quite his style, but he did comment that this was a strong first scene. I'll let you be the judge.
Prologue
General William Kilaney awoke, disappointed to find he was still alive. He tried to raise his head, but a metal rod pressed the back of his skull, forcing his gaze to the floor. He knew this interrogator’s trick � bend the body as a prelude to breaking the spirit. He willed his arms and legs to tug against the restraints, but whatever had stunned him on the space station had his limbs locked down cold. He’d seen his crew killed, and he had no false hopes about his own fate. He listened to his captor’s footsteps. He had a hunch who it was.
“Why am I here, Sister Esma? That is you, isn’t it?� The Alician High Priestess herself. He prayed the four transports off Earth had escaped. He’d told Micah to leave just before they’d lost communications. If the ships hadn’t left in time, it had all been for nothing.
“If you’re after their flight plan, I never saw it. Torture me if you like, but it won’t get you anywhere.� It should be over quicker if he pushed her, if she lived up to the reputation she’d gained during the four-day assault on Earth.
He heard a faucet, the rinsing of hands: blood, probably his own. Steel boots clacked across the metal floor towards him. He glimpsed them underneath drug-heavy eyelids: blue flow-metal with steel stilettos. So, not above vanity. Life held so few surprises.
Icy water drenched his head and neck. He gasped, shaking off as much as he could, squeezing it out of his eyes.
“Your battle tactics were quite unorthodox, General.�
Her voice carried all the arrogance he’d imagined from the leader of the terrorist sect who’d plagued Earth for the last decade. But he allowed himself a smile.
“Gave your Q’Roth locust friends a run for their money, did we?� While the rest of the world had been frozen by fear and panic, his forces had accounted for a quarter of a million Q’Roth dead in five separate hits. It paled in comparison to humanity being all but wiped out, but it was something. He’d put up a fight and � he hoped � four ships had escaped with their precious human cargo.
“What do you want, Esma?�
Her cool fingertips anchored themselves on the back of his neck. Pain punched through his head as something was wrenched from the base of his skull. He blinked hard. A wave of nausea gripped him, then flattened out, dissipating. The skin on his hands and feet prickled as his muscle control returned. He flexed stiff fingers. Curiosity got the better of him. “What was that?�
“A device to download your recent memories, in case you were lying about their flight plan.�
They made it. He hadn’t admitted how much he’d needed to hear this sliver of good news, and let out a long breath. He hadn’t been lying about not knowing their destination. When Micah had almost told him, he’d cut him off immediately. Twelve thousand had escaped. He drew comfort from that. But he’d been in pain from cancer for years. Truth was, he couldn’t face any more.
“You have what you want. Let’s get it over with, shall we?� He waited. She reminded him of a cat playing with a mouse.
“The Q’Roth Supreme Commander wants you.�
Kilaney wished he’d gone down with his men. He’d damned well tried to. “For torture or a light snack?�
She snorted. “You should have worked it out by now, General. They do not eat human flesh � they feed on bio-psychic energy. It is a critical part of their maturation process. But to answer your question, neither. She wishes to recruit you.� Esma sounded bemused.
He laughed; life held a few surprises after all. “Let me get this straight: I just nuked five of her ships and she wants to offer me a job?�
“She said you showed potential. The Q’Roth are consummate soldiers, like you, General. They respect your tactical ability.�
The disdain in her voice didn’t go amiss. He knew now, between the Q’Roth aliens and the genetically-altered Alicians, who his worst enemy was.
“Well, Esma, I’m Stage Four. The cancer’s all that’s holding this sad bag of bones together. Can’t blow my nose without a transfusion. I have a couple of weeks, max. Anyhow, not sure it would look good on my resume.� He wanted this over. He’d done his part.
“They can cure your cancer, extend your lifetime by decades.�
She said it matter-of-fact, and he realised she wasn’t lying. They could cure cancer. He felt as if she’d kicked him in the stomach. The disease had eaten away at him for four years, robbing him of everything he once was. Being offered a cure now was the worst torture he could imagine. He clamped his lips.
Her voice became earnest. “You have seen the Q’Roth in action, but that is nothing compared to what they can do. All you have witnessed are freshly hatched warriors � newborns, primal rage instilled into their genes. But now they have fed, they will mature into the most potent armed force you could envisage. They are the foot-soldiers of the galaxy, General, respected by hundreds of races.�
And feared by most of them, he supposed. But despite himself he had been impressed. He’d seen them tear down a whole planet in a matter of days: shock troops, destroying infrastructure in the first wave, dismantling communications, reacting so damned fast to every counter-measure; all of this immediately after being hatched. He jammed his lips tighter and thought of his wife, taken by cancer four years earlier, of the thousands of soldiers who’d served under him over the years, all killed in the last days� carnage. All except Blake.
So there was still a chance.
“General,� she continued, pacing in front of him, “A war is coming. Not like the one you have just fought and lost, barely a campaign in Q’Roth terms. The Commander assures me it poses a threat to hundreds of races, maybe even the galaxy itself. She is interested in the creative tactics you demonstrated. She feels they could be developed. You are a soldier, General, and –�
He had to stop this. “The answer’s ‘no�, Esma. That’s final. Now, I’ve shown you respect, you show me some.�
The boots disappeared from view. Involuntarily, he tensed. A section of the metal floor beneath him receded to reveal a window. The sight unpeeling before him snatched his breath away. Earth hung below, a dull orange ball speckled with boiling clouds and glowing embers where the nukes had gouged his planet’s flesh. Even the oceans had taken on a sickened pallor.
His muscles fought against the restraints. He was furious to have even listened to her poison. Eden, he reminded himself. This had all been about Eden, and where there’s the promise of paradise, there’s always a snake.
“One day they’ll find you, Esma; Blake, Micah and the others. And when they do, they’ll shoot you like a rabid dog.�
She walked in front of him, so that her boots appeared to be standing on top of Earth. Her tone sharpened. “A task force is already hunting them down and will destroy them. But even if they do escape, General, humanity will perish.� She bent forward, her cheek level with his. “Do you know why?�
He preferred it this way, niceties and bullshit expended.
She whispered. “If humanity escapes � a very small if � they will undo themselves.� She stood up, grinding her heel against the glass, as if she was stubbing out his native North America. “It is only a matter of time before your valiant refugees do something wrong, and are cut down like the weeds they are. Galactic Society values intelligence above all else, General. I do not mean the odd genius here and there, but coherent intelligence at the species level. Now, does that description fit humanity’s resumé?�
He bristled. “If we’d known there was sentient life out there � especially a society � it could have changed everything.�
She tapped her toes on the glass. “I told them you would say ‘no�.�
He was about to respond when he noticed something. It was as if the world was changing colour, morphing into grey sepia. “What’s happening, Esma?�
“The Q’Roth have finished. They do not believe in leaving loose ends. It is one of the galactic rules. After an incursion, the planet’s atmosphere is removed. It is for the best, especially following nuclear detonations on this scale.�
His eyes widened as whirlpools of smoke, like massive hurricanes, mushroomed around the globe. Glittering nuclear sparks snuffed out one by one, deprived of oxygen. The last whorls of atmosphere lost cohesion and flashed into space in a series of bursts which pricked his retinas. When the blotches in his vision faded, he saw Earth as no one ever had, as no one ever should. The oceans had boiled off into space, leaving smooth basins bordered by stark continental ridges. The planet was barren, dark, moonlike. Earth was� he didn’t even want to think the word.
“Earth must lay fallow for ten thousand years. No race will be allowed into this system during that period. Which is why humanity never encountered anyone from Grid Society � Mars was also culled, not that long ago by Galactic standards. The ban on entering the sector was lifted only a thousand years ago, and the Q’Roth were first to stake a claim on Earth.�
He heard a click, and the metal rod behind his head eased back. He raised his chin despite the stiffness in his neck. She was tall and long-necked, wearing a simple grey robe with the hood down. Her skin was pale, framed by jet black hair pulled back into a tightly braided ponytail. Broad, menacing eyes stabbed down at him over a hooked nose.
She spoke slowly. “You should thank me, General. You should actually thank all Alicians.�
The conviction in her voice almost made him retch. He tried to gather enough saliva for the only fitting response he could think of, but his mouth was dry. He watched her strut in front of him. What he wouldn’t give right now for a grenade.
“The Q’Roth first visited Earth a millennium ago on a scouting mission. Their intent was to return and harvest all of humanity, after their long hibernation period. But they needed an ally to fine-tune the attack nearer their waking period. They found my ancestor, Alessia, and the Alician order was born. The Q’Roth re-engineered a few of us, and then left. We patiently awaited their return, and now we will have a new home, taking our place amongst Grid Society. We are humanity’s evolution, General.�
He took one last look at Earth, then faced her, speaking on behalf of his dead world. “You’re an abomination, Esma, and Alicians are humanity’s bastards. What’s to stop the Q’Roth feeding on you and your sect, now you’ve helped them?�
She looked away. “We have an agreement, a contract, you might say.�
He scrutinised her � there was something she didn’t want to admit, a secret too important to confess even to a dying man. He shrugged. “Watch out for the small print, Esma. In my limited experience, deals with the devil go south sooner rather than later.�
A bell chimed somewhere deep in the ship, and she glanced at her wristcom.
“Your time is up, General. As you do not wish to come with us, I am going to send you home.� She touched a panel and a glistening shroud ballooned around him. The glass beneath his feet slid away. His feet didn’t fall, supported by some kind of force-field. But a savage, biting cold gripped his soles, coiling around his ankles, drilling into his bones. He cried out with pain.
“It will actually feel warmer outside, believe it or not. Right now the field in contact with your feet is conducting your body heat to the outer hull, which is in darkness, fractionally above absolute zero.�
A steady hiss forewarned him of the dizziness he began to feel. His thighs and arms struggled against the restraints, trying to lift his feet. Her voice sounded fuzzy.
“You see, General, even if humanity escapes, the only way they can hope to survive is to evolve beyond what they are. And the sad truth is that humanity would choose to die as they are, rather than evolve.�
His eyes fogged as their water vapour evaporated. He closed his mouth. She touched another panel and his leg and arm straps released. He fell forward, the skin of his palms and outstretched fingers welding to the freezing layer separating him from hard vacuum.
His body wracked with shivering, knocking his teeth together. When he spoke, it sounded like he was underwater. He shouted to compensate. “They’ll� survive.� His arms were numb. Through slitted eyes he watched his hands turn a sickly wax colour. His breath ran out, his throat asteroid-dry. He hunted the last oxygen molecules inside his shroud. Her voice was distant, fading.
“I can see why the Commander was interested in you. Goodbye, General. Oh, and a word of advice: do not hold your breath.�
Out of the corner of a frosting eye, he saw her hand, as if in slow motion, move to activate another control. He had no doubt what it would do. The force-field cracked apart beneath him like an eggshell.
As he tumbled into space, he knew he had only a few remaining seconds of consciousness. As the residual air in his lungs expanded to bursting, he let out a space-silent yell of rage. He squeezed his eyes shut to protect them as long as he could, suppressing needle-like pains as nitrogen flashed out of his bloodstream into his joints, competing with the grinding ache from his bloating limbs. The naked glare of the sun slammed into him, searing his face like a whip with each turn of his somersault. None of it mattered anymore. As his body convulsed, venting blood at every orifice, he choked off the idea that she might be right about humanity. Instead, he willed his last thought out into the void: Prove her wrong, Blake. You and Micah can do this. Wherever you are, for God’s sake, prove �
The rest is on Amazon...
July 1, 2012
Update on Eden's Revenge
People keep asking me two questions:
1. When is the paperback version of Eden's Trial coming out?
2. When is Eden's Revenge coming out?
So, here's an update. The paperback is scheduled for early release September, just trying to sort out cover details, layout, printing, all that stuff with my publisher.
Eden's Revenge will be coming out late Fall, hoping for November, but definitley before Xmas. I'm actually sorting out the cover design today, looking at two Science Fiction cover artists who do fantastic artwork. This is going to be an ebook first off, and a paperback later.
Nowtime for a confession... which I hope will be good news!
Eden's Revenge won't be the last of the series. There will be a fourth and final book, Return to Eden, in April 2013, which will close the series.
I've just been polishing a couple of the later chapters in Eden's Revenge, and they get me excited, soplease just stay with me, I'm getting these books out as fast as I can!
The Eden Paradox available on (paperback and ebook), Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones.
Eden's Trial available on (paperback in the Fall)
1. When is the paperback version of Eden's Trial coming out?
2. When is Eden's Revenge coming out?
So, here's an update. The paperback is scheduled for early release September, just trying to sort out cover details, layout, printing, all that stuff with my publisher.
Eden's Revenge will be coming out late Fall, hoping for November, but definitley before Xmas. I'm actually sorting out the cover design today, looking at two Science Fiction cover artists who do fantastic artwork. This is going to be an ebook first off, and a paperback later.
Nowtime for a confession... which I hope will be good news!
Eden's Revenge won't be the last of the series. There will be a fourth and final book, Return to Eden, in April 2013, which will close the series.
I've just been polishing a couple of the later chapters in Eden's Revenge, and they get me excited, soplease just stay with me, I'm getting these books out as fast as I can!
The Eden Paradox available on (paperback and ebook), Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones.
Eden's Trial available on (paperback in the Fall)
June 30, 2012
Basing characters on real people - Part Two
This blog is the second (and last from me) on what I've learned concerning whether and how to base characters on real people.
Yesterday's blog considered the first five approaches below, and today's deals with items 6-10:
Basing characters on yourself
Using physical traits (looks) of other people
Using speech patterns (dialogue)
Using mannerisms (‘handles�)
Borrowing personality traits from friends and enemies
Mixing personality traits of different people you know
Extending personality traits
Upsetting real people with their characterization
Creating characters from scratch
Letting characters write themselves
6. Mixing
personality traits of different people you know
This one is real short. I tried it several times, including very recently, and it
doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s like making good cocktails and can be done, but
I have never managed it. I think it’s because I have clear visions of people I know,
and can’t cut and paste them into each other. I’d rather create one from
scratch (point 9) or extend personality traits (next).
7. Extending
personality traits
This is something worth doing, particularly
if you are writing any sort of thriller fiction. If you are writing more
literary fiction, I’m less sure it’s a good idea.
Essentially, you take your basic character
and imagine them going that bit further, that much wilder, saying what they
really think rather than what we usually end up saying in reality (and wishing
later we’d said so much more, or less). I usually do this in two stages,
particularly with dialogue. First I get the basic dialogue down, then I’ll come
back to it later and ‘up the ante�, raising conflict. You let the characters go
further, and bring out certain traits (fear, love, anger, greed, hatred,
whatever) to the fore. This doesn’t have to result in action � you can show
what the character is thinking of saying or doing, but not have them do it;
this can sometimes be more effective in making the character memorable in any
case, because it is more like us.
Here’s Micah, at a pivotal moment in book
1, when he ‘loses it�. Notice I bring Vince in to restore a sense of reality
afterwards.
Vince was
half-way to the door. He sighed, turning around. ‘Look, I know you’re trying,
and you mean well, so I’m going to give you some advice you’re probably not
going to listen to. I ran the profile on you, so I’m going to tell you who you
are, so that maybe, just maybe you can help yourself, though I doubt it.�
Micah leaned
backwards against the desk.
‘You got fucked
up by your father, Micah. You’re in his shadow. Daddy hero syndrome. We know
all about him, what a prick he was to you and your family � heroes, always a
black side, eh?�
Micah had
thought it a million times, but never heard it from someone else.
‘So you want to
be a hero, too, maybe a different kind. Am I right?�
Micah’s throat
locked tight.
‘Well let me
save you the bother. He’s dead. You need him to recognise you, accept you,
whatever, and it won’t happen, Micah, because� the sonofabitch is dead. So,
step out of the shadow. He screwed up your life while he was alive, now you’re
doing it for him.� Vince spun around and headed out. ‘Get a life, Micah, your
Ƿɲ.�
Micah breathed
hard. Dozens of buried memories resurrected themselves. All were between him
and his father, all were unpleasant: the put-downs, the patronising lectures,
and the ever-present disappointment in his father’s tone. Micah’s fists
squeezed hard. Uncorked anger rose inside him like bile.
Nobody, in all
these years, even his sister, had ever validated him � not once � about his
father. All the press, the vids, had nothing else to say but that he was the
Great War hero who sacrificed everything for God and country, Colonel Victor
Sanderson, the Gray Colonel� Micah remembered the storm shelter, his father
labelling him a coward after the nuclear attack. He realised he was still
trapped in that one, terrified, fifteen year old boy’s humiliating moment.
Without
thinking, he grabbed the arms of his chair, raised it above his head, and with
an anguished cry brought it crashing down on his computer. He raised it again,
slamming it down even harder, denting the metal. He swept everything off the
desk, sending tortured fragments clattering across the floor. Two guards rushed
in, then grounded to a halt.
‘Calm down,
Son,� one of them said.
Micah didn’t
know what his face looked like, but they didn’t approach any closer.
He cast aside the twisted chair and glared
at them. ‘I’m nobody’s fucking son.�
Vince
re-entered, glaring at the mess around Micah’s feet. ‘Christ, Micah, do I have
to get you escorted off the premises, or call a shrink? Forget the privileges,
I’m bringing the Mil in now.
I just watched the final episode of Stargate the other night (pretty good, actually), and in it Daniel has a complete rant against Vala, which goes a long way beyond his normal character 'envelope'. But because of the situation they are in, it is not only credible, but moving, and essential to the plot and rounding off of the entire series.
Incidentally, a good device in any writing
is to have one or two characters discussing another one. That’s what we do in
the real world, right? And word of mouth is often taken more seriously than the
narrator’s ‘voiceover�. You can also build up a character this way by having
several people at different times describe the character or make reference to
his or her attributes, all from slightly different (or even completely
opposite) standpoints or angles. This can be a good way to set up a character,
or even to set up a false impression of a character. For example. a classic (as
opposed to timeworn) approach is to hear that someone is really bad or good,
and then find out they are not. This works better if other characters have ‘set
you up� than if the narrator has done it. It means you will feel like you know
the character better than anyone else in the book. I do this with two
particular characters in my book, Gabriel and Louise, neither of whom are based
on any real people. I think this kind of authorial gymnastics gives the author a
way to get to know the characters better, deepening them. People often tell me
they remember these two characters above the others, actually, definitely
wanting one of them to live, and the other to die, die, die!
8. Upsetting
real people with their characterisation
As mentioned, this can happen. It is a good
reason for never using a real person to make an identical character in a book.
You could in theory be sued for libel, and most publishers (especially in the
UK where libel protection is excessive) will not want to face down a libel
case, though normally this only happens with memoires. In any case, my books are
set fifty years in the future, which should give me a good defence case, LOL.
More to the point, most fiction is about
entertaining the reader, and this shouldn’t be at the cost of personal
relationships. Most people feel honoured if they see their names. A friend of
mine has the same name as Josefsson, one of the not-very-nice characters in the
book, but he knows it’s just the name and maybe some of the looks, the rest is
completely different.
Don’t put friends in your books just to
please them, because as said earlier, it can backfire, and it will detract from
the story and its cohesiveness. At the end of the day it is a work of fiction,
and should be about the story and the fictional characters that make it. It is
a bit like ‘cameo� appearances of famous people in a movie, where you see them
for a second and then they are gone. It is a bit of fun, but when it happens,
it takes you out of the film and reminds you that you are watching something
rather than being entirely caught up in it. A reader will detect that there is
something not quite right about the character in the story if they don’t really
belong there.
I used to tell people if I was using them
in some way in the story. I don’t anymore. It’s not about them, it’s about the
story, and giving the reader a good reading experience.
9. Creating characters from scratch
I do this more now, having come through the
other steps. Some writing coaches tell you to do a questionnaire on each
character, e.g. how many siblings, where they come from, how old, etc. etc. I
tried it, but I found it too much like a shopping list approach, not leading to
anything � or anyone � whole. Having said that, it is important to give readers
the odd snippet that they have (or had) a life ‘off-page�. Kat is a good
example. In all three books there are oblique references to her uncle and a
former life of luxury which she gave up, though there are almost no details
because for some reason she is ashamed about it. I’ll tell you this much:
something bad happened, but you, the reader, will never know, because it is her
secret, and it’s part of her character. That’s real, isn’t it?
There is something refreshing in creating a
character from scratch, one that does lift off the page. Rashid is another
completely made-up character, yet many readers remember him, even though he is
not that central. Usually such characters have arisen as counter-points to
other characters, and because the plot demands it. Rashid is Indian (yes, I
know it’s not an Indian name, that’s explained in book 2�), and I wanted him
there because the book was too ‘West-centric, and I needed a good counterpoint
to Blake. Here’s when he and Blake (and Kat) first meet, seen through Kat’s
point of view:
She’d heard no
footsteps, and spun around awkwardly in the cramped cabin to see a silhouette:
human at least, no space suit either. Blake’s pistol was already drawn, but she
left hers where it was as the man pulled the door closed behind him and she got
a good look at him: a tanned man in khaki shorts and threadbare tee shirt, unshaven
for a few days. He was shorter than both of them and had open sandals on his
feet. He put his palms together in front of his chest like he was praying, and
gave a short bow.
Before either of
them could speak, the newcomer greeted them in a lilting, almost musical,
voice. ‘Welcome to my home.�
Indistani! She’d had
several good Indian friends at the academy, before the reunification with
Pakistan and Bangladesh after the War, so she recognised the accent well
enough. She smiled at the man, and without thinking, being closer to the door
than Blake, held out her gloved hand. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, the man
stepped forward and took it, at first gingerly, then he shook it firmly, with
both hands. Kat saw the man up close now, probably early thirties, with deep
brown eyes, seemingly back-lit whites surrounding the irises. Kat turned to
introduce Blake.
‘My name is Katrina
Beornwulf, and this is –�
Blake holstered
his weapon, but left the securing clip undone � she didn’t doubt he could draw
it fast if required.
‘Captain Blake Alexander,
Eden Mission, New World Alliance, Sir. And you are?�
The man
considered Blake, then turned to Kat.
‘Why are you
wearing your helmet?�
Kat cast an
ignored glance at Blake. The man continued in his Indistani-English accent.
‘The harm from this planet will not come from its atmosphere. Please, both of
you sit dǷɲ.� He gestured to the makeshift bed. Kat again looked questioningly
to Blake who, clearly having never encountered a protocol for this particular
scenario, indicated to Kat to sit, but gave a firm shake of his head when Kat gestured
with a finger to her helmet. Not surprised, she sat, as did Blake, though he remained
at the edge of the cot, on his guard. The man opposite pulled up the cushion in
front of the computer terminal.
‘You know, after
a hundred years of computers, even us Indians have nearly forgotten how to sit
cross-legged on the floor.� He beamed at them.
Kat smiled back,
hoping to compensate for Blake’s iron regard. She guessed what he was thinking.
It looked as if there had been a struggle in the cockpit, and one crew member
was alive, the other dead, possibly killed before
the crash. But she couldn’t believe this man a murderer, or even capable of
killing; his whole demeanour was so gentle. No, she thought � genteel, that archaic word almost lost
by its near irrelevance to modern Earth’s post-War manners, though she’d grown
up in such a household in Oxford. She hadn’t missed either that he referred to
himself as Indian and not Indistani, but then he didn’t fit the bill of a
separatist either.
I had several Indian friends at University,
and have travelled there several times, and wanted to bring out that ‘genteel�
aspect of their character, though Rashid has another side, too. The funny thing
is that I now have a friend who has read the book, loves the Rashid character,
and is quite like him (he is a Sikh). It’s a funny old world�
10. Letting
characters write themselves
In book two, Eden’s Trial, I had a
character called Hannah, again, completely made up. I tried to kill her off
early on, but she resisted, made her case, and so I held back. I swear that’s
how it felt. Also, my writing group said she was an interesting character, even
though they knew she was not central. Another character who wrote herself was
Angel, who appears in two chapters in Eden’s Trial. I have no idea where she
came from, she just took over my keyboard, and emerged, so to speak. Despite
just appearing in two chapters, a number of readers have asked when she’s
coming back�
There was a short hiss and a dull rumble,
like a train carriage on tracks, as the door swung aside into a recess. A sheen
of water vapour lingered in the air, then dissipated like wisps of dew in the
morning sunlight. Micah’s eyes narrowed, then widened.
A
lean, muscled woman in her thirties, completely bald, with sharp jade-coloured
eyes, stepped toward them, looked straight at Micah, ignored the rifles, and
held out her hand. “Angelica Rushton. You can call me Angel. Nice to meet you.�
Zack
lowered his rifle. Ramires didn’t.
Micah
gingerly met her hand, and shook it. “Micah Sanderson. How –�
“And
this is Starkel.� She jerked a thumb behind her, as the second airlock occupant
stepped out of its shadow. Zack’s rifle jerked back into readiness as the tall,
black-clad figure glided into view, silent as a zero-G dancer, and muscled to
boot. Micah’s instincts told him to be very careful, even before he noticed
that the man’s eyes � irises included � were pure black.
“It’s
okay everybody,� Angel said, “he’s eaten.� She turned to Zack. “Speaking of
which, and I know this is going to sound weird, but do you have any meat
onboard? You know, honest-to-God meat?�
It
went smoother from there.
In summary, here’s some things to strive
for with characterization:
A reader should be able to pick out a character from a police
line-up (looks)
A reader should be able to recognise a character by watching
them at a party (looks plus mannerisms)
A reader should be able to recognise who is speaking without
dialogue ‘tags� (e.g. ‘said Jen�)
Readers should be able to gasp at what characters sometimes do,
or punch the air thinking ‘Yes!� when a character screams at her boss, or
bite their lip when a character holds his tongue when she should scream
out, all without losing a jot of credibility.
People in your writing group should be able to say to you, as I
remember them saying to me in an earlier draft, “Look Barry, I’m sorry,
but Blake simply wouldn’t say that!� That was the first time I realised
I’d created a character, and for me, it marked the crossover point from
writing as a hobby, to a passion.
Good luck.
Yesterday's blog considered the first five approaches below, and today's deals with items 6-10:
Basing characters on yourself
Using physical traits (looks) of other people
Using speech patterns (dialogue)
Using mannerisms (‘handles�)
Borrowing personality traits from friends and enemies
Mixing personality traits of different people you know
Extending personality traits
Upsetting real people with their characterization
Creating characters from scratch
Letting characters write themselves
6. Mixing
personality traits of different people you know
This one is real short. I tried it several times, including very recently, and it
doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s like making good cocktails and can be done, but
I have never managed it. I think it’s because I have clear visions of people I know,
and can’t cut and paste them into each other. I’d rather create one from
scratch (point 9) or extend personality traits (next).
7. Extending
personality traits
This is something worth doing, particularly
if you are writing any sort of thriller fiction. If you are writing more
literary fiction, I’m less sure it’s a good idea.
Essentially, you take your basic character
and imagine them going that bit further, that much wilder, saying what they
really think rather than what we usually end up saying in reality (and wishing
later we’d said so much more, or less). I usually do this in two stages,
particularly with dialogue. First I get the basic dialogue down, then I’ll come
back to it later and ‘up the ante�, raising conflict. You let the characters go
further, and bring out certain traits (fear, love, anger, greed, hatred,
whatever) to the fore. This doesn’t have to result in action � you can show
what the character is thinking of saying or doing, but not have them do it;
this can sometimes be more effective in making the character memorable in any
case, because it is more like us.
Here’s Micah, at a pivotal moment in book
1, when he ‘loses it�. Notice I bring Vince in to restore a sense of reality
afterwards.
Vince was
half-way to the door. He sighed, turning around. ‘Look, I know you’re trying,
and you mean well, so I’m going to give you some advice you’re probably not
going to listen to. I ran the profile on you, so I’m going to tell you who you
are, so that maybe, just maybe you can help yourself, though I doubt it.�
Micah leaned
backwards against the desk.
‘You got fucked
up by your father, Micah. You’re in his shadow. Daddy hero syndrome. We know
all about him, what a prick he was to you and your family � heroes, always a
black side, eh?�
Micah had
thought it a million times, but never heard it from someone else.
‘So you want to
be a hero, too, maybe a different kind. Am I right?�
Micah’s throat
locked tight.
‘Well let me
save you the bother. He’s dead. You need him to recognise you, accept you,
whatever, and it won’t happen, Micah, because� the sonofabitch is dead. So,
step out of the shadow. He screwed up your life while he was alive, now you’re
doing it for him.� Vince spun around and headed out. ‘Get a life, Micah, your
Ƿɲ.�
Micah breathed
hard. Dozens of buried memories resurrected themselves. All were between him
and his father, all were unpleasant: the put-downs, the patronising lectures,
and the ever-present disappointment in his father’s tone. Micah’s fists
squeezed hard. Uncorked anger rose inside him like bile.
Nobody, in all
these years, even his sister, had ever validated him � not once � about his
father. All the press, the vids, had nothing else to say but that he was the
Great War hero who sacrificed everything for God and country, Colonel Victor
Sanderson, the Gray Colonel� Micah remembered the storm shelter, his father
labelling him a coward after the nuclear attack. He realised he was still
trapped in that one, terrified, fifteen year old boy’s humiliating moment.
Without
thinking, he grabbed the arms of his chair, raised it above his head, and with
an anguished cry brought it crashing down on his computer. He raised it again,
slamming it down even harder, denting the metal. He swept everything off the
desk, sending tortured fragments clattering across the floor. Two guards rushed
in, then grounded to a halt.
‘Calm down,
Son,� one of them said.
Micah didn’t
know what his face looked like, but they didn’t approach any closer.
He cast aside the twisted chair and glared
at them. ‘I’m nobody’s fucking son.�
Vince
re-entered, glaring at the mess around Micah’s feet. ‘Christ, Micah, do I have
to get you escorted off the premises, or call a shrink? Forget the privileges,
I’m bringing the Mil in now.
I just watched the final episode of Stargate the other night (pretty good, actually), and in it Daniel has a complete rant against Vala, which goes a long way beyond his normal character 'envelope'. But because of the situation they are in, it is not only credible, but moving, and essential to the plot and rounding off of the entire series.
Incidentally, a good device in any writing
is to have one or two characters discussing another one. That’s what we do in
the real world, right? And word of mouth is often taken more seriously than the
narrator’s ‘voiceover�. You can also build up a character this way by having
several people at different times describe the character or make reference to
his or her attributes, all from slightly different (or even completely
opposite) standpoints or angles. This can be a good way to set up a character,
or even to set up a false impression of a character. For example. a classic (as
opposed to timeworn) approach is to hear that someone is really bad or good,
and then find out they are not. This works better if other characters have ‘set
you up� than if the narrator has done it. It means you will feel like you know
the character better than anyone else in the book. I do this with two
particular characters in my book, Gabriel and Louise, neither of whom are based
on any real people. I think this kind of authorial gymnastics gives the author a
way to get to know the characters better, deepening them. People often tell me
they remember these two characters above the others, actually, definitely
wanting one of them to live, and the other to die, die, die!
8. Upsetting
real people with their characterisation
As mentioned, this can happen. It is a good
reason for never using a real person to make an identical character in a book.
You could in theory be sued for libel, and most publishers (especially in the
UK where libel protection is excessive) will not want to face down a libel
case, though normally this only happens with memoires. In any case, my books are
set fifty years in the future, which should give me a good defence case, LOL.
More to the point, most fiction is about
entertaining the reader, and this shouldn’t be at the cost of personal
relationships. Most people feel honoured if they see their names. A friend of
mine has the same name as Josefsson, one of the not-very-nice characters in the
book, but he knows it’s just the name and maybe some of the looks, the rest is
completely different.
Don’t put friends in your books just to
please them, because as said earlier, it can backfire, and it will detract from
the story and its cohesiveness. At the end of the day it is a work of fiction,
and should be about the story and the fictional characters that make it. It is
a bit like ‘cameo� appearances of famous people in a movie, where you see them
for a second and then they are gone. It is a bit of fun, but when it happens,
it takes you out of the film and reminds you that you are watching something
rather than being entirely caught up in it. A reader will detect that there is
something not quite right about the character in the story if they don’t really
belong there.
I used to tell people if I was using them
in some way in the story. I don’t anymore. It’s not about them, it’s about the
story, and giving the reader a good reading experience.
9. Creating characters from scratch
I do this more now, having come through the
other steps. Some writing coaches tell you to do a questionnaire on each
character, e.g. how many siblings, where they come from, how old, etc. etc. I
tried it, but I found it too much like a shopping list approach, not leading to
anything � or anyone � whole. Having said that, it is important to give readers
the odd snippet that they have (or had) a life ‘off-page�. Kat is a good
example. In all three books there are oblique references to her uncle and a
former life of luxury which she gave up, though there are almost no details
because for some reason she is ashamed about it. I’ll tell you this much:
something bad happened, but you, the reader, will never know, because it is her
secret, and it’s part of her character. That’s real, isn’t it?
There is something refreshing in creating a
character from scratch, one that does lift off the page. Rashid is another
completely made-up character, yet many readers remember him, even though he is
not that central. Usually such characters have arisen as counter-points to
other characters, and because the plot demands it. Rashid is Indian (yes, I
know it’s not an Indian name, that’s explained in book 2�), and I wanted him
there because the book was too ‘West-centric, and I needed a good counterpoint
to Blake. Here’s when he and Blake (and Kat) first meet, seen through Kat’s
point of view:
She’d heard no
footsteps, and spun around awkwardly in the cramped cabin to see a silhouette:
human at least, no space suit either. Blake’s pistol was already drawn, but she
left hers where it was as the man pulled the door closed behind him and she got
a good look at him: a tanned man in khaki shorts and threadbare tee shirt, unshaven
for a few days. He was shorter than both of them and had open sandals on his
feet. He put his palms together in front of his chest like he was praying, and
gave a short bow.
Before either of
them could speak, the newcomer greeted them in a lilting, almost musical,
voice. ‘Welcome to my home.�
Indistani! She’d had
several good Indian friends at the academy, before the reunification with
Pakistan and Bangladesh after the War, so she recognised the accent well
enough. She smiled at the man, and without thinking, being closer to the door
than Blake, held out her gloved hand. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, the man
stepped forward and took it, at first gingerly, then he shook it firmly, with
both hands. Kat saw the man up close now, probably early thirties, with deep
brown eyes, seemingly back-lit whites surrounding the irises. Kat turned to
introduce Blake.
‘My name is Katrina
Beornwulf, and this is –�
Blake holstered
his weapon, but left the securing clip undone � she didn’t doubt he could draw
it fast if required.
‘Captain Blake Alexander,
Eden Mission, New World Alliance, Sir. And you are?�
The man
considered Blake, then turned to Kat.
‘Why are you
wearing your helmet?�
Kat cast an
ignored glance at Blake. The man continued in his Indistani-English accent.
‘The harm from this planet will not come from its atmosphere. Please, both of
you sit dǷɲ.� He gestured to the makeshift bed. Kat again looked questioningly
to Blake who, clearly having never encountered a protocol for this particular
scenario, indicated to Kat to sit, but gave a firm shake of his head when Kat gestured
with a finger to her helmet. Not surprised, she sat, as did Blake, though he remained
at the edge of the cot, on his guard. The man opposite pulled up the cushion in
front of the computer terminal.
‘You know, after
a hundred years of computers, even us Indians have nearly forgotten how to sit
cross-legged on the floor.� He beamed at them.
Kat smiled back,
hoping to compensate for Blake’s iron regard. She guessed what he was thinking.
It looked as if there had been a struggle in the cockpit, and one crew member
was alive, the other dead, possibly killed before
the crash. But she couldn’t believe this man a murderer, or even capable of
killing; his whole demeanour was so gentle. No, she thought � genteel, that archaic word almost lost
by its near irrelevance to modern Earth’s post-War manners, though she’d grown
up in such a household in Oxford. She hadn’t missed either that he referred to
himself as Indian and not Indistani, but then he didn’t fit the bill of a
separatist either.
I had several Indian friends at University,
and have travelled there several times, and wanted to bring out that ‘genteel�
aspect of their character, though Rashid has another side, too. The funny thing
is that I now have a friend who has read the book, loves the Rashid character,
and is quite like him (he is a Sikh). It’s a funny old world�
10. Letting
characters write themselves
In book two, Eden’s Trial, I had a
character called Hannah, again, completely made up. I tried to kill her off
early on, but she resisted, made her case, and so I held back. I swear that’s
how it felt. Also, my writing group said she was an interesting character, even
though they knew she was not central. Another character who wrote herself was
Angel, who appears in two chapters in Eden’s Trial. I have no idea where she
came from, she just took over my keyboard, and emerged, so to speak. Despite
just appearing in two chapters, a number of readers have asked when she’s
coming back�
There was a short hiss and a dull rumble,
like a train carriage on tracks, as the door swung aside into a recess. A sheen
of water vapour lingered in the air, then dissipated like wisps of dew in the
morning sunlight. Micah’s eyes narrowed, then widened.
A
lean, muscled woman in her thirties, completely bald, with sharp jade-coloured
eyes, stepped toward them, looked straight at Micah, ignored the rifles, and
held out her hand. “Angelica Rushton. You can call me Angel. Nice to meet you.�
Zack
lowered his rifle. Ramires didn’t.
Micah
gingerly met her hand, and shook it. “Micah Sanderson. How –�
“And
this is Starkel.� She jerked a thumb behind her, as the second airlock occupant
stepped out of its shadow. Zack’s rifle jerked back into readiness as the tall,
black-clad figure glided into view, silent as a zero-G dancer, and muscled to
boot. Micah’s instincts told him to be very careful, even before he noticed
that the man’s eyes � irises included � were pure black.
“It’s
okay everybody,� Angel said, “he’s eaten.� She turned to Zack. “Speaking of
which, and I know this is going to sound weird, but do you have any meat
onboard? You know, honest-to-God meat?�
It
went smoother from there.
In summary, here’s some things to strive
for with characterization:
A reader should be able to pick out a character from a police
line-up (looks)
A reader should be able to recognise a character by watching
them at a party (looks plus mannerisms)
A reader should be able to recognise who is speaking without
dialogue ‘tags� (e.g. ‘said Jen�)
Readers should be able to gasp at what characters sometimes do,
or punch the air thinking ‘Yes!� when a character screams at her boss, or
bite their lip when a character holds his tongue when she should scream
out, all without losing a jot of credibility.
People in your writing group should be able to say to you, as I
remember them saying to me in an earlier draft, “Look Barry, I’m sorry,
but Blake simply wouldn’t say that!� That was the first time I realised
I’d created a character, and for me, it marked the crossover point from
writing as a hobby, to a passion.
Good luck.
June 29, 2012
Basing characters on real people - Part One
One of the comments I get from readers is
that my characters feel real, even if there are a lot of them (it is a
‘multi-protagonist� book). This was not always the case. In early drafts of the
first book, The Eden Paradox, the characters were a little stiff,
two-dimensional: ‘ciphers� in writing jargon.
This is neither what the author nor the
reader wants. As readers we want to know some of the characters better than
real people in our lives, characters who stand out, lift off the page, or as
Hemingway put it, leave footprints in the snow. Characters we will remember,
for good or bad.
So, I decided to ‘borrow� from some people
I knew. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. In this blog I cover the following steps,
which for me were a progression, and led to having some (apparently) memorable
characters:
Basing characters on yourself
Using physical traits (looks) of other people
Using speech patterns (dialogue)
Using mannerisms (‘handles�)
Borrowing personality traits from friends and enemies
Mixing personality traits of different people you know
Extending personality traits
Upsetting real people with their characterisation
Creating characters from scratch
Letting characters write themselves
1.
Basing characters on yourself
It is a truism that an author’s first novel
in particular will in some ways be about the author, that his or her traits and
mannerisms will creep into at least one of the characters. This is not
necessarily a bad thing. My first reader said I was in two of the characters:
she told me I wanted to be Blake, the archetypal hero, but in fact I was in
reality more like Micah, the main protagonist, who is actually an anti-hero. I
laughed, because that’s what you do when you hear something about you that has both
the ring and sting of truth. ‘Write what you know� is the best way to
successful writing, and certainly some (though not all) of Micah’s interior
monologues were exactly how I would think and react, if in such situations.
But not all. In fact one of my first
professional reviewers of an early draft said of Micah that he could be a bit
of a jerk. I laughed again, a bit more forced this time. That was when I
learned the most important lesson, the main one you should take away from this
blog: don’t base any character completely on someone you know (unless you’re
writing a biography, of course). I’ll return to this point in part two of this blog. The
clear advantage, though, is that your novel will have a definite ‘centre of
gravity�, and, after all, most readers will never meet or get to know the
author personally, so what they actually think of your character is less
important than the fact that they will remember that character.
The risk, however, is that the character
based on yourself will skew the book in your favour, and can be an ego-centric
exercise in getting the things you always wanted but never had, saying things
you wished you’d said but never did, in other words, living out your life in
fiction to make up for some unsatisfactory real-life experiences. The reader
will notice this, maybe not consciously, but will probably put the book down.
That was why I made Micah an anti-hero, and gave him such a hard time.
2. Using
physical traits of people you know
When a reader ‘meets� a character, they
need something to latch onto, what is called a ‘handle�. The easiest one by far
is physical looks. But saying ‘she had long dark hair and penetrating emerald
eyes� won’t stay in the reader’s head for very long. Here’s how I describe
Blake, the first time you meet him, through the eyes of Zack:
The harsh red flicker
from the Ulysses holo reflected off Blake’s rusty hair and chiselled features,
lighting up the bow-shaped scar above his right eye from hand-to-hand combat in
Thailand, and the pockmarks on his left cheek from the gassing at Geronimo
Station. Blake had lost a lot of men in the War, but always got the job done.
What is interesting is that this face is
based on someone I once met, then never saw again, but I can still remember and
picture his face. Think about it � it’s not a bad approach, right? But don’t
picture someone famous, the readers will recognise you as a thief�
And here’s Zack, whose personality is based
on a friend, and whose physical characteristics are completely made up:
Kat nudged her
forearm upwards just enough to reveal Zachariah Katain, his large, oval black face
grinning downwards, framed by wire-mesh eyebrows and a gleaming bald pate. His
jaw stuck out, as if permanently mocking life. His eye-lids were a different
story � they always seemed to be a fraction closed � alert, as if targeting
something. She’d met other vet attack-pilots who’d had that same perpetual
hunter look, like they couldn’t switch it off any more. It reminded her that
although Zack appeared to be a regular, jovial wife-and-two-kids guy � because
he was � he also had that killer instinct just underneath the surface.
What’s interesting about Zack is that a lot
of readers like him, but forget he is black. I have no idea why, or what that
means. Maybe I need to mention it a few more times, but to me colour isn’t much
of an issue (in the future, at least).
Here’s Micah, described by his work buddy
Rudi:
Rudi stretched
his hands forward, framing Micah between thumbs and indexes as if taking a
holopic. ‘I mean, look at you. The basics are okay � no hunchback, all your own
teeth, body parts in the usual places. But the wiry fuzz on your head, the
bulging eyes � is that a thyroid thing, by the way? And as for dress sense...�
Rudi’s hands returned to their habitual position, clasped behind his head.
‘Does your Mom still buy your clothes, or what? No style. That’s the problem, Micah. The girl you want is pure class, you’re not.�
Micah’s looks are based on someone I know
well, who hasn’t read the book, and I’ve not asked him to either�
I don’t describe him much, actually,
because the reader gets to be in his head a lot, and knows him that way. This
is an important point. If you want the reader to identify with a character, but
you over-describe him/her, nailing them down completely, then most readers will
find it less easy to slip inside that character’s skin. Some of my favourite Scifi
books have very little (or even no) description of the protagonist, you just
get a feel, an image in your head of what they must look like. This is one
reason why sometimes we go see films of our favourite books and are
disappointed, because the characters on the silver screen look wrong. A good
caster can overcome this, though, as in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, for
example, whereas in every version of Dune I’ve seen, the character Paul
Atreides on the screen is somehow dead wrong.
Try and avoid clichés and tropes (tall dark
stranger� yawn), and ideally mix in a bit of personality with the physical
attributes: e.g. as in my character Jen, who was almost pretty, a little on the
plump side with short blonde hair, showed a bit too much cleavage, and had
bottle green eyes that spent most of their time looking sideways at people when
they weren’t looking back. Do you see her? Will you recognise her later on in
the book? Do you want to know what makes her show cleavage and look at people
sideways? Do you know someone like this? Do you already have a gut feel what
she is like as a person? If you’ve read any of the Millennium books by Steig
Larsson, I only have to mention a certain female character’s crooked smile, and
you know who it is. In ten years� time, you’ll still know.
3. Using speech patterns (dialogue)
Finding a character’s voice is really
important, especially if you have a lot of characters, as otherwise they will
sound the same, and your writing will appear flat, it won’t engage. The
character Sandy in my book is based on a real person, in particular what she
says. I can never get the last word with this person, in real life or on the
page. Here’s an example, from a scene where Sandy is being interrogated by
Vince, a Chorazin Interpol agent, who himself is a no-BS hardball. They are in
a small room, on two chairs, facing each other, no table in between:
Sandy leant back
in her chair. “Are you going to ask me all the shit again about Keiji’s murder?
About what I saw, which was pretty much nothing. Why I hid?� She inhaled
deeply, blowing out a long plume of smoke sideways, not at him. “That’s the way
it always goes in the vids, isn’t it? Ask everything four times, story
cohesion, all that bullshit?�
She
watched him as he uncrossed one leg and crossed the other. Muscular thighs. Shit, she thought, as she flushed, I don’t believe this. What’s this crap I
suddenly have for bald-headed, athletic, blue-eyed men? She wondered if
he’d noticed; of course he had.
“No,� Vince said.
He spoke with an unexpected nonchalance. “As you say, that’s what they do in
vids. In any case the Sensex cleared you three hours ago of being Mr. Kane’s
murderer or an accomplice. According to your deposition you saw little, given
your relative position to the killer.�
Yeah, right, she thought, I was giving Keiji a blowjob under the desk
when the killer walked right in.
“…and you
yourself were potentially a target, depending on what the killer thought you
knew. But staying there all that time was a little extreme, don’t you think?
The killer had made his getaway. You could have left.”�
Sandy crossed
her legs, then changed the cross. His gaze didn’t falter. She looked around for
an ashtray. She flicked a small head of ash onto the floor, and took another
long drag.
“You know that
blondie Chorazin is screwing Micah? I had a ringside seat. She’s kinky, you
know. A bit out of his league.� She watched for a reaction, a movement, a
flicker of the eyes. Something; anything. Nothing. She pressed harder. “They
must train you people pretty good not to react to shit like that. Must take
stuff out of you, huh? You must lose something, you know, a piece of yourself.�
Vince’s eyes
intensified then broke her gaze. He stood up and walked around to the back of
his chair. “Actually, it’s more like they put ‘stuff� in.”�
She gave a short, hollow laugh. “Good grief, a
piece of Chorazin philosophy! I’m honoured.� She took a last drag and dropped the
cigarette on the floor, stubbing it out with her shoe. She ground it longer
than necessary with her heel, not looking at the messy stain.
Zack is also based on a real person,
especially what he says. He’s a more rounded character, a counterpoint in
amongst a stiff military group. Here he is with Pierre, who is Zack’s polar
opposite, a scientist, (also based on somebody who hasn’t read the book, though
in this case I do ask him to):
‘About time,� Zack said.
Pierre primed a contact syringe, and in one
smooth movement flicked it switchblade-style towards the side of Kat’s neck.
There was a hiss, like a sharp intake of breath. A wash of deep red crawled
across her face then vanished.
‘Will
it calm her down?� Zack frowned at her normally smooth, fine-featured face, now
crumpled like a piece of paper, slick with sweat.
‘No,
but she’ll realise she’s in a dream. If she remembers, she can control it.�
Zack
looked down at their youngest crew member. Yeah,
if she ain’t too shit-scared. Her chest rose and fell with increasing speed.
‘Her vitals okay?�
Pierre
tapped the holopad next to the cot � several red spikes radiated outward, but
none pierced the edge of the surrounding green hexagon. ‘Tolerable. In the
dream she’s running, so her lungs work faster.�
Zack
chewed his lower lip. The nightmare was coming more regularly the closer they
got to Eden, and Kat reckoned it wasn’t a normal dream, always exactly the
same. So they’d decided to try a lucid dreaming technique, injecting a stim
during the nightmare, so she could maybe
control it, and recall what was chasing her.
Pierre
gazed into the mid-distance as he discarded the syringe. ‘Do we run because
we’re afraid, or are we afraid because we run?� He said it as if reciting, a
hint of his Parisian accent lingering.
Zack sighed, wondering for the hundredth
time why Pierre wasn’t back in MIT, surrounded by his best friends � equations
and a muon-scope. ‘Spare me the psy-crap, Pierre.� He glared at him. They both
knew why she was running.
‘I have to go. I’m finishing some tests. There’s
a strange variance –�
‘Whatever.� Zack gave him a sideways look.
‘I thought you liked Kat?’�
Pierre hung there for a moment,
fish-mouthed, then spun on his heel, and retreated to the cockpit.
Zack
re-focused his attention on Kat, planted himself on a mag-stool, and leant back
against the graphite-grey inner hull. ‘Take it from me, kid, sometimes it’s
okay to run. You run as fast as you damned well can.�
Kat is not based on a real person, but I
like her dialogue, she parries all the time, because of her past, and supreme
lack of trust in men, but is very incisive, both cutting and cut-up at the same
time. She’s been around in my head so long she’s become real to me. Here’s an
extract from the upcoming third book, Eden’s Revenge:
“Hello, Pierre,�
Kat’s avatar said. “Platinum suits you. It’s your colour.�
Pierre
felt pleased at first, then caught himself � was he pleased with the
simulation, or to see her again? Just an avatar, he reminded himself � let’s
keep it professional. He addressed the slim, short-haired brunette with the
crooked smile. “You have access to all my premises. We go to meet the female
Kalarash known as Hellera. What do you advise?�
She
cocked her head. “I missed you. I thought it would go away, you know, fade. It
didn’t. Not much, anyway. Not nearly enough.�
He
had an urge to clear his throat. This wasn’t working to plan. He thought about
removing some of the emotional algorithms his brain had reverse-engineered into
her avatar, but of course that would affect her intuition. He had to play
DzԲ�
“I
� missed you too, in a way.�
She
glanced away. “Whatever. Your daughter � Petra
� of course you remember her name, it’s the last thing you said to me.� Her
eyes flashed dark. Anger, he realised. But she continued, waving a hand dismissively.
“You’re seeing something that the Tla Beth are missing, but you’re also
avoiding an obvious solution.� She folded her arms, stared at him.
4. Using
mannerisms, ‘handles�
I’ve already mentioned the famous ‘crooked
smile� or Larsson’s famous character. Zack is bald, but has a habit of running
his hand over his head, as if smoothing non-existent hair down. Micah clears
his throat a lot (ahem, I do too, actually). It’s a nervous thing, so I only
use it in such situations. Louise flirts a lot with her hair and eyes. Jen
skulks around whenever she is amongst strangers. Blake steeples his fingers
when making decisions. If you’ve read my books, and I mention the word
‘cigarette�, you’ll know who it is, because he is never ‘seen� not smoking. But
it is memorable because of the way he smokes. You’ll maybe remember that when
he stubs out a cigarette, it’s with tangible regret, as if he was shooting a
beloved horse. His only notable possession beside his sharp suits, is his gold
cigarette case.
Characters can have nervous ticks, scratch
themselves, purse their lips, sigh a lot, have hollow or excessive laughs, etc.
Watch people, we all have them. They’re useful handles, because we can’t keep
saying to the reader, ‘and here’s Jen again, remember, the one with the bottle
green eyes?�
5. Borrowing
personality traits from friends and enemies
A friend of mine writes vampire stories.
When people piss her off in normal life, she casts them in her stories, and
they come to a rather nasty demise. Love it. You think you know friends better
than enemies. I hope so. But sometimes your vision of an enemy is more
crystallised than that of a friend. I used one person I don’t like to represent
a bad character in my books. It’s well-hidden, including the fact that I
changed the sex for the characterisation. But it works. It also stops ‘baddies�
from becoming cartoon-like rather than real people. You have to let the baddies
have a rationality behind their machinations, no matter how twisted. Remember
that everyone is a hero in their own version of events, and this goes for any
bad character, even evil ones. Here’s an example, without naming the character
in case you’ve not read book one:
She leaned back in her chair, clasping her
hands behind her skull. Galileo, my dear man, you should have listened to me.
If you had, then you could have seen with your own eyes what your brilliance
had only just managed to grasp � not just the non-Euclidean solar system, but
the rest of the galaxy. And Amadeus � at least we will take your music with us,
though you chose to remain so finitely mortal. She thought of the people she
had known over the past six hundred years. Most she despised � her perspective
was so different that she no longer thought of herself as human, and found
humans � earthlings as she had started to call them, hopelessly bound to this
doomed planet � their pitiful, short lives and limited vision, their petty
selfishness. Humanity left alone would never rise above itself. There had even
been a time when she had questioned the Q’Roth-Alician pact, but the longer she
trod the Earth the more she knew the inevitable choice was between cull most
and upgrade a few, or cull all.
There had of
course been some exceptional men and women � a few. She and others had tried to
turn them, most without success. Still � there were five hundred like her, a
few even older, roaming the world. They controlled humanity, misguided it, kept
it off-balance, bringing it to ripeness for the return of the Q’Roth. Soon �
very soon � almost no time at all, this self-obsessed civilisation would be eradicated,
and they, the five hundred who knew what was coming, plus another five thousand
promising Alicians, would have their own ships and a passport to the Grid. A
new existence and legitimacy as a sponsored Level Five species. The hierarchy
they had heard about would know this new humanity for the first time and would
respect it: our next stage of evolution.
Notice this is all done via ‘internal
monologue�. I’ve known a few people with twisted minds (I’m a psychologist).
They are very careful about what they vocalise, most of it stays inside, and
you watch their eyes, wondering what horrors lie behind� Besides, if this was
done as dialogue or narrative, it wouldn’t sound right. Evil stays quiet, a
neat trick a lot of SciFi films miss when they get their arch ‘baddie� to wax
lyrical about world domination or whatever. One advantage books have over film.
Using friends is actually trickier, because
we are often too close to them to see them objectively enough to get it down on
paper coherently. Also, we won’t want to kill them off, for example, when
perhaps the plot demands it. So, I borrow traits from friends but change
things, so at most half of the resultant character is based on a real person.
One of my characters, Pierre, is loosely based on a colleague and friend at
work. He refuses to believe it, though his wife can see it, and he doesn’t read
science fiction. I joke back that the character Pierre would be far too serious
in real life to read science fiction anyway.
But the main advantages of basing
characters on friends is that you know how they would react, what they would
say, and so it has more credibility and depth. One of my favourite school-day
books was Wind in the Willows, and apparently all the characters were based on
friends, obviously some eccentric ones, including Toad of Toad Hall.
Of course your friends might not like the
way you portray them. I’ll come back to this in part two.
One psychologically interesting point is
that if you base characters on friends, it can be a nicer experience writing
the novel, because, let’s face it, writing is a lonely endeavour. I really like
Naipaul’s writing, for example, but most of his characters are people I would
not like as friends� Same for Coatzee. Maybe that’s what it takes to win Nobel
prizes for literature�
More to come very soon...
June 25, 2012
Why would aliens want our oceans?
To live there, of course. There have been
Scifi stories of aliens wanting to steal our water, but honestly, if a species
could develop interplanetary travel capability, they could probably sort out a local
water supply problem. But as we continue to find new planets ‘out there�, we
may find that most of them are relatively ‘dry�. Water is often considered to
be a necessity for intelligent (or any) life to evolve (I don’t think other
paths are excluded, but let’s go with the flow for a moment). We came from the
sea (so we’re told J) and
evolved on land, but it might well be that a species could evolve
technologically underwater, or else remain parochially attached to the seas and
oceans on their world. What if they polluted their world, or suffered an
environmental catastrophe, self-inflicted or otherwise? Of the hundreds of
planets they might know of, how many would be (a) in their ‘Goldilocks zone�
(able to support their species type with environmental and gravity factors) and
(b) contain oceans? Probably very few. Maybe one. Our colloquially and
strangely-named blue planet (Earth).
They might covet it. It might take them millennia
to arrive, and they might notice a few savages in loin cloths skulking in the
rocks, but see that the true seat of a civilisation � the oceans � were
marvellously untouched. They would set off, and place their young in
hibernation for the journey, to arrive thousands of years later, by which time
we’d be skulking around skyscrapers, in some places still sporting loin cloths.
So I wrote to consider this scenario (not a comedy, by the way). I did not state the
premise, as above, I simply showed them landing and what happened afterwards.
One man tries to communicate with the aquatic invaders to avert a war that will
destroy the planet. But how to communicate with them? And at what price?
Not much science fiction delves beneath the
waves. As a scuba diver, I wish more would. I’ve done a small amount, with a
Mariana Trench chapter in The Eden Paradox , and an advanced alien
ship hiding in an underground ocean in two chapters of Eden’s Trial . After all, it’s another
world, and I get most of my ideas for aliens from undersea tropical creatures.One thing I don’t do underwater, however,
is read or write: too much to watch...
Also by this author:
The Eden Paradox, available on ,
Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and Ampichellis
Eden’s Trial, available on
Eden’s Revenge � Xmas 2012�
June 22, 2012
Embassytown, aliens and language
I found Embassytown by China Mieville easy to put down - it was just that I couldn't help but pick it up again. The writing was mesmerising. The more I read the more I was drawn into this human-alien culture, so unlike any other science fiction I've ever read.
Despite the eloquence and masterful writing, it is not an easy read. Mieville takes the Scifi adage 'resist the urge to explain' to an extreme, so that at the beginning it is very hard to work out what the hell is going on. And when it gets to inter-planetary travel, he avoids every single available warp or faster than light travel cliche and trope and invents the 'immer': fantastic, poetic, and almost incomprehensible - but that is the point, and he carries it off brilliantly.
The titles of the chapters still make no sense to me, even after I have inished the book, but why should they? The reader is an observer, an interloper (a 'floaker', in Mieville's terms) of a human culture so distant from our own that it seems, and it is, alien, except that human characteristics, especially our weaknesses and fears, prey large on the plot. The protagonist, Avice, is herself very flawed, making it easy for the reader to empathize with the terrible decisions that have to be made in the second half of the book.
The spiders, the Arakei, are never too clearly described, with their fanwings and coral eyes, but they are from the beginning an enigma, as is the arrival of EzRa, which is where the book really takes off from a plot perspective. They do not speak as we do, and in fact the whole book is about language and meaning, and just how difficult it could be to communicate with a truly alien species. The intricacies of how their language works, and the dramatic effect EzRa's arrival has on them, are well-thought-out; this is a deep novel, a masterpiece.
Unlike many science fiction books, the ending was excellent and satisfying. I read this one on kindle, and after finishing it, I paused a few minutes and then went straight back to the beginning, where I had originally been captivated and confused in equal measure, and started reading again. I can't remember doing that with another book, except Lord of the Rings, a lifetime ago.
Doubtless one of the reasons I persevered with it was its focus on language and communication difficulties, and the fact that the aliens in question were spider-like, as I have all these elements in my Eden Paradox series, but this writer is a master, and it was humbling to read. I don't think it is for everyone, but this is serious, high-end, well-written hard science fiction that heads off on a right angle away from most Scifi, into the immer... If there was a nobel prize for SF writing, this would get my vote.
The Eden Paradox is available on , Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and Ampichellis.
The sequel, Eden's Trial , is available on .
The third book, Eden's Revenge , will be out Xmas 2012.
June 16, 2012
Cool alien ships & design concept for Eden's Revenge
One aspect I love about science fiction is space ships, both human-designed and alien ones. I never got that enthusiastic about cars, but space ships, well, that's different. Some are deservedly iconic, whether Star Trek's Enterprise and Borg Cubes, Star Wars' Millennium Falcon and Death Star, or2001's ship whispering HAL and its crew to Jupiter and beyond.
More recently, the ship scenes in Sunshine were just trippy. Some ships are not merely vehicles but alive, notably Farscape's Leviathan hybrid Talyn, with a character all of its own. And lets not forget Stargate Universe and its ship of the ancients, though the external shots were too few for my taste. The Vorlonships in Babylon 5 are my favourite of all time.
In books as well, from Iain Banks' Contact vessels and warships in Excession to Peter F Hamilton's Voidhawks, and not forgetting Alistair Reynolds, the images they conjure up are breathtaking.
For years books held sway over the imagination, but with the rise of CGI now even with a fairly predictable and played-for-laughs scifi film like Lock-out, one can sit back every now again and just admire the space art visuals.
Ship art and concepts are particularly important for Space Opera, because the idea is to show how big space is, not to make us feel small and insignificant, but to make us feel wonder at the vastness of the galaxy, and the endless possibilities it offers when we can finally get a ride out of our solar system.
Some of the more dystopian series like Firefly, or the quirky film District 9, have ships which are less jazzy, where oil and grease and dirt grace the interiors, and the exterior of the vessel looks like hastily glued together bits of scrap-metal. Of course, it may end up like that, especially the way our global economy is going, although SpaceX's Dragon seem to be doing okay so far. Alternatively, we may have the luxury to have clean and cool ships like in the recent film Prometheus, where the ship was pretty much the only thing I found interesting during the entire film.
In my own writing, for example in The Eden Paradox, our first interstellar ships, theUlysses and the Phoenix, are more in the Firefly vein, powered by dark energy drives but otherwise cramped, as in the ships and mockups at the SmithsonianAir & Space Museum in Washington DC. But the alien ships, mainly in the sequelEden's Trial, as well asEden's Revenge which I am working on now, are intended to be much more cool. Here's a description of the StarPiercer, from Edens Trial...
Nobody spoke, they just stared. Micah had
seen plenty of cool ship designs in vids and games, but this wasn’t just the
latest fluidic-chip maxi-sense holo-vid: this was real. And it was much, much better.
The
approaching ship was somewhere between an elongated cone and a javelin, the
sleek outer hull laced with metallic scarlet and purple shades rippling from
the tip back to the aft section. Its texture reminded him of a moonlit lake,
but its sleek lines suggested power, and above all, speed. It was hard to gauge
the size, but as it approached Hannah filled them in.
“It’s
a Scintarelli Star-piercer, according to the onboard database, Level Eight design,
about two hundred meters in length, minimal jump drive, built for inter-stellar
non-Transpace flight. Crew complement two, registering as Mannekhi, a Level
Five race.�
Micah
tore himself away from the screen to face her. ‘Two?�
So, for book 3, Eden's Revenge, I want to have a ship on the front cover, so there is no mistaking that this book is science fiction. Of the dozen or so alien ships in my books, I've chosen the Kalarash ship, whose entrance into another galaxy occurs at the very start of the book:
In the darkness of the inter-galactic void, at the edge of the Hourglass Galaxy, a ruby gash opened in the fabric of space.
The tear widened to a bloodshot eye, an obsidian pupil irising open at its
centre. A ship emerged, shaped like an elongated crossbow. Along its ten kilometer shaft, metallic hues of
aquamarine and scarlet morphed characters from an ancient, forgotten language, as if the ship was reading aloud to a universe no longer listening. The eye
blinked and was gone, space around it snapping closed as if the portal had
never been there. Kalaran had arrived.
Now I just need to find an artwork designer to do the front cover, one who doesn't cost the Earth...
At the end of the day, or at the end of an episode, whether Star Trek, Farscape, SGU, Babylon 5, or any other series, one of my favourite shots is always to see the hero(ine), whether Picard or Janeway, standing by a porthole on their ship, looking outwards, then the camera pans out slowly, revealing the ship, which then continues on its journey into space or hyperspace, the deep hum of engines (which in reality we wouldn't hear, but what the hell) taking the crew to their next adventure.
Would I volunteer to be on such a ship? Seriously, need you ask? In a microsecond.
The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and in ebook on , Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and Ampichellis.
The sequel, , is available on in ebook from Amazon.
Eden's Revenge is coming out before Xmas 2012.
June 7, 2012
Experiences with advertising and selling Indie ebooks
Over the past year or so, like many, many
other authors, I’ve been trying to sell my two ebooks. They are not only available
on Amazon, but I’m going to focus on Amazon because that is where most of the
sales occur. I’ll try to answer the following question � how useful were the
following in selling ebooks?
Website
Title
Cover
Pricing
Amazon author page
Excerpts from the book
Amazon tags
What other people bought after buying yours
Blogs
Reviews
Adverts in magazines (online and paperback)
Interviews
Publishing stories
Social Media
Price changes
Giveaways
Kindle Nation Daily
Website
Before my first book came out as an ebook, I set up a website. My books are science fiction, and I had an idea for
the website look, but first I had to find a website designer I could trust.
Luckily, I was already published in non-fiction and was a member of the UK
Society of Authors, and they gave me a few reputable contacts. I settled on
Annie Pennington, and over the course of about a month, and a bunch of designs
we finally homed in on one, and I decided to incorporate my blog into it. All in, it
cost around £1000, but everyone said it looked good, and professional,
and I consider it money well spent. However, I don’t sell direct from the
website, I just have links to Amazon etc. But there is a bio and more info
about my books, and some free short stories. To me the website is not about selling, but
it is an enabler, and can help a reader decide whether to purchase or not, and show them how serious a writer you are.
Title
You need to check early on that your title
is not already out there (and your author name, incidentally), otherwise you may
find that when people search for you or your book that they find another one
instead. The title should be catchy.
Cover
Can you judge a book by it cover? Well,
even if you shouldn’t really, people will, especially if you are an unknown
author. My ebook was published by a small ebook publisher, and I loved the
cover design they did, but for some reason they put a gothic-style font on it,
rather than the jazzy science fiction one I had on the website. This to me was
a downside, and still is. To me the picture is eye-catching but the font looks
a bit cheap and almost hokey. If you’re publishing it yourself then you have
complete power over the look and feel, and of course absolute responsibility
for it. In either case, take your time, it matters, especially with some of the
later ways of selling I’ll come to. It becomes your ‘brand�. When the first book came out later in paperback, I got the cover re-done.
Pricing
I don’t ‘buy� free ebooks, or ebooks for
99cents, because I figure they are cheap for a reason (lack of quality). Maybe
some of them are really good, I’ll just never know, because the few I looked at were pretty awful.
Pricing with paperbacks used to be logical
� there were printing costs, advertising, cover design, author royalties,
distribution and warehousing and retailer costs, etc. Mass trade publications
therefore hit the market at around $6.99 because this allowed a reasonably
cheap entertainment experience (how else could you get a week’s pleasure for
such a price?) and gave the publisher a profit margin and an author enough
money to live out a meagre existence in a Parisian garret on cheap red wine, French
bread and Gauloises. With ebooks, the price market got turned on its head.
Some famous authors ebooks are $16.99,
which has to be around 80% profit margin for the publisher (because there is no
printing, warehousing, distribution, etc.), and is pretty outrageous. On a production cost
basis, an ebook should be under $5, and to be competitive should be $2.99. Both
my publishers refuse to accept this, but hey, what do I know, I’m just an
author who looks at Amazon every day and sees what sells� So, my advice to
Indie authors, is this. Think about how much you spent on getting it out there.
Did you pay for professional manuscript reviews that ensured quality of the
product, or did you just get your friends to tell you they liked it, and put it out on Smashwords and then Amazon? Did you spend years honing it with
writers groups and workshops, maybe having done an MFA? Well, whatever the case, just put it
in for $2.99 and see what happensJ
See ‘price changes� later.
Amazon author page
Took me a while to realize I needed this,
as many people cruising Amazon may not want to visit separate websites for fear
of Spam, or simply because Amazon is meant to be your ‘one-stop-shop�. It needs
a good picture, short bio, and information about the book. It can help the
reader/buyer make a judgement about whether to trust the book (and author) or not.
Book excerpts
On Amazon, for most books you can read the
first few pages or even the first few chapters. This is indispensable, and it
means that what any agent or publisher would tell you is true, that the first few
pages have to be the best writing you can produce. As a reader/buyer, I always
read the first paragraph, especially the first line, to find out if the author
knows how to write, and has a fresh and interesting style. If I get hooked and
find myself reading beyond page 2, I’m probably going to buy it.
Amazon tags
These are very important. For example, I
read science fiction but not fantasy, nor crime or mystery, and never
‘romance�. But a mystery/crime set in science fiction � well, hell yes, why
not? And interestingly enough my first book was classified this way. My second
was classified as science fiction / space opera. Here’s the important selling
difference: when book 1 hits 20,000 or less (higher) on the Amazon ranking, it
will say, for example #75 in science fiction/mystery crime. The second book
will just say #20,000 on Amazon rating. If either book gets to #10,000, they’ll
both get into say #50 in science fiction / space opera, but the first one will
also by then say #35 in science fiction mystery/crime. Now, any reader can do
the math and realize that they’re still not big sellers on Amazon, but the
point is that they get into the top 100 in certain categories, and they look
more like winners. Also, Amazon may then start recommending these books to
other buyers in those categories. If either book gets as high as say #6,000,
then they will get into the top 100 science fiction scale, and then you start
to rub shoulders with some of the more famous authors. It can have a snowball
effect, and happened to me about a month ago, and was nice to see! So, tags
matter. They help you get noticed. For example, I just cut and pasted this morning's ratings on The Eden Paradox (book 1) and Eden's Trial (book 2), see below, from Amazon.co.uk, where I sell most books. The ranking isn't much different, but book 1 is #72 in the SF/mystery crime bracket. Looks better, right? Which one would you buy, given the choice?
Amazon Bestsellers Rank:#17,565 Paid in Kindle Store ()
#72in>>>
· Amazon Bestsellers
Rank:
#18,104 Paid in Kindle Store ()
'What other readers bought after reading
dzܰ�
This feature is good on Amazon for readers,
but the author has little control over it. For instance, with my second book,
Eden’s Trial, some people thought it came from another ‘Eden Trilogy� which came
out about the same time as mine, but it is not science fiction, and is more
fantasy/romance. This put people off, until thankfully enough others bought mine and
then bought more science fiction, so that it looks like it is sitting on the
right ‘shelf� now.
Blogs
It took me a while to get into writing
blogs, but now I usually look forward to writing them. I only write on average
about once a week. My publisher(s) [yes, I have two] tell me to do more
blogging, or guest blogging, but I don’t, because my job is pretty demanding
(about 60hrs per week, usually encroaching into the weekends and evenings), and
if I did more blogging I would not be working on my third novel. But I like
blogging, and I either blog about science fiction or else the art of writing as
I understand it, in the context of science fiction. Blogging only costs time,
and usually sells a few books with each blog. I now see through blogger’s
analytics that quite a few of my older blogs get read, so people are finding my
stuff one way or another. I don’t have many formal ‘followers� as far as I can
tell, but my blogs get read, and occasionally I get comments, though not that
many. But if they get sufficient interest and get new readers interested in
buying the books, well, that’s good. I often show passages from parts of the
books, or from stories I’m working on, or new sequences from the current
novel-in-progress. That way people really see how I write, and, if it interests
them, they splash out with a few dollars and buy the book(s).
Reviews
I don’t have so many reviews on Amazon, but
they’re generally five stars, and no, I don’t know all the reviewers. Some of
the reviews are quite detailed, and one even had a ‘spoiler� in it, but they were
all good so I just left them there. Someone told me to write my own reviews
under false names and email addresses. I said no. I’m sure such practices go
on, but I don’t agree with it. It’s wrong, plain and simple.
By the way, if a book has only 5* reviews,
and lots of them, I don’t trust it. Appreciation by readers is subjective, so
somebody is bound not to be enthralled by your book, so get over it, because
some middling reviews or even a couple of turkeys won’t do you too much harm.
I did use ŷ to review my book and
advertise it for a year. What happens is that almost immediately they promote
it, and then they get a review done of it, which was fairly honest (I got four
stars), and then they get the review published in at least a dozen places. This did
spur sales, especially in the US where the science fiction market is biggest
and I sell the least books (!?). On a pure numbers basis it wasn’t worth it,
but I figured that the more the book gets out there, particularly to a new and
diverse audience, the more chance that pure ‘word of mouth� recommendations
might occur, so I don’t regret it, but I think it’s not as good for science
fiction as it probably is for mainstream. Cost about $300 if I recall. I also
felt they delivered what they promised, so fair’s fair J
For my first book, after about nine months
I got it published by a small indie publisher in paperback. I then sent it out
to around ten places (e.g. science fiction journals like Asimov’s and a bunch
of other places) for review as my publisher couldn’t at the time, but after
seven months it’s still not been reviewed. I guess they get hundreds of books
to review, and focus on the more well-known ones. Maybe I don’t know the right
people, as I’ve always felt publishing is a ‘contact sport'. I did get early
manuscripts of each book reviewed by a science fiction author, however, and
used some of the nice things he said about my book (with his permission, of
course) on the back jacket and on Amazon etc., which I do think helped sales.
Adverts
This one was a bit of shock, so much so that it took three attempts
before I learned that splashing out hundreds of dollars on half-page colour
adverts, or as an online glitzy banner on a nice top Scifi website like Analog SF,
sells virtually no copies whatsoever. They are nice to see, however, and I’m
afraid I probably haven’t learned my lesson yet. Oh well, I’m helping magazines
survive I suppose, even if they only rarely accept my stories. I do think it
makes some people check out my website, however, as I always put that in
adverts.
Interviews
I’ve done a few interviews with the writing
scene in Paris where I live, and they are fun, though I don’t think they lead
to sales, they just make you more three dimensional as an author. They also made
me think about how I was projecting the book and re-evaluate some aspects of my
sales pitch and target audience. But like I say, they’re fun. The time they
probably work best is with a book launch, and then getting an interview with a
local paper, for example. When I did a (paperback) book launch in my home town in southern
England in March this year, my sister tried to set up an interview for me with
about six papers, but the papers didn’t get interested (maybe a scifi thing).
Social Media
When I first started, people said “Facebook
sells, sell on Facebook!� It was like a mantra. I didn’t like the idea. I
thought Facebook was about friends, and trying to sell would be a good way to
lose some real ones, and find lots of others who wouldn’t really be my friends,
no matter what Facebook told me. After about six months the mantra changed, and
went like this: “Don’t try and sell on Facebook, or you’ll be a douche-bag!
Sell on Twitter! Sell on Twitter!�
The point is this. There are millions of
people writing and trying to get noticed. Someone like John Locke or Amanda
Hocking comes along and does something different and sells a million. Everyone
then copycats, jumps on the bandwagon and creates so much noise that nobody
stands out anymore, until the next wannabe makes it. So, in a few months the
mantra will probably change again. It’ll be something else. So, I use Facebook
to see what friends are up to. I use Twitter to spread my blog to relevant
communities who might be interested (e.g #SciFi, #Writers, etc.). Occasionally
I tweet if I have something interesting that’s going on, but I usually don’t
spend much time on social media because most of it is so banal, and it stops me from doing what I could be doing, which is writing, and I like to see and talk in person to friends�
Latest request from my publishers is to do
blog tours. But these take a lot of time, and, well, I’m just not convinced.
I’ve done some guest blogs, and it was fun, but no big deal really. Again, for
me, I have limited time. But over the summer I'm going to try it and see, just
to reach some new audiences, and get in touch with other indie scifi authors.
Price changes
Dropping the price can attract people.
Amazon do this sometimes in a laughable way, e.g ‘was $2.99, now $2.78!� like
anyone would care. However, ‘was $8.99, now $2.99' will get noticed. Of course
the reader will look at the Amazon ranking and if the book is still in
nowhere-land, will not be so impressed. Also, it tends to be a one way street.
‘Was $2.99, now $8,99!� is obviously not going to endear readers. So, take your
time before you plunge your price. A better option might be the ‘giveaway�.
Giveaways & Amazon Prime
These are normally for a fixed duration,
e.g. a day, three days, or in the case of Amazon Prime, three months. I think
the latter one is daft � you’re going to make your ebook free for three months to a random group who buy lots of ebooks. My publisher for the second ebook did
this, and nothing much happened � it actually suppressed sales, because the
price for non-Amazon Prime readers was very high $9.30 for an ebook by a unknown
author.
However, the publisher then did a three-day
giveaway followed by a price reduction, and this shifted 1400 ebooks in three
days, coupled with my efforts on blogs and twitter, and it triggered a
significant spike in sales on book 1 as well. Because both books rocketed up
the Amazon charts, this then had the desired snowball effect as both books got
into the top 100 Science Fiction category ( #3 in UK, and #20 in US), and so
sales continued to remain high for the next few weeks. I had interesting
comments from people I’ve never met, saying, for example, “I’d never heard of
you but liked the cover and it was free, so I downloaded it. After reading the
first chapter I realised this was quality writing and it was a sequel, so I
immediately bought the first one, and read them in sequence. So, when is book 3
coming out?”Sweet.
Kindle Nation Daily
This is Kindle’s own Facebook-style way of
pushing ebooks to 80,000 readers. I know it works for some people, but I paid
something like $130 for a one-day sponsorship, and it sold five ebooks worldwide. Don’t
know why. Maybe it’s because my books are science fiction, maybe it was the
cover. I’ll never know. But whilst the service was good, and they did push it
out there, I won’t use KND again, that’s for sure.
To sum up, you’ve probably gathered by
now that I’m not big into social media, not big into selling myself, and would
rather be writing novels, stories or blogs than all the rest of the ‘marketing
stuff�, and hanker after the old days when authors wrote and publishers did the
rest (if such days ever truly existed). Still, the books keep selling, so
between the blogs, twitter, a website and having a series of books, something
must be working (I'm hoping it's the writing). I hope some of the info above might help other Indie authors
navigate through the marketing maze and not waste money on things that don’t
work. Just remember two things, both of which are probably true: (1) Publishers will tell you that effort spent
on marketing is more important if you really want to sell, than writing your
next novel. (2) You are defined by what you do.
Good luck!
The Eden Paradox is available in ebook and
paperback on , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis ebooks, and Waterstones
UK.
Eden's Trial is available in ebook from
.
Eden's Revenge will be out for Xmas 2012.
