Adam Christopher | Steampunk and dark fantasy author. Now with added superheroes!
Adam Christopher is a New Zealand-born SF writer living in the sunny north of England.Archive for February, 2009
73 days to a novel: Change of pace and general housekeeping
Right, off to London for three days for some much-anticipated R&R – the writing continues, of course, and my Scrivener project is all packaged and ready to go on the laptop. After two weeks of solid writing (I love it when a plan come together), I hesitate to suggest a change of pace, but it would be silly to try and continue my twice-daily writing routine, fail, and then feel miserable about it while on holiday. So my target is to hit 50,000 words while I’m away, which is actually not far off and is a nice milestone to feel good about.
General housekeeping – switch your bookmarks to adamchristopher.co.uk! It still points here, but that’ll get you ready for a new website which is coming soon!
Next episode: The Devil in Chains! Actually I’ve been proofing the Legends iPhone/iPod touch version over the last couple of days, and it is looking really neat. It just need a final bit of testing before it can be submitted. At 113 pages, the price is actually going to be US$2.99, rather than the $2 I previously mentioned. But more on that next time!
See you in three days…
73 days to a novel: 40,000 words and not a dialogue tag in sight
Passed the 40k mark on Dark Heart this morning, leaving just under 60,000 to go. That feels good – it’s getting substantial now. With 41 days left, I need 1464 words per day, and based on this week’s progress I should be right on target.
I’m a big fan of the DragonPage, which is an excellent SF/fantasy podcast that comes out of Arizona, and co-host Michael Stackpole (New York Time bestselling author, doncha know?) is always on hand to offer excellent advice on the publishing industry and techniques of writing. In fact he has his own newsletter, The Secrets, which is an excellent resource for writers. One of the recent topics of discussion has been the use of dialogue tags – he said, she said, he whispered, she shouted, etc – or more specifically, the disuse of dialogue tags.
Dialogue tags are unnecessary and unnatural. Just take a sample scene: It’s an out of control spaceship, and our hero and companion have made a shocking discovery.
“The pilot’s dead,” Jack said grimly.
Wait a second – that’s totally fake. Imagine you’re in the scene and you’re the companion. If you were there, it would run like this:
“The pilot’s dead.” Jack’s face was grim.
That’s how it would be – in real life, when someone talks to you, you don’t think “Jack said hello”, you think “Jack was smiling”. Dialogue tags – the saids, asks, whispers, shouts, whatever – are fake.
Ok, ok, I’m being a little heavy on them. They are a tool of writing, and there is always a place for them. And they can be used to great effect if you are going for a particular stylistic approach for a piece (look at Hemmingway, for instance). But if you want naturalistic characters and dialogue, and generally more interesting writing, then don’t use them. If your prose is structured correctly, it should be perfectly obvious who is speaking, so dialogue tags are just unnecessary. Once you’ve got rid of them, you can focus on the important stuff, like the fact that Jack’s face was grim. There’s the interesting character point. I don’t know what proportion of an average novel’s wordcount is taken up with saids and asks and whispers, but it must add up. It seems to me that if you lose these unnecessary words, you’d be left with a whole bunch of extra word space which can be used for characterisation and plot.
Anyway, Mike Stackpole explains it with a great deal more flair than I just did, but suffice to say that Dark Heart has crossed 40,000 words with not a single dialogue tag in sight.
At the risk of turning this post into the newsletter of the Stackpole Appreciation Society, another thing he’s turned me on to is eBooks and electronic publishing. Now, I’m not going to attempt to discuss the whole shifting paradigm here, as this is a 6-month-long conversation that has been going on on DragonPage Cover – just go and download the podcasts and listen for yourself. But one thing I did get out of it was Legends, the eBook application developed by Michael Zapp for the iPhone and iPod touch. Mike S. has been championing this developer and his application, and for good reason – it’s a great application – and he’s got several of his own works available as a Legends eBooks. I got in touch with Michael Zapp to discuss Legends, and as a result, The Devil in Chains will be appearing as a Legends eBook in the iTunes app store very soon.
Legends eBooks are stand-alone applications – it’s the eBook and the reader application all in one package. Some people have (sometimes impolitely) suggested that this is the wrong way to do it, that you should be able to download a reader application, then load individual eBook files into it. I think this comes from a rather outdated point of view that having ten individual eBook applications on your device is bloated and a waste of space, but consider this. Each Legends eBook is only a couple of MB. The smallest iPhone or iPod touch is 8GB. That’s plenty of room! The other thing that some people have seemed to forgotten about is distribution – if you have a separate eBook reader, where do you get the eBooks from? iTunes only offers applications, music and video. You’d have to host your own eBook files, which (aside from cost) is an added complication for people, because they have to go to a new website and find what they want. If you have the reader and eBook as a single unit, it can all go in one place on the iTunes app store, it’s easy and convenient, and people don’t need to think twice about it, you just download your eBook like you’d download some music and start reading. It’s pure win.
So getting back on topic, Legends rules – black text on white, white text on black, touch gestures, portrait or landscape, zooming, you name it. Everything you need in a reader. And as the iPhone and iPod touch have accidentally become the most widely-used eBook readers in the world, the iTunes app store is a place you want to be. Check out Legends, check out Dragonpage, and check out Stackpole’s website – I’ve added some links to the sidebar there.
Tonight it’s back to work. Let’s see if I can hit 41,000 before lights out.
73 days to a novel: Action! Plot progress! Irony! eBooks!
Oh the irony. The day I stop worrying about wordcount, the day I finally go over what was my old daily target. Lesson learnt and full steam ahead to March 31st.
Anyway, I’m pleased to report that not only has Prince Albert made his one and only appearance in the novel (although in a sequence which may need extensive revision when I’m done, as looking back at the synopsis for this chapter it seems I left an important element out… then again, this actually might be worth a chapter of its own, which would give government man Macmillan Brown another fifteen minutes of fame… hmm, I like it!), but Bellamy, Clarke and Zoe have finally made it off that damned airship and have arrived at the chaos of the abandoned – or should that be empty? – army camp. Now it’s time to get some good old plot progression down before they wander off again.
Meanwhile, the days are counting down to the launch of The Devil in Chains eBook. Unfortunately I can’t do an actual countdown, as tremendously exciting as it would be, as once the iPhone/iPod touch application is submitted to Apple, they actually review and approve it. While this should only take a few days, there is no way of knowing when the eBook will actually appear on the iTunes applications store for sale, short of checking it every day. But hey, maybe we can have a PDF and Kindle countdown. Sounds good! So once we’re all set and the iPhone thing is submitted, the party can begin.
In the meantime, I’ll see you tomorrow when I’ll introduce you to Legends, the exceedingly nifty eBook application for the iPhone/iPod touch. Good times!
73 days to a novel: Distractions and wordcount
So there I was thinking that I’d just been away from the blog for a couple of days and that it was time to update it, and checking the last post I see it has been more than a month. Woah, time flies! But also, that kind of gap isn’t good. If there is one thing this blog should be good for, it’s exercising the finger muscles each morning before I do some writing, so there is no excuse really!
Couple o’ thing: firstly, worrying about wordcount. I need to stop this. I write twice a day (needs to fit around my day job, alas), but I always have one eye on the wordcount. This doesn’t seem quite right, as I need to be writing to whatever length I feel like at the time. Writing is an art, so by restricting everything with targets and daily goals, etc, is a bit too scientific. So long as I’m hitting roughly what I need each day, then no problem. A bit more, a bit less, doesn’t matter. So that’s my focus for this week, not worrying about wordcount. The fact is that while I’ve said Dark Heart will be 100,000 words long, I might get to 99,000 and discover I’m only halfway there. I’m hoping that’s not the case, but you know, stories are strange and sometimes they spring surprises on you.
Secondly, I’ve been working on a second project which is really exciting. I’ll be talking more about this during the week, but I’m prepping my first eBook for release. It’s The Devil in Chains, my Dark Heart prequel novella (well, very short novella – it’s only 27,000-ish words, which is the bottom end of the range). It was originally published in two halves in Pantechnicon… well, it will be, as part one came out at the beginning of December last year, and part two will be out sometime in the next couple of months. But the eBook release is the whole shebang in one – and the exciting thing is that it’s going to be available not just as a PDF download from this blog, but as a Legends eBook for the iPhone and iPod touch, available for purchase through the iTunes applications store, and also as an eBook for the Amazon Kindle!
And the purchase model? Well, it’s pretty easy. You can download the PDF for free from this blog. If you read the story and like it, you can buy a copy for US$2/UK£1.50. If you have an iPod touch or iPhone, grab the Legends eBook for US$2. If you have an Amazon Kindle, buy the story from Amazon.com for US$2.
Why buy something you can get for free? It may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s all about supporting writers. Authors work hard on their stories to entertain you. Giving you something for free is actually a pretty big deal. So be a patron of the arts! If you like the story, and buy a copy, send it to friends and tell them you liked it! And if they liked it, get them to buy a copy! And so it goes.
