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 Uncategorized
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Adam
The best beard in fantasy
Let me tell you about all the ways that Patrick Rothfuss is a god among men.
Firstly, he’s a nice guy. Really nice. Secondly, he has an awesome beard. Really awesome. It’s long and full and has two grey streaks in it. Thirdly, he fences, like me, and fences epee, like me.
Fourthly, he wrote the best book I’ve ever read, The Name of the Wind. It’s his first novel. It’s something like 250,000 words of heaven. And for all that length, not a single word is wasted, every one is essential. It’s brilliant.
Fifthly, Patrick Rothfuss signed a copy of this book for me last night when he gave a talk at the Deansgate Waterstones in Manchester. He laughed at my quote request (despite someone ahead of me in the line stealing it) and chatted to my wife.
All of these things make Pat awesome. Awesome to the max.
I first got wind of The Name of the Wind around April 2007, when Pat was interviewed on my favourite book-related podcast, DragonPage Cover to Cover. That interview more than two years ago was fascinating, as he described all the things he did wrong when it comes to writing a fantasy novel, and how, despite breaking every publishing rule in the book (a 250,000-word first novel with no bad guy?), he produced one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written. Well, that’s not quite how he described his own book, that’s how I’m describing it.
I picked it up in December 2007, having been given a bookstore gift card. I read the book in December 2008, mostly in my car in a parking lot near my old workplace each freezing winter morning. When I was done, I wondered why on Earth it had taken me more than a year and half to read this work of art.
I forgot my camera last night, but it was a terrific couple of hours. He read from book two in the Kingkiller Chronicles, and talked about how the version of The Name of the Wind that was published was actually the 400th draft. This was particularly interesting, because, as he pointed out, that meant there were 399 versions of the novel before the published version that were not as good. It was all, he said, down to perseverance. Although I didn’t get a chance to ask him about his writing habits, he hit the money with that point. Perserverence.
As a writer, you have to keep going, and going, and going, and going, and going, and going, and going. Write one book, then a second, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth, then a sixth. Even though The Name of the Wind is Pat’s first book, he actually wrote it 400 times, so he had a lot of practice and a lot of sticking power.
So, any lessons learnt from last night? Yep. Write and keep writing, and then when you’re done, write some more.
On the way out, my wife said I could grow a beard like Pat’s when I get my book deal. I think I can probably beat Pat in that department, as I’ve got goddamn white in my beard (none of this half-assed grey business). So I’m really looking forward to the day when we meet up as fellow authors at a con somewhere, and can argue about fantasy and beards and the best episode of Firefly long into the night.
Word count, word loss, and the year ahead
Time to change the title of these posts – “73 days to a novel” wasn’t even accurate!
So tomorrow is the big day when I cross the 50% mark on the first draft of Dark Heart. Champagne of the cheapest variety shall be consumed, I can tell you that now.
But tonight I narrowly avoided a heart attack when I discovered my work from this morning had vanished completely – gone in a puff of zeros and ones. It’s a mystery, and possibly a bug in Scrivener (the Mac-only writing app I use), but having discussed it at some length with the developer, neither of us can replicate the data loss, so I may have to put it down to the Malign Influence of Soussan-Pannan. Trust me, he’s a nasty one.
All of which got me thinking about word counts, and earlier in the day I was listening to a podcast from Mur Lafferty from January (hey, I’m behind!), in which she broke down her goals for the year. Now, I have a long-term plan, but when the year was divided up by word count, the results surprised me.
So here’s how my year looks:
I write 1600 words a day. As of tomorrow there are 304 days left in 2009, which means I should write, in theory, 486,400 words by December 31st. Good lord, that’s a large number (which makes Zoe’s miscalculation of The Master’s career wordcount in The Mind Robber episode 5 even more amusing… but I digress).
I’ve got 50,594 words left to go on Dark Heart, which leaves 435,806 words. If I estimate 50,000 words writing the second draft of that book (total length still 100,000, but allowing for a 50% rewrite on average), I can allocate 100,000 words to Power, my superhero novel, and another 100,000 to the sequel to Dark Heart.
Phew! 185,806 words left to play with. So 50,000 each for second drafts of Power and Dark Heart II, and then rounding the year off with a shorter novel of 85,000 words – still at the very early stages, but I’ve got an idea for a Children of the Stones/The Weirdstone of Brisingamen-style magical young adult novel, which would be ideal for that sort of length.
That leaves me with change of 806 words, plus whatever I can scrape back from the second drafts of Dark Heart, Power and Dark Heart II.
To be honest, that’s pretty staggering. At just 1600 words a day, I’ll have four novels done, three of which will be at second draft and one will be at first. The Generalissimo, Scott Sigler, is planning on writing 1 million words this year, which is 2740 a day. While I can’t match that, 2009 should still be a very good year indeed.
