Honest Critiques

This week's assignment...

2006-03-25T15:15:00.000Z

Please go here and read Joyce's "Refugee"... I'm blogging about it tomorrow. Password is 'Vista' if you haven't been to AW's Share Your Work forum before.

A Game of Chess

2006-03-10T15:45:00.000Z

Right, have you all had a look at "A Game of Chess"? Good!

The first thing you'll notice is that it's highly observational; the method by which information is conveyed to the reader is the watchful narrator, who is capable of noticing fine detail. The narrative voice in any piece of work tends to imply a personality. I know people go on about first- or third- person or omniscient/unreliable/limited POVs, but I think it's initially easier just to think of a person telling a story, and what sort of person that is.

In this case, the narrator is an excellent psychologist and reader of body language with a flair for pithy imagery. He looks on at the events in the story from a detached perspective; see how Ian continually stresses the distance between the narrator and his subjects. He's in the corner by the noisy coffee machine (sound becomes another barrier to observation); he reminds us often that he is 'watching', 'seeing' or failing to see. Ian does not allow the narrator to become a part of the story, by having him remain aloof, and by not allowing him to comment directly.

The narrator is hypersensitive. We get all five senses from him. He can see fine golden hairs from the other side of the room. The cadence of his observations is simple, deliberate. Characters arrive trailing sharp, declarative images - crisp white shirts, green velvet ribbons. As you see, they're handled well and often compounded of one or more sense-impressions, which conduces to a feeling of keenness and clarity in the writing.

As I say, he's also able to read people. This can be a desirable trait in a narrator as it provides a bridge between two different kinds of narrator - the person like you or I, or the omniscient narrator. Ian's narrator tells us that the man and the woman are both trying to lose, which feels like he's jumped into their heads; but he's carefully set up that class of observation, for example when he sees the man's eyes 'slide along the diagonal', thinking about a bishop move. Not only close observation, but also analysis; a fitting person to comment on a chess problem, a conundrum he is trying to work out.

And he speaks in pleasant images. I like the fresh scrubbed air and the insolently stretched legs. There's a writerliness about him too.

Some part of the narrator is Ian, and the rest Ian has constructed out of his own craft to enable him to present this vignette. It is a small carefully-constructed piece of work, with a straightforward gambit and a tricksy endgame, and he's had to give us a voice who can sort it all out for the reader with equal care and brevity.

The story's very schematic, isn't it? That's the second thing you notice. He's had to stylise and maybe diminish all the characters to have them fit their chess-game roles. The narrator's aware: "The scene is unreal. It is like watching a play, or being a voyeur." That's the choice Ian has made, and he's executed it well, but it maybe leaves the reader a little uninvolved.

The weakest section is the section of dialogue in the middle, which veers uncomfortably from the abstract - "we have nothing more to learn from one another" - to the mundane - "All my stuff is packed in the car." The latter rings hollow in the context. I can't quite believe any of the dialogue, actually. The narrator's voice is so austere and controlled, and these people strike the wrong note. Maybe if the narrator were less detached, all participants could become a little more human; and the story, which shows promise and skill, would pack more of a punch. As it is, it feels like a successful exercise in writing, not a successful story.

I don't know enough about the short story market to say whether anyone would publish this. There's room for improvement, but maybe this is one of those things that a writer gets a lot out of writing, but maybe recycles into a longer a better work a little down the line.

Thanks for all your comments recently. One of the many things that is enjoyable about operating this site is when people start to debate and discuss things on the comment threads.

All the Fun of the Fair

2006-03-07T13:50:00.000Z

The London Book Fair's on at the moment. I went yesterday. I don't have much business to do there, other than wander about looking at what everybody else is publishing.

One thing you do see quite a lot is that other publishers do pick up on books that you've rejected; happened to me twice yesterday, big posters plastered all over the stands advertising books I felt we couldn't publish for one reason or another. The lesson to draw from that is that being rejected (or accepted) by a publisher isn't necessarily about the quality of the book. It's about how many copies a publisher thinks they can sell, and one house might be better set up to market a book, or just feel more bullish about it. Quality feeds in to that, but there is another set of factors, enabling us to account for the success of Jeremy Clarkson. (My money's on an infernal Faustian pact.)

Anyhow: the next crit I'm going to post, before the end of the week, is not in fact the top of the queue I gave you the other day. Ian submitted a short story to me just before the first one on the list, called A Game of Chess, which I didn't want to post in its entirety (only about 1K words) for fear of 'publishing' it. I didn't want to pull bits out of it either as it wouldn't really work. So Ian's posted it over at the forums on Absolute Write in the Share Your Work > Literary folder. Off you go and have a look. I'll tell you what I think soon...

What Fresh Hell Is This?

2006-02-27T16:49:00.000Z

I am very bad at proofreading. Very, very bad. Such that I occasionally don't notice if there's a whole page missing from a book, or if a word is spelt wrong in sixteen-point type in the middle of a page. Added to this is my complete blind spot for several points of house style and grammar, such as the correct use of the restrictive relative pronoun or the distinction between -ise and -ize.

Unfortunately, in a world where editorial service departments are a thing of the past, I have to do a lot of spotting these things myself, and then I get my work checked by people who proof professionally, and then my typescripts come back covered in post-it notes with tart little comments all over them. BAD editor. In extreme cases the competent person in this relationship will come and sit down with me and give me a little lecture, whereupon I thank my lucky stars I do not work for the Mob and therefore am not liable to be shot behind the ear and dumped into the Grand Union Canal.

So the part of book-making that I particularly hate is when the creative part of it is over and it becomes a matter of getting the book ready to be printed. This is most of it. How much nicer it is when I am on the other side of the divide, just burbling away as author-on-staff, safe in the knowledge that my colleague with her editorial hat on will have to dot my undotted is and cross my uncrossed ts. Not to mention swap out all my whiches for thats and vice versa.

With my author hat on, I have around 150,000 copies of my books in print (needless to say, not under my name) in the UK and Australia alone. Maybe it's time I got out of the office, chained myself to the word-processor and see if there's a more interesting way to make a living than checking very slowly for typos.

Anyway, today I am freshly shamed by my proofreading rubbishness, so by way of blowing off steam, a few things that have come out of my reading of children's book manuscripts recently.

1) Please would people stop titling their books "[PROTAGONIST'S WACKY FORENAME] [PROTAGONIST'S WACKY SURNAME] AND THE [SOMETHING] OF [SOMETHING]" E.g. "WIGGY FUMBLER AND THE SOAPDISH OF QZARD". No, it doesn't really make me think "Hey! It's the next Harry Potter!" It makes me think "I'm going to have to read 400pp about somebody called fucking Wiggy?"

2) Please would people stop writing the book where the brainy awkward geek is oppressed by high school and shoved around by jocks but because he is sensitive and creative comes to a kind of triumph and inner strength and probably gets to kiss the prettiest girl in the school because he isn't like the other guys. Typical life-lessons / rites-of-passage learned in this novel include the shattering revelation that the pretty girl may not be so pretty on the inside, or that your parents aren't as bad as you think, or ... oh, you know the rest of the yadda yadda yadda. Here's a free novel idea for you: let's have a book called JOCK, in which one of the Neanderthal stereotypes usually found picking on our pale-and-interesting heroes in the above gets to tell their side of the story. Why exactly do they beat up on future authors? Now It Can Be Told.

3) The prologue where a child is born and bystanders make cryptic/prophetic comments whose true meaning will not be understood until later. Yes, fantasy writers, I am talking to you. It's really hackneyed. Just leave the damn prologue out already.

4) You open a kids' fantasy manuscript and you get faced with something like this:

"The prophecy?" said Dangalf the Sage. "For many years, the sages warred over its meaning, until now only I remain as the last keeper of the words of Khobblers the Oracle. I now impart it to you, my young friends, shoeless, feisty ragamuffins though you may be.

"Three shall come when times are dark.
One has a distinctive mark:
His head's the shape of English muffins
With birthmarks in the shape of puffins.
The second is a waspish girl
Whose wisecracks make you want to hurl;
And probably the plot will feature
Some annoying talking creature.
Inside they'll find the magic sword
And slay the standard Evil Lord"

"Like, that makes sense! Do you understand it, Cloppy?" asked Kourtnee, waspishly.
"Naayyyy!" said the unicorn.
"Wait a second, guys!" said Wiggy. "MY head's shaped like an English muffin!"

Wow, what are the odds. In the end we reach a crisis because there's no magic sword, but it turns out the magic sword actually refers to the magic sword of friendship the protagonists carry around in their hearts, and they defeat the bad guy with a group hug. Ooh, didn't see that coming, did you! Having destroyed any tension by telling you what's going to happen in the end with stupid doggerel, the author desperately tries to claw back some sort of drama by playing on words. PLEASE STOP USING PROPHECY AS A PLOT DEVICE IN FANTASIES UNLESS YOU HAVE SOME KIND OF RATIONALE FOR IT, e.g. time travel or something. It just makes it much more difficult to create thrills.

The only great fantasy I can think of in which a prophecy is a plot device is Jack Vance's unfeasibly brilliant Lyonesse, and that's only really because King Casmir's oracular magic mirror Persilian hates him and wants to fuck with his head. Actually, in the example above, if Wiggy and pals were to end up spitted on Axfang the Black's halberd by the end of chapter three, that'd be a fun use of prophecy.

5) Please stop writing the post-apocalyptic SF thriller in which after the bomb/plague/enviro-meltdown the world is reduced to scrabbling around in little Hobotowns, disused quarries where everyone wears bits of old sackcloth and leather, and at some point someone will be discovered worshipping a burnt-out old TV set. Our hero/-ine will then go off on a quest and discover the forgotten history of Earth, probably including a secret enclave of people living at a 21st century level, yadda yadda yadda. Surely we are all bored of books and movies supposedly set in the future in which people have regressed to tribalism? You're writing SF for kids, give us some bloody robots and death rays.

These dull SF-for-kids books are so often moralising and didactic (look what we're doing to the planet, how bad it is!) and usually display a decidedly un-SF-like poverty of imagination. (The reason film producers resort to Hobotown is usually that they've blown all their money on the SFX budget and there's nothing left over to dress the extras; but in a novel, exciting visuals cost you nothing.)

If anyone out there is still reading after my long absence, please use the comment threads. I'd like people to contribute to the critique process a bit more. In fact I think I'd like to see at least one helpful or interesting comment from each person who has submitted an extract before I blog about their work - I'm going to start bumping lurkers down the list... (If anonymity is an issue, you can always comment anonymously, but email me separately to let me know who you are.)

Here you go: the top of the queue.

2006-02-21T23:43:00.000Z

1. "Refugee" - Joyce
2. "Filling the Gap" - Richard
3. "Insight" - Diana
4. "The Blood of Queens" - Valerie
5. "The Walmart Way" - Julie
6. "Hippie Chick's Life Lessons Learned" - Rene
7. "One for the Ages" - Leo
8. "Osama's Dream" - Richard
9. "Joffa" - Suzanne
10. "An End to Longing" - Stephen

Short Stories

2006-02-21T13:47:00.000Z

Two new crits below.

I've also been sitting on two short stories for a while - A Game at Chess and In a Dark Time. I can't really post them in full without that constituting 'publication' so I suggest the best thing for the authors is that they post them in Absolute Write's password-protected Share Your Work forum. Once they're up, I'll post thoughts about them here.

I'm so bored with having to keep logging in to a file-hosting service every few weeks to keep the Easter Island statue from disappearing off their server. So, please consider the statue on holiday. Perhaps he is walking the earth, solving mysteries, reuniting families, and possibly competing in secret underground bare-knuckle kickboxing tourneys in order to save the life of his feckless kid brother. (I did have this idea once for a TV series in which the late lamented Ol' Dirty Bastard would drift from town to town doing good works but being pursued by the cops, inspired by the real-life incident in which he rescued a child from a burning car. It would've been called The Dirtiest Hobo. Sadly, it was not to be.)

Mini-post

2006-02-21T13:35:00.000Z

Er, not sure what this one's called. It's by Margaret and it's YA fiction.

Gina Sarafino knew Eli Jenkins didn’t normally invite girls to his basement to play video games. He didn’t invite them one-on-one, nor to the big multiplayer games he often threw with a dozen friends and four networked television sets. It wasn’t that he didn’t like girls. In fact, he thought quite highly of them. Girls, he believed, just didn’t like video games. Gina, though, was welcome downstairs anytime. It wasn’t only that they’d known each other since he was in third grade and she in first, or that they used to be next-door-neighbors out in the country before his family moved to town, nor was it because they attended the same church. It was because she regularly smoked him at Halo, and if she beat him, she could certainly beat the other guys who weekly hung out in the Jenkins’ basement. When it came to video games, Eli wanted Gina on his team.

Gina, on her part, felt honored to be there. She was a sophomore and not a big deal in Woodvale High School. Eli, on the other hand, was a senior and a very big deal. Since she’d known Eli so long, he seemed like a brother, and she hadn’t realized what an asset the association was until she started high school herself last year. As a result of Eli’s reflected glory, doors opened for Gina into places she would never have been on her own, like where she was tonight, playing games in Eli’s basement with a dozen senior jocks and a smattering of kids from the church youth group. She wasn’t the only girl present tonight, however. Her best friend, Amy Tsukada was included because the two were practically joined at the hip, and because most of the jocks thought Amy was hot: untouchable, but hot.

It was a small place, Woodvale, Oregon, and there wasn’t a lot for kids to do in the rural, mountainous, logging and farming community. The Jenkins’ basement was a safe haven for many. At the moment, though, it was emptying fast.

"Where’d everybody go?" Benito "Benny" Sanchez asked, returning from upstairs with a can of the soda Mrs. Jenkins kept stocked in a spare refrigerator on the back porch. The largest group of game-players, Eli’s jock classmates, had left en masse while Benny was raiding the soda stash. It was a week before school started and most had summer jobs.

"Claimed they had to work in the morning," Eli said, yawning.

"They just got tired of Gina beating them," Amy said.

"Don’t we all?" Eli said, unplugging controllers from the game consoles. Gina began picking up pop cans and empty chip bags. Amy’s mother was on her way to take them home, but they had a few minutes and she didn’t want to leave Eli with a mess. Eli stopped suddenly and looked around the room. There were only four kids left, all from their church. Benny was helping clean up by finishing a bag of pretzels. Ian McNeel was still lost in a game on one of the sets. He could, Gina knew, easily play all night, then get up and ace an advanced chemistry quiz. Ian was a self-described "freakin’ genius."

"Everybody’s here," Eli said, glancing around. Gina looked at Amy quizzically who shrugged.

"You’re losing it, Eli," Amy said, continuing to stack pizza boxes to haul upstairs to the trash. "Everybody just left."

"Caitlin!" Eli called, ignoring Amy. After a long moment, Caitlin, Eli’s younger sister, appeared at the top of the stairway, book in hand, with the slightly dazed look she always had when she’d been engrossed in a book. She was always engrossed in a book. Gina watched her make her way down the worn carpeted stairway, her limp, pale brown hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, a shapeless t-shirt over her grey sweat pants. She might be cute, Gina thought, giving her a quick smile, if she’d take the time. Standing next to the stunning Amy didn’t help any, but Caitlin seemed indifferent. For some reason she and Gina had never been close, although they were nearly the same age. It was Eli she’d spent time with when they were little, building forts together in the field that lay between their houses.

"They’re all here," Eli said to Caitlin. "Shall we reveal The Plan?"

"Sure," Caitlin said, closing the book in her hand and sitting primly on the edge of the couch. Benny nudged Ian who began the process of shutting down his game.

When they were all seated on the floor or the worn brown velvet couch along the family room wall, Eli perched on the edge of a small piano stool and looked at them in that intense way he had, like the survival of all earthlings was at stake. He was medium height, not tall enough to be a basketball star nor hefty enough for football, although he had done both with some success. His hair, a shade lighter than his sister’s, curled down over his collar and around his ears. Eli’s hazel eyes turned green when he was upset, or when he was pumped about something. They were green now, Gina saw.

"This is my senior year...," he began.

"Go, seniors!" Ian said from his perch on the arm of the couch. Amy punched him.

"We have to hurry," she said. "My mom will be here soon."

"You heard her; hurry it up," Ian said to Eli.

"...but before I leave for college, I want to start a band," Eli continued.

Wahey! I think that’s the plot right there, isn’t it - the band - appearing an economical 900 words or so in, the characters sketched in. The prose is solid – not incredibly stylish, but unobtrusive and functional. I’d probably get bored with it, but then I’m not the target audience.

The only reason I wouldn’t ask to see more of this for a UK children’s list is that it’s really very American, and that’s a difficulty in kids’ books. School’s quite different over here in some ways. Still, the basics are good, and I’d want to read on to see what happens.

This is what I mean about the beginning of a book giving the editor the best chance to grasp what it’s all about. (Cue Margaret telling me the band has nothing to do with the plot…)

The City Council Murders

2006-02-21T13:21:00.000Z

Here's the beginning of Jim's The City Council Murders.

The mayor was lying dead on the floor and I was sitting on top of the best story of my life.

If there's one inviolate fact I've learned as a reporter for a small-city newspaper, it's that city council meetings can be pretty boring. [Inviolate fact and ‘can be, pretty much’ don’t match, nor does ‘usually’, next.] It's usually just a lot of bullshit. I'm a damned good reporter and I'd been searching for something exciting to write about. [You could cut this line – it’s a non sequitur, it makes me think Our Hero is up himself rather and of course he is naturally looking for something
exciting.]

I had a funny feeling before this meeting, though, and I'm not sure why. It might have been the way the city clerk's secretary batted her hot, blue eyes at me when she wiggled into City Hall.

I admit I enjoyed the way she kept baby-bluing me from the front of the council chambers. She kept crossing and uncrossing her never-ending legs under the council table and, was it my imagination, or was that a flash of thigh peeking out from above a stocking top? Was I the first reporter to unearth the news that the heart-stopping Sheryl Lareaux wore, not pantyhose, but stockings and a garter belt? [This is pure Mickey Spillane.]

I wasn't hallucinating; she actually WAS running her tongue slowly across her pouty lower lip every time she caught my eye. I wondered briefly why this knockout blonde was suddenly showing all this interest in me, the lowly reporter who sat through every one of these dry-as-dust council meetings. [Odd, isn’t it – Our Hero ricocheting between being hard-boiled Mike Hammer and the ‘lowly reporter’ with the city council beat. One starts to suspect satire. I hope so, or it’s bathos.]

The session had started as usual, with the pledge of allegiance and a little prayer that no one really listened to. Me, I'd been at the back of the room, sucking on a smoke before I had to sit down and pay what passed for serious attention to the political hijinks going on up front.

One of the perks of being a foot soldier in the journalism wars is that you get to meet some of the real people in government, the cops and the firemen and the building inspectors and the street superintendents and the clerks, the people who usually have the most interesting stories to tell, anyway. I always prefer to spend my time with them. It's like having the freedom to curse and scratch my balls without feeling like I farted in church. [Why is this paragraph here? It doesn’t seem to relate to those on either side.]

I’d stubbed out my cigarette and ambled up to the front row of seats in the council chamber like I didn’t care who owned the place. I sat down next to the city solicitor, a high-dollar lawyer who was always pretty friendly. He usually kept me pretty well informed about the resolutions and ordinances that appeared on the council agenda. He could always be counted on to be helpful, as long as it didn’t interfere with his own agenda. [Jim, like me, needs to watch his ‘pretties’, and other qualifiers that can dilute the impact of a sentence. Also, I get a big wave of I-don’t-care regarding the city solicitor, who seems kind of pointless.]

The council members were still discussing something earth-shatteringly important, like whether to approve the minutes of the last two sessions, when it happened.

Glass shattered and the mayor spun around out of his padded leather chair at the far right end of the head table and crashed to the floor.

For a lifetime-long second, nobody moved. Then one of the councilwomen screamed and everyone was up out of their chairs.

I weigh a lot more than I should, but I can move fast when I have to, so I beat everyone to where the mayor lay crumpled like a used Kleenex on the floor. [Definite bathos, and seems an inappropriate image. I can imagine the victim of some mob hit being dumped at the side of the road described sardonically as being ‘like a used Kleenex’ because the image conveys the body being disposed of thoughtlessly in the first place to hand. Unless the council chambers are a real sty, it seems incongruous.] A big chunk of his face was gone. His last glance out the window by his desk had been his last glance at anything. Someone had shot him through the window. If the shooter had been trying for a between-the-eyes shot, he’d pretty much scored a bull’s eye. [Ha! Redundant, no? You could say that about any gunshot wound: If he’d being trying to hit what he hit, he hit it. You could say that about Dick Cheney.]

I reached over for the mayor’s wrist to search for a pulse, knowing I wouldn’t find one. The police chief was beside me and he took over. He doesn’t carry a walkie talkie, so he shouted for someone to call for the cops and the ambulance. The look on the old cop’s face left me with no doubt that the ambulance wouldn’t be hurrying to the Emergency Room, though. [Our Hero didn’t really need to tell us about the cop’s expression, as it’s been fairly comprehensively established that the mayor is dead.] Those huddled around the mayor were in a noisy state of confused shock. but I couldn’t succumb to the temptation to join them. I was right in the middle of the biggest story to come down the pike in years and I had to stay alert, sucking up information like a nuke-powered Hoover [comic imagery. What tone’s Jim going for here? Funny, thrilling…?].

It was immediately apparent that no one had seen or heard anything more than I had: the sound of the window breaking and the man being propelled backwards, spinning around and falling out of the chair onto the floor. [How could this possibly be 'immediately apparent'?]

I glanced through the shattered window, wondering where in the hell the sniper could have been. It looked like the clearest line of fire was from a dilapidated, white-washed building across the street, the old County Welfare Office. At an angle, though, and several hundred feet away across a nearly empty county parking lot, was the high school. I tried to mentally fix the school window that had the clearest sight line to the broken window. And the mayor’s head. With a powerful rifle, and probably a scope, an expert marksman could certainly have lobbed the slug from the school. ['Lobbed the slug?']

Still, none of it made much sense. An assassin killing a mayor who had absolutely no enemies anyone knew about? [We the audience know nothing of the Mayor so far, so I feel it’s an error to jump in with this piece of summary exposition – let’s have a little investigation from the journo before we conclude (even initially) that it doesn’t make sense.]

More cops and EMTs arrived, so I slipped out of council chambers, down the back stairs and outside, where a small crowd was beginning to gather. The guys from the firehouse next door were milling around the front door of City Hall. [Why?] I quickly scanned the windows of the high school and the old white building again, from ground level. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I couldn’t spot a thing that spelled “murder.” [It'd be traditional, in this sort of situation, for the sleuth to pick up some clue that everyone else has missed... maybe later.]

I slipped back inside before the cops could seal off the building and called the paper, telling the city editor what had gone down and asking for a photographer, tout suite. The office was only four blocks away, so the shutterbug could be here pronto. [What with the toot sweet, the shutterbug and the pronto I feel rather overwhelmed by slang/jargon! A little slang is good to maintain atmosphere and character, a bit of flavour in the text, but too much and it can sound silly.]

The ambulance attendants were standing around with their hands in their pockets. The mayor was dead and they wouldn’t be taking him anywhere. The medical examiner, after he did his little rain dance, would have to move the body. [Rain dance?]

By now, the place was crawling with uniforms and detectives. Even the county prosecutor showed up.

Caveat: I’m posting this in my lunch break, and I can’t check back on my email inbox at home to see if Jim might have sent me an updated version; if so, I’ll replace this post when I get home.

I’m not convinced by anything that happens in this passage. Our hero seems to want to be tough, funny, smart, streetwise and cynical all at once, with the result that the tone oscillates wildly from one sentence to the next. As a reader, you don’t know what to take seriously. I got irritated with the flip way the gory dead Mayor was being treated; our hero comes off like a jerk.

To be fair, there are a number of local government employees over whose graves I would be hard pressed to shed a tear, but let’s at least establish who’s likeable and who isn’t before we start taking the reader’s sympathies for granted.

The whole thing’s incredibly pulpy, with the knockout-dame-with-legs-that-don’t-quit on femme fatale duty, the drawling slanginess, the breezy pseudo-gumshoe… I wouldn’t expect, from this, a great read. I’d expect something clunky and predictable.

I think this sort of thing is highly difficult to write. The basic models – Hammett and Chandler – were both fine writers, and Chandler IMHO was exceptionally fine. You can’t just throw together a sultry blonde, a bit of Sam Spade attitude and a dusting of flashy simile.

Side Dish

2006-02-15T20:05:00.000Z

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blathering. This is an excerpt from Danielle's Side Dish.

I looked up to the ceiling lights over my desk and saw a bug trapped under the plastic. Exactly how long it had been there I couldn't recall. Every so often my boss would point to it and say, "Claire, can't you do something about that bug up there?"

I'd then respond, "But we don't have a ladder."

To which my boss would say, "Oh right. Well, I've got some other jobs that need to be done. I'll just call someone."

But he never did. He never did do much of anything.

And thus the bug would continue on in its insect limbo, suckered into its present state by the false hope of florescent. The poor bug had thought it was a way out but now he was worse off than when he started. He was stuck, he was screwed. He wasn't even granted a parting wish of being allowed to decompose properly like the other outdoor insects. All because he'd had the misfortune to fly in here. I felt exactly like that bug.

Dr. Ogre approached and followed my eyes up to the light.

"Claire, you haven't been able to get that bug out yet?"

"Dr. Ogre you haven't been able to get me a ladder, yet?"

"Oh, yes. Right. I'll call someone."

Dr. Ogre was a nice enough man but his name was so befitting of his personage it sort of took your breath away. A large hulking man of 6'4 whose shoulders reached up to his baseball-glove-sized ears. He was hard not to notice.

And then there were his lips. Fat and heavy, they made it hard for him to keep his mouth closed. Not so attractive. Not exactly the look of a scholar.

Every new patient was greeted in precisely the same manner by the man.

"Welcome. I'm Dr. Ogre."

And every new patient reacted in exactly the same way.

"Really? Oh yes, I mean, I see. I mean, nice to meet you."

Dr. Ogre asked, "Do you have the medical history form for the new patient?"

"Yes, it's right here," I handed him the paper.

Let me note here that there are two things a dentist would be wise not to meddle with, stain and soil. Yet Dr. Ogre delved into both fearlessly. In his spare time he built bird houses, always stained brown, always done without gloves. Once the bird houses were erected he would then plant a lush garden surrounding the structure using rich top soil and lots of manure. Heaps of the stuff. A good portion of which usually ended up under his nails.

Around the office there were many photos of these little shrines. Dr. Ogre was also an avid photographer. I thought it a shame that he used only a digital camera as I wondered if he developed the film himself that the chemicals might burn off at least some of the offensive stain and soil.

As it was his hands were constantly in a gruesome state of neglect, scratched and scarred with tracks of brown running deep into his palms and cuticles. The surgical gloves (size extra large) masked the overall unpleasantness but the damage was usually done on that first day of introduction as Dr. Ogre extended his foul paw to the new patient, reaching out as if from a grave. The patient would take his hand reluctantly and afterwards no glove could successfully blank out the image.

I watched as the doctor scanned the form, thinking, He grinds his teeth at night. No conditions of the heart and he flosses once a day.

I peered over the counter out into the waiting room. And he chose the Entertainment Weekly over the Time, wears dress socks and a nicely pressed shirt. He is 27 and put his mother down as an emergency contact.

All of this was mere observation and was evident to anyone by simply looking at him and reading his chart. But there was one more thing that I knew about this guy with a certainty that hurt. He would never notice me. When he leaves today he will not suddenly stop and say, "Hey, could I take you out sometime?"

I knew this because he was a nice guy and in all of my 30 years I'd never been able to land one of those. Not because of my looks but simply because I was cursed. He'd smile politely at me when he paid and then he'd walk right out the door, leaving me and this stupid bug behind.

"Fine," the doctor said as he handed me back the paper. Stepping out into the waiting room, he made his usual grand entrance by first bumping into the magazine rack and then swearing. I closed my eyes, Could he not work on his entrance?

"Greg? Welcome. I'm Dr. Ogre."

"Really? Oh yes, I mean, I see. I mean, nice to meet you."

Once patient and doctor retreated back to the operatory I thought it safe to check my e-mails. There was rarely much to get excited about. The standards were- one supportive cheerleading type one from my mom telling me that although this wasn't the life I'd planned for myself it was not a total debacle- rah, rah! One chain e-mail from my college roommate urging me to forward it to seven other people and something magical will happen- seriously, this works was always noted at the bottom. Total crock and a scam to get your contacts. Honestly, this was from my college roommate who actually managed to graduate. One from CVS advertising deals of the week- usually everything I bought the week before. And roughly three to ten from my cousin Andrea complaining about her near perfect life.

I looked at my mail inbox and saw 14 unread messages. Andrea must have sent an extra today. I guess the cleaning women missed a spot.

Clicking on the inbox, I perused the list and stopped suddenly. His name jumped off the screen. The title read simply "Hi." After three years it somehow seemed enough.

My hand shook as I dragged the mouse over and clicked.

The message read-

"Hi Claire. I know it's been awhile. I kept meaning to get in touch with you but I thought you wanted some time to yourself. I know you did actually. It's just funny how time flies, right?

So how are you? I wanted to let you know that I'm engaged. Can you believe it? Weird, huh? Anyway, I'll be home soon. I'd love to see you. If you want. Love ya, Darren

I pulled my hand off the mouse and let it slide down my leg slowly, feeling the thinness of my shin and then roll my ankle and listen for the crack. It was a habit I'd adopted over the last few years without even realizing. I'm sure I'd done it thousands of times before. But it was different for me now. It was in that brief but highly audible sound that I was most keenly aware of all I knew I'd lost.

What, I wonder, is this? Are we in Bridget Jones territory?

Inauspiciously for my first critique back in the saddle, I find it's hard to react to this piece of writing. The bit with the ladder and the insect at the beginning is perhaps overplayed, but it isn't horrible. Dr Ogre is mildly amusing, although again the stain and soil seems strung out a little longer in more detail than need be. I love him reaching out his paw as if from the grave, that's funny and says more than five paragraphs of description about his hobbies.

The whole thing is written fairly confidently although it feels... deliberate. Lightness of touch is a difficult thing to achieve and this narrator requires it. Jokes have to be finessed into as little space as possible, or strung out through the book as running gags or plot points that pay off in unexpected ways. I think jokes of the latter kind work on a credit/debit model; the more you invest in setting something up, the bigger the payoff has to be, or the longer you need to wait for it to mature. A nice example here is the way Dr Ogre's patients react to his name, which just about works here; the setup is a little bit laboured, but Danielle waits just about long enough for the punchline and it gets a chuckle. I'm not saying it's the gag of the century, but structurally, it's a joke.

Lightness of touch may be hard to achieve in the kind of text where the narrator has an unvaried tone of voice, even if that tone is ironic or sassy. It can lead to a plodding read, and reader disinterest.

There are also a couple of moments where it seems like Danielle is shoe-horning 'material' in to the text. For example, the whole email inbox thing seems unnecessary and a way to keep the narrator continually carping about things she observes around her. By this point, the whole insect bit has done the work of establishing that Claire is bored, dissatisfied, and harassed, so no need to then illustrate her being bored, dissatisfied and harassed by her email. Unless it's really, really funny. This only raises a rueful smile. (If the ECOLIFE COMPANY is reading this, please piss off and die, by the way.)

If we are indeed in Bridget Jones territory, I quite like the throwaway 'simply because I was cursed' as the narrator's explanation for Not Being Able to Find A Man. It's a good idea where a narrator's this chatty to keep some of the narrator's thought processes opaque to the reader (like a real person, not just a 'POV character'.) If the narrator feels they're cursed, you as author should know why they would say such a thing; then you can arrange their perceptions to fit that. Let the reader know that's how they see things once and then you don't have to refer to it again - show them, don't tell them.

It's difficult to evaluate a fragment like this, which is why most publishers will ask for synopsis and first few chapters. I don't like getting chapters excerpted from the middle of the book. You can get a flavour of the writing from them but if you ask me it's the very first chapter that gives the best indication of a book's strengths and weaknesses. (Another reason I have a minor prejudice against prologues -- you can't tell much about the book from them, as they're usually so disconnected from the time and space of the main story.)

Danielle, if you're still out there and you'd like to, drop a synopsis into the comments thread.

I'm posting another screed in a minute...

A Million Little Pieces of my PC

2006-02-07T19:03:00.000Z

And they fixed all the ones that were broken. Hello again!

Stephen Newton said,

When you're back online, I would be interested in hearing your perspective about the controversy surrounding James Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces.

OK. I haven't read the book. But what I can't particularly understand is why people feel so very betrayed by the fact that Frey has embellished and exaggerated the details of his life.

Frey's book fits in to a recent trend for memoirs of personal ruin and redemption. We had Dave Pelzer a while back telling us about his horrible childhood for money; then Dave telling us about his horrible childhood again, for further money; then Dave again; then Dave's brother wanted to cash in; then everybody else who ever had an abusive or addictive background got a book contract and made Oprah cry. I find these books, on the whole, to be emotional pornography, and the publishing trend to be a somewhat distasteful bandwagon.

It seems to matter to Frey's betrayed readers that these things Actually Happened. Why exactly is that? Do the events he recounts have no power to move us unless they occurred? They must feel that they were sold a ghoulish souvenir of somebody else's misery, and discovered that it was counterfeit. (Or, more charitably, a holy relic of a miraculous cure.)

If A Million Little Pieces were a novel, and it was being evaluated on its literary merits, none of those concerns would have come out. So, I can only see this controversy as existing at all because this is a kind of book that has value to its readership for reasons other than its literary merits (whatever they may be.) Oprah's involvement is interesting: a TV show whose successful model is to feed its audience vicarious emotional highs and lows. If that's how you get your fix, you want it to be pure. You want the author, the victim, staked out in front of the cameras, truly confessing. Putting it another way, they are the goat. They take the sins of the congregation away into the world. James Frey says 'I am an alcoholic' and all the viewers and readers who drink alone feel purified, because they do not end up in rehab, in jail or on a tri-state crime-spree, or whatever.

Anyhow, that's my theory. Frey's agent has been nicely dealt with by Miss Snark, so no need for me to rehearse that. The publisher should be trying to sell as many copies as possible, and I don't think they should have much trouble getting the book to stay on the shelves. As for Frey himself, without having read the book I can't blame him. He told a story and people loved it, then they attacked him because the story wasn't true. I simply wouldn't care, if it's a good yarn told well.

The one similar book I would like to recommend is Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors, which is beautifully written and very, very funny. You alternately giggle helplessly and gasp in horror the whole way through, a tough thing for Burroughs to pull off technically, and it would stand up just as well marketed as fiction.

I've retrieved my emails and thank heavens have all your MSs intact, so we should be back on track this week. Meanwhile at work things have slowed down a little - my big ol' project went off to print the other day. The previous one I ghosted has sold 40K copies so far, which teaches me a valuable lesson: ALWAYS GET A ROYALTY. Tattoo that one on an easily-accessible part of your body, dear reader.

Number One Fan

2006-01-26T18:48:00.000Z

Hello there.

This is the condensed version, as I am in an internet cafe and paying through the nose for the bandwidth. Couple of weeks back the fan that cools my computer's CPU wheezed fatally to a stop, and required replacing. I've only just managed to retrieve or reset all my various passwords - getting into my email has been an absolute pain in the Rumsfeld - so can post for the first time in ages. Tomorrow, with any luck, I get the PC back from the shop and will poke about to see if all my data's intact. Here's hoping...

Ok.

2006-01-06T00:18:00.000Z

1pm GMT tomorrow. Goddamn but I was busy today.

You gots to chill

2006-01-04T14:55:00.000Z

Back tomorrow.

I'm back...

2005-12-19T22:33:00.000Z

...from here.

Am I terribly pleased to be back in chilly, grimy London? Not so's you'd notice. But it's Christmas soon and so just four more days in the office until another little break.

However, I am full of beans; replete, bean-wise; awash with the legumes; I may indeed have cornered the world bean market, so any feelings of bean-deficiency you may be experiencing can probably be attributed thus. I'll just get my house in order at the office, so to speak, and will be back to your submissions very soon.

By the way, the book is pretty much done, just requiring a good look at the design and copyediting done in my absence, so that seems to have gone over OK... phew!

On my hols, I got through a whole stack of reading - the good (The Sweet Forever; Infinite Jest; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; The Physiognomy), the bad (The Bourne Supremacy; The Apocalypse Watch; The Hundredth Man) and the abysmally bad (The Taking). I might bore you all with my thoughts on them some time...

See you in two weeks

2005-12-04T00:15:00.000Z

I'm now on holiday for a fortnight - have a great time, everyone, and see you later.

Time I Was In Bed

2005-12-02T02:33:00.000Z

Well, it's late, but I've done too much work today to want to go to bed at a sensible hour. I say work - I imagine if I'd been down the mines for eight hours, I'd be long since knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care - but having spent the last six weeks focusing obsessively on minute details of style in this book we're outting together, I feel the need to sound off about nothing much in particular. Plus I have had a few glasses of wine and some grappa, but I probably shouldn't be mentioning that, right?

Anecdote: I recently went on a training course which is supposed to teach us editors What Goes On In The Production Department. If we're the Eloi, these guys are the Morlocks - they often move mountains invisibly in the background, and only occasionally pop up to the surface to devour an unfortunate colleague who has made an unwise choice of format. So I sat there for a couple of days in the hope that the next time our lovely but unrepentantly monosyllabic Glaswegian production controller appears to tell me that my book's going to be late, I will be able to argue him into submission armed with my dazzling comprehension of what the hell he's on about.

We get towards the end of it and my cranium is so stuffed with practical wisdom it feels like the liver of a foie gras goose. It's time for the exercise where we get together in little groups and prepare specifications for various imaginary books; we choose the Harry Potter-type book, a kid's paperback, 110,000 words, selling at $8.95, print run of 25K.

My partner and I get to go first, and we knock it out of the park. Out presentation combines staggering technical insight with a deep and sympathetic understanding of the aesthetic value of the project. The whole thing is costed, down to each sheet of paper required on press, and laid out in a clear schedule that will get our book from manuscript to market in less than four months. Once the applause has ceased to echo, the next group is called - the unenviable task of following us made even more daunting by the fact that they've chosen the Potter assignment as well.

Long story short: they'd actually done their sums right, and we only sounded like we had. Their book is 100 pages shorter, due to the fact that I'd misread the casting-off tables and specified a 5cm column width for our book. Quick, grab a copy of Harry Potter, open any page, and measure how wide the text block is. Now imagine it was 5cm wide, instead. Yep, that's an extra 8 tons of paper right there.

Next time the Glaswegian comes round with bad news, I'm going to buy him a pint.

What else. Well, I was going to reply to Lesia Valentine, who wrote:

You're a professional, so what I'd like to ask of you, on behalf of us all, is just how the system "works." To us, all that means is that it works for you (and others on your side of the chasm). We don't feel it works for us. We're all frustrated with what we see as a system as slow and bureaucratic as the U.S. government [...] We are being reduced to churning out formulaic fertilizer where all that is necessary is to take the previous novel and insert a new name and occupation for the protag.

OK. The system is slow and bureaucratic because 1) there are a huge number of writers trying to get published; 2) in order to evaluate a piece of writing you have to read it; 3) this evaluation is subjective and so a book bought by one editor may not be bought by another; 4) every publishing house is, unavoidably, different, and so the writer is going to have to tick different boxes. I don't see any of these things changing any time soon. However, what I do see is that there are very many good, bad and indifferent first novels published every year, most of which have come through this system. So it continues to produce a wide variety of new publishing. It 'works for us'.

But why should it work for you? The book market is - well - a market. You are trying to put your work on that market. The market doesn't owe you anything. It's up to you to create a product that will appeal to it. The publishers are just there to be your partner in case you can't afford to print, market and distribute a book yourself, and their decision-making process is geared towards deciding whether that market appeal exists. So, really, forget about the publishers. If a publisher asks you to retread your last novel, it's because they believe the market wants that.

Sure, we sometimes publish stuff for love, but we have to be commercial, too, or we lose the ability to do that, too. If something crosses our desks that's obvious commercial gold, the system swings into frighteningly rapid action.

If you're finding that your book is languishing in a slush pile, it might well languish in a warehouse or bookstore too. The former situation is cheaper and less traumatic for all concerned. Trust me on that. The first run of my first published book is 90% pulp. It's not a nice feeling. (The second one's selling very nicely, thank you...)

Secondly, about that formulaic fertilizer. Can you make a living out of it? Then churn it out. You can always write the Great American Novel once you're financially secure. Believe it or not, there's lots of good new writing out there; I know the bloody Da Vinci Code looms over everything like the Eye of Sauron, but things aren't as bleak as all that. And hey, lots of writers I know and respect have done their share of hack work. Don't be too precious about your trade.

It's better than going down the mines.

Good night all...

Just in passing...

2005-11-25T10:31:00.000Z

Via Charlie Stross' blog, here's something interesting for writers of thrillers: just how hard is it to 'shoot the lock off'?

Remember me?

2005-11-22T20:42:00.000Z

Hello chums.

Remember that writing job I was on? It's turned out to be trickier and more of an all-round pain in the neck than anyone had suspected at the time, or even last time I complained about it in similar terms. I've barely even been in the office for the last month - chasing around London interviewing people and tracking down odd bits of information.

The current situation is this: I've got until the end of November to finish. With only about half of the 64 pages filled, it's going to be a long and busy week or so for me; and then I'm off on the 4th of December for a well-earned holiday for two weeks.

I'll certainly be back on a more regular basis in mid-December, when the jobs that are currently keeping me busy in lunch-breaks and evenings will all be finished. I can't promise anything new to read before I go away, but I'll try my best.

On a happier note, Honest Critiques and Torgoblog between them recently clocked up 25,000 page impressions. Even considering that about half of those are me opening my web browser with Torgoblog as my home page, I'm very grateful to everyone who reads, and continues to read; and, most importantly, continues to write.

A coupla questions

2005-11-07T18:45:00.000Z

From 'Yogy Bear':

You say you're an editor at a publishing house and manage the slush pile. I thought publishers didn't have slush piles any more because they all refuse to read unsolicited unagented manuscripts. Is this a myth, or is your company an exception?

We certainly do still have one. It is becoming rarer and rarer, but I still believe it is a valuable resource for publishers.

In other blogs I've read that agents (and editors) find the size of their slush piles so overwhelming that as a self-defence mechanism they read each unsolicited manuscript expecting to hate it and looking for a reason to reject it so that they don't have to spend further time on it. This sounds very understandable, but it's a daunting prospect. Is it true?

It's not so much the size as the quality (as the actress said, etc). If you've just read thirty terrible manuscripts in a row, it may create a strong suspicion that the thirty-first is also going to be terrible. And usually it is. However, when you say we're then 'looking for a reason to reject it', that's not really the case. We don't look for minute errors in formatting, or bad spelling, or wonky punctuation - that's the sort of thing that gets picked up at the other end of the process. We do look for things like awful prose and boring, hackneyed stories.

You soon learn to give even these a chance, because it's surprising how often the start of a book is the absolute worst bit.

One of the most pervasive myths I've come across reading writers' blogs and advice sites is that most often editors will not give a submission a fair hearing. If we did that, it'd defeat the point of the exercise, and it's not a particularly fun exercise, at that. Unless the MS is physically difficult to read, or is completely inappropriate for the list, it'll get a fair crack of the whip. Two examples from my time doing children's books: the occasional granny-submission, in spidery biro on onion-skin paper which requires a jeweller's loupe to read - nope, not going to bother. Sorry, Nan, please read the guidelines, and I'll take a chance on you not being the next JKR. Or the man who wanted us to publish his collection of erotic postcards.

I've also read on other blogs references to editors/agents having to 'fall in love with' or 'feel passionate about' a manuscript before they consider making an offer. This seems rather a tall order; I've never fallen in love with a book in my life. Again, is it true?

Have you not? That's a shame. I do, very often. What these references are probably getting at is the fact that, with publishers' lists very strong, a book needs to be extra-special to muscle in. And some books do require a champion. Editors and agents like nothing better than to discover and fight for a talented new author - it reflects really well on them - and that's something that's worth being passionate about. Besides, we get to talk about books for a living - it's better than going down t' mines.

On the other hand, lots of books - the majority, I'd say - get published without extraordinary levels of love and passion; they happen because they seem like shrewd bets commercially. So, don't worry too much.

One thing that you might hear in a rejection is 'I didn't love it', which is one of those stock editor phrases. What this means is 'This book is reasonably competent, but I wouldn't have been too bothered if I'd put it down half-way and never picked it up again; it's not exceptional; I'll wait until something exceptional comes along.' It's a tough thing to hear, but it's miles better than most.

A reply from Bookner

2005-11-07T18:30:00.000Z

Dear Torgo,

Thank you for your email.

It's funny that you opted to concoct a fictitious interview when you could have interviewed me and posted the real thing. Perhaps you were afraid that I would come out ahead.

I can't take your post seriously at all; it's certainly not journalism, and your post doesn't offer anything I haven't heard before.

Just as you can keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with the status quo, so can I keep insisting the opposite, and nothing interesting will come out of the discussion.

Please forgive me if I choose not to engage you in a debate.

Jason Gonzales

And a reply that I have just this second sent:

Dear Jason,

I felt that creating a dialogue based on statements on your website was at least as fair as your 'myth' and 'reality' concoctions, neither of which resemble the experience of my years in publishing in any way, and which many people in my position find not merely challenging or provocative but actively insulting.

If my post does not offer anything you haven't heard before, you might consider this possibility: the fact that everyone in the industry is saying the same things about your endeavour is not because we are running scared, but because we are, in fact, perfectly secure in our position.

I am more than happy to engage you in a debate upon any terms you care to mention and in any venue on the net - live chat, email, anything. However, I quite understand if you choose not to take up the gauntlet.

Regards,

Torgo

EDIT: Irony from the B website:

At Bookner, we believe in discussion and debate. Hopefully, by getting the basic misconceptions out of the way, we will have helped raise the level of the debate a little bit. So far, not anyone has given voice to what we at Bookner consider the truly difficult issues which merit discussion and a lot of hard thinking.

A shame, then, that Mr Gonzalez does not see fit to answer any point that I raised in my original post; although this might be explained if by 'debate' he understands 'you keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with the status quo, I keep insisting the opposite, and nothing interesting will come out of the discussion.'

Devil's Honor

2005-11-07T13:33:00.000Z

Here's the synopsis for SW's book, Devil's Honor.

Ten years ago, SHIRO KURODA came to New York from Japan in the service of the Harada zaibatsu, a criminal empire of drugs, prostitution, streetfighting and contract killing. [My understanding is that a zaibatsu is a corporation?] Now, he participates in an organization originally comprised of five Houses--one for each borough in New York--as a fighter. In the ring, he is known as Akuma...the devil.
Though he enjoys the thrill of the crowd and the heat of battle, Shiro is growing uncomfortable with his role. He is bound by honor to serve his shujin: TOMI HARADA, leader of Staten Island's House Pandora. And the matter is compounded when a match gone awry results in the death of a fighter from another House--with Shiro to blame for causing it.

This sounds like the setup for an action movie. There's going to be some difficulty for SW in showing the fight scenes to the reader in this medium... see Instinct below.

As punishment, Harada orders Shiro removed from the fighting roster, and then presents him with a tanto, a dagger used in ritual suicide. Instructed to keep the dagger with him at all times, Shiro is warned that he will soon be given a task to complete--and if he fails, he will be ordered to take his own life in shame.

For the sake of his honor, he cannot refuse the command.

While Shiro is being instructed in his new duties as part of the House security team, the dead fighter's House seeks retaliation by attempting a drive-by shooting on ANGEL, Shiro's best friend and founder of the fledgling House Phoenix. Fortunately, House Prometheus' fighters have abysmal aim, and Angel escapes their wrath...for the moment.

Abysmal aim is a bad plot point. It's never good to have a serious story that hinges on the incompetence of the bad guys... perhaps think of a different way for Angel to cheat death.

It isn't long before Harada assigns Shiro his task. Three years earlier, a fighter by the name of SHONEN betrayed the organization by rigging its annual tournament and fleeing with the five million dollar prize. Now Shonen has returned to New York, and Harada wants revenge. Shiro is ordered to hunt him down and kill him.

Shonen is a dangerous man: trained in the art of assassination, deadly with a blade or bare hands, and utterly devoid of a moral code. Compounding the assignment further is a fact known to few outside House Pandora's walls: he is also Shiro's brother.

Is it over-egging the pudding somewhat to have them be brothers? It's also sailing rather close to kung-fu movie cliche.

He has been spotted in Manhattan, and since that borough is the home of both Angel and JENNER--Shiro's sensei, who was formerly employed by the Harada clan--Shiro concentrates his search there. But Shonen has allied himself with the leader of House Prometheus in Brooklyn, and is using his newfound influence to breach the inner circles of the organization in his own pursuit of revenge.

I can't say I really believe the secret fighting tournament house system. It's fine on screen, but it'll get ten times less credible set down on paper.

By the time Shiro realizes what his brother's intentions are, Shonen has managed to travel to the island off the coast of Staten Island where House Pandora is located and strand his pursuers on the mainland. Shiro, Angel and Jenner commandeer a boat and give chase...but when they reach the island, Shonen has murdered Pandora's head of security and seems to have disappeared.

Why has he killed the head of security rather than Harada himself? Or Shiro, for that matter? Either there's lots more plot there or it's kind of facile.

Believing that he has failed those he cares about, Shiro does not protest when Harada orders him to carry out the suicide ritual. With Angel as his witness, he prepares to take his life in dishonor -- but a phone call revealing Shonen's location stops him in mid-thrust.
He finds Shonen hiding on Harada's yacht, and gives him the chance to redeem his honor by performing the seppuku suicide ritual, offering the dagger bestowed to him by Harada.
Shonen, of course, refuses.
The brothers, equal in skill and dexterity, engage in a swordfight on the rain-slicked deck of the yacht. Shonen manages to disarm Shiro, but as he lunges to deliver the death blow, he is mortally wounded by the dagger meant for Shiro. The knowledge of his impending death restores Shonen's honor, and he implores Shiro with his last breath to act as witness to his seppuku. Shiro agrees.
His brother's honorable end serves a dual purpose: Shiro's task is complete, and his familial obligation to the Harada clan is absolved. Disgusted with Harada's actions and his treatment of those in his service, Shiro informs his shujin of his intent to join Angel and House Phoenix. Though Harada is enraged by his decision, he can do nothing to stop him.
At last, Shiro is free to live his life by his code, and to retain the strength of his honor.

Hmmmmmm.

Let's take a look at an extract - Shiro's been in the hospital after a beating from one Captain Wolff, but he's back at his day job now.

One month after his release from the hospital found Shiro behind an austere mahogany desk in the fifteenth-floor office he shared with his mentor. Behind him, a window stretched the length of the wall, offering a panoramic view of lower Manhattan made dreary with a morning fog that refused to lift. Before him lay a case file on a patient with a bizarre and inexplicable fear of shoes, who had begun treatment sometime during his three-month absence.

Hold up. Shiro is a psychiatrist with a fifteenth-floor Manhattan office? Does that not conflict with his activities in the murky world of devilish chop-socky?

But Shiro barely saw the words on the pages. His mind insisted on returning to the conversation he had the previous evening with Harada-sama. The one in which his shujin informed him that he would be on the fight roster for tonight--and then all but called him a coward when he insisted he was not ready.
Intellectually he knew the reasoning was sound. It was the same remedy as the one for falling off a horse: Get up. Try again. But the part of him that was Akuma--his fighting name, the Japanese word for devil--carried vivid memories of anguish and humiliation. The images filled him with dread that his sense of duty could not penetrate.
For the first time in his life, he was not looking forward to a fight.
Shiro bent back to his work, then glanced up a moment later as the office door opened to admit a shadow in the guise of a man. [literally: a shadow disguised as a man. Really?] The age of the gaunt, angular East Indian who approached the desk was indeterminable, for though his nearly unlined face pegged him in the summer of his life, the plait of silver-steel hair that hung beyond his waist suggested otherwise. The hooded eyes that saw everything and gave away nothing, a startling stormcloud gray out of place against dusky brown skin, glittered with untold knowledge.
All things twisted and cunning and dark, every nuance of humanity that transcended the bounds of normalcy and entered the realm of madness, could be defined in one word: Jenner.

Crikey. SW might be laying Jenner on a bit thick here. He's got the waist-length plait of silver-steel hair, the stormcloud-grey-hooded-untold-knowledge-glittering eyes, plus he's the embodiment of all things twisted, cunning, dark etc.

The elder psychiatrist approached the desk and tapped a finger on the open file. "Any new developments?"

He's a psychiatrist TOO? Curioser and curioser.

Reluctantly Shiro shook his head, avoiding his sensei's gaze. Talk of the shadow organization to which they both belonged was forbidden at the office.
"Shiro."
The single sharp word was a command that could not be disobeyed. Shiro lifted his eyes to behold the thunderous frown and the piercing scrutiny that was Jenner's trademark--an expression that never failed to wither the soul of its recipient.

Definitely too thick. Trademark, piercing, soul-withering scrutiny is too thick.

The look lasted a long minute, [literally?] and then Jenner folded his arm[s?] and his features softened somewhat. "I see your thoughts are elsewhere today."
Shiro nodded, letting his stricken gaze speak for him.

We've got some 'telling' here, in a bad way. Enough just to have Shiro gaze at him, I think.

Striding around the desk to stand at the window, Jenner surveyed the sprawl of the city below in silence. At length he said, "I have an errand for you."
"Oh?" Surprised at his mentor's sudden mood shift, he turned to regard the man at the window.
"Yes. And this is something I believe better suited to your current frame of mind."
"All right." Pushing his chair away from the desk, Shiro stood and brushed a stray lock of dyed blond hair from his forehead. "What is it?"

Sorry. I can't get past the whole office-job thing. Shiro is not only a no-holds-barred killer chop-socky enforcer, he's also a psychiatrist with a blonde dye-job. Could Shiro's, or for that matter Jenner's, patients place a lot of trust in these menacing/outre-looking people?

More effective to have them look just like typical Japanese/E Indian salarymen - in William Gibson's cyberspace thrillers, for example, the cloned ninja killers look just like that, which makes them all the more believeable as assassins and makes it more shocking when they slice someone in half.

"I need you to visit my new associate, to find out what you can about this--" He stopped, making an obvious effort to rein in a swell of frustration. "This business venture he is so determined to undertake."
Shiro grinned in spite of himself. Jenner was sending him to Angel's gym. Though the younger man's decision to open the place displeased Jenner to no end, he had no choice in the matter; he had agreed to act as Angel's lieutenant.

Who had agreed to act in this way? Not quite picking up on the politics or background. It's difficult to get this in here without a plain old infodump, or worse an 'as you know, Bob' conversation, so maybe this isn't the place. The exact ramifications of this request could be worked out somewhere else where it'd be more natural.

Maybe, in fact, this scene is the wrong way to put across any of the information the reader needs to know - it's basically just two guys talking in a room to move the plot along.

Besides, Shiro had not seen Angel since the week before his release--and he missed his friend.
"It would be my pleasure, sensei," Shiro said.
Jenner's upper lip curled in disgust. "Of course it would. Now go," he said, motioning with impatience toward the door. "I expect a full report before tonight's activities."
Offering a slight bow of acknowledgement, Shiro left the office with Jenner's ardent condemnation cautioning him that he may not like what he would find.

Kind of clunky.

I have my doubts as to whether this is going to work. The setup is cartoonish in a way that would work nicely for a fun B-movie (or even more successfully for a comic book), but will be very hard to pull off in prose. The fight scenes will be a particular problem. I'm thinking now of memorably good hand-to-hand or sword fights in novels and not coming up with many.

The world of the book is larger-than-life - the secret fighting clans, run by bizarre people who also hold down professional jobs - and a thriller does tend to depend on some hooks into reality. At some point, you have to draw the line between what is familiar and what is excitingly exotic, but here the line is too far on one side.

Good thrillers often work because they present a simple situation. A few examples: the classic McGuffin plot, where some object is being sought after by lots of bad guys, and the one good guy has to come up with it. Or the Fugitive plot where the hero is himself being pursued by all concerned and has to clear his name. You set up some simple rules in those such as This Falcon Statue is Incredibly Valuable or The Cops Will Put Kimble Away If They Catch Him and That's Bad. The reader can pretty much fill in the rest of the world from their own experience; and the more claustrophobic the bind that the hero is in, the more tense and exciting it is.

In this synopsis, I will have to be told all of the rules, and they're quite complicated, involving the politics of a clan system I have no experience of, bushido etc... I worry that as much time will be spent explaining plot points as is spent actually showing us the action of the plot. It's going to be difficult to be excited about Shiro contorting himself to jump through the various hoops because I can't really put myself in his place.

As far as the prose goes, it oscillates between being quite a flat narrative style and rather overdone detail and imagery. I see a lot of manuscripts in this particular voice and I wish I could describe it better. It just doesn't excite the ear very much and you only tend to notice it when it occasionally slips into bathos or clunkiness. Needs to be listened to carefully.

A difficult sell, then, I'm afraid.

Update

2005-11-04T00:33:00.000Z

The writing thing is dragging on. I'm going to be pretty busy for at least another week now.

On the other hand, there's Honest Critiques to do - thanks for all your comments and links on the Bookner post, much appreciated! - and I'll post one or two new things tomorrow night.

Have a nice evening, everyone, and I'll be back tomorrow. By the way, have you seen this? I remember it from the Commodore 64, and the Java version is just as compelling and thought-provoking...

Everybody be cool, this is a colloquy

2005-11-01T03:07:00.000Z

If you've been reading Miss Snark recently, you might have come across postings about Bookner, a new website which aims to "evaluate the worth of manuscripts for the benefit of the publishing industry". The idea is essentially that writers upload their manuscripts to a central server for peer review by the community there, thus ranking submissions, which can then be cherry-picked by publishers. "It is hoped that Bookner will allow a not inconsiderable quantity of good material, which is currently falling between the cracks, to find a worldwide audience."

What's wrong with traditional methods of spotting talent? According to the website, the status quo is slow, ambiguous (little feedback), laborious for the writer, and redundant (duplication of effort by readers).

Bookner tells us a story about publishing; on the front page, under the heading 'trash your assumptions', there are two narratives posted to show you the difference between myth and real life.

In 'Myth', a literary agent spots a great MS, has a deep and meaningful conversation about it with the author, instantly sells it to an editor, and the writer lives happily and successfully ever after. In 'Reality', the writer is rejected by almost 150 different literay agents, before finally, after various reminders, memory lapses and episodes of incompetence, she sells her book to the agent. The agent sells the book as something completely different to what the writer intended, but nevertheless the writer lives happily and successfully ever after.

What I don't get, first off, with these stories, is that both end up with the writer lighting Cuban cigars with $50 bills in their Dom-Perignon-filled hot-tub. Now, we know that doesn't happen. Not everyone makes it. The point of the stories seems to be just the 'unnecessary' effort involved in selling the book, and the attitudes of the literary agent ('mythical' aesthetes vs 'real' shysters.)

Instead, Bookner's community of writerly sages will take the commercial and time pressure off literary agents and publishers, whereupon we will all be free to be the kindly aesthetes of legend.

Let me tell you something about 'Myth' and 'Reality': they're both bullshit.

The underlying assumption seems to be that the processes by which the vast majority of publishers acquire their books are designed and operated by slack-jawed cretins. Furthermore, these poor fools have never investigated their own broken policies, whether from the point of view of simple curiosity, or indeed from a desire for competitive advantage. Agents don't bother to read submissions or to follow up properly on their interest; editors allow themselves to be sold books they have not read, but which they can sell with phenomenal effectiveness.

In fact, the characters in 'Myth' - the wise literary agent, the enthusiastic editor - are much closer to the truth than the clueless dunces in 'Reality'. Literary agents and publishers, who in the main have top-class judgement, are continually on the lookout for new talent, and are excited to find something saleable. The point is that it has to be better than what's already on the list. If I already publish ten excellent, commercial writers, you have to be slightly more excellent to get signed. If I am worried that I don't have a good mystery writer, then I'm on the lookout for that new person. And if they're unpublished, they come ten times cheaper than someone who has twenty books under their belt.

Bookner says:

neither publishers nor literary agents are interested in discovering new writers, because unpublished writers are an unknown risk.

Nonsense. The risk is assessed on a case-by-case basis by the system Bookner regards as broken. Unpublished writers are published all the time. The worst outcome for the publisher is known absolutely, and is far from catastrophic, given the initial outlay. The best outcome for a book is predicted, with good success rates, by experienced publishers. This is how publishers make a living.

Hence we have a surreal situation where it is easier for a pro wrestler to publish a book than a writer.

Yes, of course it is. Millions of people are prepared to buy books by celebrities, and the publishing industry supplies those, subsidising some more literary works and contributing to the growth of the industry.

As a result, the writer - someone who is good at putting thoughts into words and spinning a good yarn in printed form - is in danger of extinction.

No, the writer isn't. Honestly. I see them every day. They look fine. They continue to write and publish books. We all continue to make money.

Given that - which, let's be honest, seems to be the message of 'Reality' as well as 'Myth' - the main complaint is that the submissions system is 'labyrinthine' and impersonal. I do not recognise the picture painted by Bookner.

BOOKNER: It takes forever to get a manuscript read.
TORGO: Yes, because of the volume of submissions, and because they do in fact get read.
BOOKNER: No, they don't. Editors and agents barely look at manuscripts.
TORGO: You think we're inundating ourselves with slush for our health? What are we, crazy? Why don't we just throw the mail sacks straight in the incinerator? We read as much of a manuscript as we can stand. As we can physically stand.
BOOKNER: Aha! Well, Bookner will take the strain off you. It is normal in any economy to have people specialize into certain disciplines, and outsource as much work as possible.
TORGO: I don't think I want my judgement outsourced to an online critique group with a mysterious ranking algorithm.
BOOKNER: But who better to evaluate manuscripts than writers?
TORGO: Almost anyone else in the world. If the manuscripts in my slushpile were rated by all the authors in that pile, a tremendous amount of crap would rise to the top. The twenty percent or so of all the children's stories that are tedious, 'empowering' Ugly Duckling stories, for example. Or the ones written by people with tin ears. Or the really mad ones, as they are a significant subset. So anyone, really, but luckily there are people who specialize in doing this for a living, and they're called publishers and literary agents.
BOOKNER: But you never give any feedback - how is the writer supposed to know if they have any chance?
TORGO: Look, it isn't our responsibility to give free critiques on your work. A person would have to be crazy to try something like that. We have neither the time nor, occasionally, anything to say that isn't actually abusive.
BOOKNER: Abusive, eh? Admit it - secretly you hate writers, and enjoy making them jump through arbitrary hoops.
TORGO: Well, that's a slightly more flattering description than the one where we're all moronic incompetents. Actually the hoops are not arbitrary, nor are they onerous. Submission guidelines are clear and usually pretty forgiving of minor transgressions - if we can read it without going blind, we'll read as much as we can. Just don't send in your novel inscribed with a burnt matchstick on the back of a cereal packet and then whine about how the rules are so unfair and shouldn't apply to you because you're special.
BOOKNER: But we can save all that duplicated effort - sending queries to all those literary agents and editors, who then all read the same thing!
TORGO: It saves the author a few stamps, granted, because the MS can be read off the net. But firstly, I don't trust your Bookner Ranking. I have no idea of what the algorithm is or how it's supposed to work its magic; the magic it's working is in some way involving slush-pile authors, who are not necessarily exemplars of commercial or literary wisdom. So I'll end up digging through the slush pile in any case, when I have a perfectly good one in the office at the moment. Secondly, as an author who is part of the Bookner community, I have to invest time in reading slush myself to rate it, which I could otherwise spend writing a second novel; what I should really be doing when I have my first one under consideration.
BOOKNER: You have hordes of agents reading the same query, because writers send out queries indiscriminately. This is a massive waste of time. Why would hundreds of agents have to do the same chore?
TORGO: Er... they're in competition with each other? And writers who query indiscriminately are making unnecessary work for themselves.
BOOKNER: You can't deny that the submissions process is long-winded and labour-intensive.
TORGO: No, I can't.
BOOKNER: And why should writers have to do all that hard work? You don't have chefs carrying their creations to diners; waiters do that. You don't have architects laying bricks; builders do that. You don't have pilots selling airline tickets; travel agents do that.
TORGO: So the idea is that writers should not have to sully their hands with these tedious tasks? The sort of thing that mere builders waste their petty lives on? (Mrs Torgo is in the construction trade, you know.) Sure, that'd be nice, but in a highly competitive market, with so many good books being published, you need to work a little to sell your book. Actually, you don't have to work nearly as hard as publishing companies do to sell your book on to shelves in bookshops, or as hard as literary agents do to sell it to editors. You just have to do your research, send a really good book out there, and get on with a second novel.

Torgo will be back this week. Thanks for your patience.

ADDENDUM: Of course, I didn't really interview Mr Bookner for this - but many of his words above are as they appear on the website. I would say I'd been 'fair and balanced', but Fox News would probably sue the tar out of me.

If I seem a little annoyed on this subject, it's not because of any inherent 'negativism' on my part. It's really because I get ticked off when people with no real experience of publishing pop up and tell me why what I do every day is really stupid and unhelpful (eg. PublishAmerica) or make up stories about me and my colleagues that are wildly inaccurate.

Hiatus

2005-10-13T21:22:00.000+01:00

Hello everyone,

I'm over the 'flu, which is nice. It's rampaging around the office - coughing, stuffy people everwhere. However, I'm not posting for a bit.

We have a book scheduled for next year that absolutely can't be late. It needs to go out to repro (i.e., text and design all done prior to proofing) in about a month's time. Unfortunately, the editor who was writing the text is leaving, with about 50 pages still to do. I got asked today if I could step in, drop everything else, and write the remainder of the text within the next two weeks. It's not quite NaNoWriMo, but it's close...

So, I'm sorry, but I'll have to put the site on hold until it's done. Apologies to everyone who's waiting.

When I'm back, I'm going to bump a few people up the list who are regular readers and commenters on the site, as otherwise I wouldn't get to them for a while and it seems fairer to them.

In the meantime, why not check out some of the free Science Fiction currently available on the web? Or read the best historical fiction ever ... some really good detective stories ... or something more literary?

See you soon!

Touched by Mucus

2005-10-09T20:05:00.000+01:00

Eeew. I have the 'flu. As a man, I believe it's my prerogative to have the 'flu, rather than what the so-called Western medical establishment would have me believe, which I'm guessing would be a head cold. Mountebanks, the lot of them.

While I'm still struggling to fight off the Avian Death Flu, please stand by.

Touched by Fire

2005-10-03T20:42:00.000+01:00

Next, the estimable Bonnie Calhoun. Her novel is called Touched by Fire. "If it's received well in the publishing world, I'm planning a series. I'm working on the second entitled E-Bomb, and I have the outline for the third called Nanotech Virus."

Here's the synopsis. It's a very complicated synopsis, so I have added comments all the way through. Tough to read, I know, but I want to give you an idea of what I was thinking as I read through it.

With a Ph.D. in Earth Science and Astrophysics, Captain Barbara Hamilton can't understand why she has been reassigned to Hansen Air Force Base in Florida. [I can't understand why she can't understand it, because I don't know much about the Base or about her doctorate subject.] She was stationed there previously when she helped to implement the High Altitude Auroral Research Project (HAARP), but now the base is a Homeland Security unit. [OK, I sort of understand now, but it shouldn't have been difficult to understand in the first place.] Her first job is to investigate destructive weather and geological anomalies plaguing the United States.

Excitement at finding strange pulses emanating from the moon is quickly replaced by overwhelming fear as the lab is assaulted by an earthquake and swallowed by the San Andreas Fault. [Crikey!! But this is in Florida, isn't it? And the SA Fault is in California? Sorry, I'm not sure of my US geography.]

Meanwhile, back at Hansen, General Hershel McKay, worried about the confirmation he expects from Captain Hamilton, [confirmation of what?] is also being plagued [change the verb] by protesters against the upcoming shuttle launch. Irony lies in the fact that the shuttle doesn't need to carry the items being protested, but they are the only public reasons for sending up the shuttle. [I am confused. I don't know anything about shuttles or items at this point. I sort of understand the shape of the irony, but not the reasons for it - or if this situation is going to be important.]

As McKay waits for Barbara's return [but I thought she had been swallowed up in the San Andreas Fault?], the group of protesters and their leader, Jim Morton, are detained by Base MPs for disorderly conduct. Upon returning to the base, Barbara sees her former boyfriend, philanthropist Jim Morton. [Is this a different Jim Morton? Perhaps: "the group of protesters and their leader are detained ... Barbara discovers that their leader is Jim Morton, her former boyfriend."] For the first time in ten years, she realizes that she never quite got over him; the feelings are mutual with Jim, but they both try to hide it.

Barbara, after receiving a promotion [why?], finds out from McKay that the HAARP has a twin system operating on the moon as a "black project", and the system seems to be wreaking havoc on earth weather. Her feelings are fractured [not great] by trying to control her response to the dangerous HAARP project [I have no idea what the project is or why it is dangerous - is this the Tesla geoforce thing?], the emotional hardship of avoiding a relationship with Jim, and a mother who tries to convert her to Christianity by repeatedly exhorting [lecturing] on the nearness of the end times.

Barbara gets a reprieve from a relationship with Jim because he travels to New York for a conference. He runs into a friend from Israel, Jacob Ben-Meir, who is now working for Alexander Romanoff, the President of the United States of Europe [and we all thought it would be Peter Mandelson]. Romanoff, upon meeting Jim, offers him a temporary job in Israel setting up an agro-fishing project, which is Jim's specialty. Unbeknownst to anyone except his well-paid cohorts, Romanoff has commandeered control of the HAARP project on the moon, in a diabolical bid to destroy the United States and rule the world. [BLIMEY! That DOES sound like Mandelson. This is turning into a Clive Cussler novel.]

Tensions heighten as a tsunami roars through the Indian Ocean, and multiple volcanoes erupt around the globe. McKay sends Barbara to investigate steam vents at the former site of the seismology station that was swallowed by the San Andreas Fault in San Diego. She barely escapes with her life at the birth of a volcano.

Once Romanoff is exposed as the culprit [of what? Is he causing the natural disasters? How?], the CIA, with Barbara's help, recruits Jim Morton, because of his new position in Romanoff's organization. Romanoff recognizes Barbara as one of the original forces for the HAARP project and worries that her intervention will thwart his plan for the United States. When he realizes that she is also involved with Jim Morton, assassins are dispatched to kill Barbara and then Jim. An undercover agent in Romanoff's office foils the plot and supplies the location of the illicit HAARP control center, hidden in Russia [the secret agent seems rather convenient].

Special Ops commandos are dispatched to destroy the center. Opposing forces set the installation on self-destruct [?], setting off a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands, which spawns a deadly tsunami that inundates the entire East Coast of the United States.

Even though Barbara's USAF Base is a safe distance from the Florida coast, the tidal wave causes an earthquake, collapsing the underground Command structure. A falling beam strikes Barbara and she lays trapped as Jim and others try to free her. With delirium skewing her perceptions, Barbara thinks that her loved ones are being raptured away, leaving her behind because of her self-sufficient attitude toward God.

Barbara wakes up twenty-two days later, thankful that she has a whole new perspective and an opportunity for a relationship with the Lord. [Lawks. Suddenly it has become a 'religious' thriller; it's gone into a special interest category. At least, that's what booksellers will think. So as an editor or agent, my ability to sell the book has diminished alarmingly.]

It's very, very complicated, isn't it? This synopsis is almost as detailed as the novel it is supposed to be summarizing; almost, because Bonnie can't, obviously, include every single plot point; so it's full of conundrums and apparent non sequiturs. It just needs a broad outline of the plot and some sense of the exciting things that are going to happen in it.

The fact that the ending turns on religious faith does seem to me to limit its appeal. This would certainly be an impossible book to sell in the UK market, purely because of that - this is a very secular market. In the USA, there would be a market for this sort of novel, but it would certainly be smaller than the 'mainstream'. This means it would have to be very carefully targeted and marketed from first to last.

I mentioned Clive Cussler above because that's who this synopsis made me think of. The book of his I read involved dashing James Bond-style Dirk Pitt, who worked for something splendidly incongruous like the Sea Kelp Survey Board but who secretly saved the world from, ooh, all sorts of things. In Atlantis Found, it turns out that A Nazi Conspiracy Saved Hitler's Brain, or something, and the Whole World Will Be Destroyed, but then Dirk saves the day. Bonnie's book appears to provide the same sort of thrills, which is all to the good. (I do worry slightly that it might be over-plotted.)

Let's have a look at the excerpt.

CHAPTER ONE--EARTHQUAKE

April 12

Captain Barbara Hamilton played with the ends of her chestnut brown hair that she had pulled back tight in a ponytail. While her legs dangled over the side of the stool, she stared with little hope, at pile upon pile of useless seismic data from the last few weeks. This time she had come up empty. She had no answers for General McKay.

The only satisfaction she'd gotten from this assignment, other than the work on her tan, had been wearing jeans and desert boots rather than her uniform. Civilian gear was much more conducive to traipsing around the San Andreas Fault than her military issue. Besides, the General threw in the perk to entice her into this assignment. That, plus the unlimited use of an Air Forces SR-73 test jet with her own pilot.

In frustration, she kicked the leg of the seismograph spool rack. A wide metal reel clattered to the floor, leaving a trail of paper in its wake.

Barbara rolled her eyes at the reel as though it had made a mess just to add to her annoyance. She hopped down from the stool, picked up the half-empty reel and sat back down to rewind it by hand. She flipped the reel over and glanced down the length of the tape. A startling discovery came to light.
The seismic pen had drawn a straight line for about fifteen seconds and then jumped a high spike. This repeated for as far as she could see down the length of unrolled tape.

"Hello....what do we have here?" Her stomach tightened.

The Earth appeared to have developed a heart beat.

I'm not loving the style. It needs to be listened to more, and the odd graceless sentence needs attention. "While her legs dangled over the edge...", for example, is an odd opening for a sentence, because it leads the reader to expect something that contrasts with legs, dangling or edge in the second half. Instead, we find that she is staring at documents. Because it's been set up as a statement of contrast, it is odd to find that it is just a statement of two unrelated things happening.

Or "Barbara rolled her eyes at the reel as though it had made a mess just to add to her annoyance" - this is too much explanation. She's obviously annoyed, so it could read 'made a mess on purpose' or something.

Suddenly, the quake hits:

The rumble came from deep within the bowels of the earth, working its way up, jerking and separating the strata layers as it rose. A shockwave broke through the surface, the still evening air exploded around the seismology station with a deafening roar. Inside the building, the evacuation sirens roared to life.

The ceramic floor tiles in the lab erupted, popping like machine gunfire as the floor twisted like a rope of licorice. Barbara's feet caught up to her brain. She hopscotched over heaved sections of floor tile as she sprinted for the front door. Her arms instinctively went up over her head to protect herself from the gritty plaster silt filtering down from the vibrating overhead beams.

Along with the churning rumble came a groan that expanded into a tremendous crunching crackle of splintering wood. The wall shelving jack hammered itself loose from the anchor bolts and hung precariously at a forty-five degree angle to the wall.

"Aughh! The disk!" Barbara skidded to a halt and darted back to her station. In the distance, personnel yelled for everyone to evacuate the building.

[...]

Barbara sprinted down the hallway coughing and wheezing, her lungs able to filter out only small wisps of oxygen from the enveloping cloud of dust. Blood pounded in her head and her heart threatened to rip through her chest.
It sounded like a train bearing down on her. Right before the outside door, she tripped over debris and lurched forward, arms spread out to cushion her fall. An airman running from the other direction caught her and guided her out of the crumbling building.

All of the Air Force personnel cleared the disintegrating building just seconds before it slipped into the gaping Rose Canyon Fault. At the same time, it seemed as if the earth had eaten its fill, and the tremor abruptly subsided.

Barbara inhaled great gulps of sweet fresh air as she bent over, hands on her knees, trying to get the blood to her brain and stop the dizziness.

Whew, Barb old girl, that was a close one! You must have nine lives. But you made it. You won! Thank you, God.

With no warning at all, the ferocious growl of Mother Nature changing positions again ripped through the night air. All seven people took off running but one by one they realized the ground had ceased shaking. They reassembled into a group as the fault yawned. A few creaks and a couple of groans and the episode ended.

"Wow, everything is just, gone!" The young Airman next to Barbara gasped.

"Not everything." Barbara continued to breathe hard. She looked down at the disk clutched in the dusty palm of her right hand. Like usual, she had solved it herself. "Is everyone accounted for, Airman?" She surveyed the group of rattled technicians.

The young Airman glanced at each member of his team. "Yes, Ma'am, they're all here."

I think it's a hard sell. The prose will need a good deal of work, some rewriting, lots of polish. However, I'd look at the structure first - start with the synopsis and try to simplify and strengthen the bones of the book. With this kind of book, storytelling is more important than art. From the synopsis, I'm not getting an impression of a really good story, but rather of a succession of slightly confusing crises. What is the story of the book? Could you describe it in just a couple of paragraphs? That's what the book buyer will most likely have to go on.

It Takes Turning 50

2005-10-03T18:34:00.000+01:00

Lydia says: "I am enclosing a short essay that I wrote, which I am thinking will expand to a book."

It goes a little something like this:

It takes turning 50, to start wearing ponytails for the first time in your life, and finding that they actually look good on you! To look in the mirror and see a woman who you actually like, and can be proud of. To (finally!) know what you want to be when you grow up, and to realize that you are already there. To know that you are doing the best you can every day, and not be afraid of what you can't do.

It takes turning 50, to look around and realize that you have so many blessings -- regardless of the horrors you had to go through to get them.

It takes turning 50 to find yourself, and others. To love your sons, but let them go. To know that you have raised two fine young men - they still need you, but in different ways... and that it is ok!

It takes turning 50 to "find" yourself -- and to realize that you were never lost in the first place. You were just traveling the road before you, at the best speed you could manage each day. You might have deserved a speeding ticket or three, but life is like that.

It goes on like this. My feeling is that this isn't an essay. An essay, and to a lesser extent a story, has to have an argument; this is a collection of aphorisms, or rather a collection of variations on the same aphorism. We don't find out, for example, why any of this takes turning 50, or what (if anything) these situations have in common.

Once that's in place, it's possible to make a book out of it. As it is, it is a mass of inspiring anecdotes with no obvious Big Idea to connect them, and that seems to me to be the wrong way round. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is a singularly witless bit of writing, yes, but it summarizes the whole with the simple, intuitive title, a really good sense of the message of the book. It sold umpteen million copies.

I can't see exactly what the book would be or who might publish it; perhaps this isn't an idea for a book.

Juan Nakai

2005-10-03T13:30:00.000+01:00

Gary has sent in his 'YA Multicultural Novel', Juan Nakai. Relatively quick, this crit, as there's not too much wrong with it bar the beginning:

Chapter 1

Juan Nakai's black Yaqui eyes flashed in anger as he watched his mother mixing the tortilla dough in the shade of her guamuchil tree. It wasn't exactly clear why he said, "How'd we get this casa, mama?"

Not a great opening paragraph. Eyes flashing in anger is cliche, and 'It wasn't exactly clear why' is weak and fuzzy. (If you're going to have someone do something for no apparent reason, don't draw attention to it!)

Rosa looked like the kind of woman who had four kids to raise. She was plump and brown from the Sonoran Desert sun, with arms strong enough to embrace or cuff a
cranky child, her long dark hair tied in back with a piece of sisal string. She glanced at the house of upright mesquite poles tied together with jute.

"This casita? Your father built it." She frowned. "You want to know about your father?"

Something she had never said before.

Juan hadn't said anything about his father.

"I like to know where is he now."

Perhaps he asked about the house because he wasn't sure how to go about asking about his father; that fuzz in the first paragraph is actually making this unclear. If we had a better idea of that, an expression on Juan's face for instance, the conversation about the house wouldn't feel like a false start. I think the one-sentence paragraphs are rather clunky, too.

Rosa picked up the lump of wheat-flour dough with both hands and slapped it down hard on the rickety plywood table. She said, "He went to Mexico City to make some money right after you was born. He said when he made enough money he's coming back and build us a big house."

"I'm going to be fourteen in two months. Did he die--" he didn't want to say it, "or what?"

She sighed. "I don't know. He changed after you was born, started drinking. It took him over."

"Started drinking after I was born?"

"Oh, at first he was proud. I never seen a man as proud as your father the day you was born. When you was three weeks old he took you around the pueblo, showing
everyone his own little Yaqui warrior." Her hands stopped kneading. She looked toward the silent Sierra Madre in the distance but her eyes did not see the mountains.

"You think he's still in Mexico City?"

"I don't know. Maybe, maybe not."

She pinched off a ball of dough and patted it into a tortilla, keeping her thoughts private, and her visions. She had taught Juan to look for signs, that was good, but visions, seeing things that hadn't happened yet--no.

To make money Rosa made tamales with sweet potatoes and chilies from her garden. Rolled them in cornmeal from her plants grown in the hot earth, wrapped each one in the corn husk, tied the ends with a strip torn from the husk, and then steamed them.

For as long as he could remember Juan Nakai went around selling his mother's tamales on the streets and in the cantinas of Alianza. He'd say, "You want to buy tamales? For you--almost free."

On Saturdays he'd drive his uncle Teofilo's pickup truck loaded with fruits and vegetables to the public market to sell them. Then sit on the tailgate drinking coconut juice through a straw and practice reading comics. Capulina the chubby clown was his favorite, always dreaming up new ideas, like selling Pancho Villa's sombrero to the tourists.

Late afternoon Teofilo would put the unsold vegetables in a box and say to Juan, "This's for your mother."

It's not bad. Juan decides he's going to Mexico City in seach of his father, which seems like a pretty promising setup for any number of stories, and I'd want to have a look to see what happens next. The style is fine - Gary needs to guard against cliche, which creeps in now and then, and to find more elegant ways to blend in the little bursts of social and geographical information that he needs his readers to know:

Juan picked up Spanish from his customers. Most of the Yaquis spoke only Cahita. The pueblo isn't much different than it was a hundred years ago. Dogs and pigs and chickens run free. No school. No electric lines or running water or telephones. Cars or trucks parked in front of one out of four houses. A third have a bedroom. Most houses belong to a woman, more than half don't have a husband. But no orphans. Every child is part of the community.

Doesn't quite jell, does it? But for the most part, this looks fairly promising.

RSS and other things.

2005-09-27T21:33:00.000+01:00

If you use RSS, you can now subscribe to Honest Critiques using the link in the sidebar.

I've had some emails from people who've submitted things to the blog asking when I'll get to them. I had a bit of a hiatus last month - we won the Ashes, did I mention that? - but I'm back on track. The earliest thing in the queue, though, is from August the 17th, so I have a little ground to make up. At the latest, reckon on four weeks from receipt (still better by far than in my day job... but then the pile is not nearly so long.) I'm not always acknowledging receipt because I'm a lazy hound, and uncouth with it. Sorry.

Please please can I reiterate: if at all possible could you strip any special characters out of your submissions? That means smart quotes; smart apostrophes; smart ellipses; and en or em dashes. Blogger is violently allergic (check the archives) and even pasting Word docs into Notepad doesn't get rid of everything. It plays havoc with text encoding. I will have to look for a DOS text editor or something that doesn't try so hard to be helpful.

I am also considering moving the site away from Blogger, as my techno-wizard brother has set me up the shell of a blog elsewhere. It looks very flexible and powerful but I'll need a while to find out how it works - it's based on Greymatter and it's all rather daunting. Oh God I'm going to have to learn CSS aren't I...

Is everyone still enjoying themselves? Any comments, suggestions for changes? Hate the font or layout? Think I was talking through my hat when I critiqued that other guy's work? Please do leave comments here and on the submissions if you'd like.

Instincts

2005-09-27T20:34:00.000+01:00

Kathy says:

My main issue has always been the synopsis. It is so hard to put into a few pages a complete 85,000 word novel and make it sound good.

But first let's look at the prologue...

"Hear the sands singing to us, A-ki-ki?"

Sammy looked over at Bold Eagle as he pulled his oar from the lake water and listened to the sounds coming from the shoreline just ahead of them. It didn't take him long to spot the source. On the beach was a young girl, and an older gentleman, dancing in slow, deliberate strides.

Every step of their bare feet caused the grainy sand of the beach to emit a deep pitched resonance that the Lake Michigan natives dubbed "the singing sands". Sammy used the binoculars hanging around his neck to get a better look. Although their backs were turned to him, he could see that the man was Asian [how? T.] and the girl couldn't be much older than fifteen.

She was slim, but firmly built, and stood a couple of inches taller than her companion, at least 5'4 or so. Her long, blonde hair hung down her back in a loose pony tail, and her delicate hands flowed through the air as she mimicked the man's movements flawlessly.

"Is that a dance they're doing?" Sammy asked, turning to his grandfather who was also watching the scene with quiet appreciation written all over his deeply lined face.

"They call that Tai-Chi," Bold Eagle replied and smiled at his 19-year-old grandson. Sammy shifted his full attention for a moment back to Bold Eagle, noting the melancholy tone in his voice. He knew that he was the apple of his grandfather's eye, and his best student. Bold Eagle never tired of answering his questions and Sammy felt a tug at his heart knowing that their lives would be parting soon, when he entered the Chicago Police Training Academy.

[...]

Sammy grinned as he watched the girl in motion through the binoculars. Strands of her hair flowed freely in the warm breeze, and as she slowly swayed around her face glistened with perspiration and intensity.

She had not spotted them as they sat staring from their perch on the lake, but Sammy couldn't take his eyes off her. For a moment he felt as if he were swaying with her. Though both men were still, the canoe gently started rocking back and forth, as if it was also dancing; creating a lullaby that connected just the girl and Sammy as one with the universe.

Sammy surprised himself with that thought. He was hardly the poetic type, but as he followed her graceful steps something he could not explain stirred inside him. Suddenly the world spun in slow motion. Everything else around him blurred and nothing else mattered but the charm and beauty he was experiencing in the simple movements of a complete stranger. It was as if he was in a trance and he had no control over the situation, which unsettled him.

[...]

When he looked back up the girl was staring back at him. His first reaction was to look away, the 'it's not polite to stare' lesson he had learned as a child instantly signaling his brain. But his heart won out and instead of avoiding her eyes, he lost himself in them.

Hers were the bluest he had ever seen, and he could almost feel her gaze touch his inner being and search his soul. Once again, it was as if the world no longer existed outside the two of them and they both smiled, as if remembering some secret that they had shared since life began.

[A conversation with Bold Eagle ensues]

Sammy shook his head in reply, grinning and rolling his eyes the way he used to when he was a young boy. He was proud of his Miami Indian heritage, but the myths of his ancestors he had learned in his youth were just stories to him.

He looked at his grandfather fondly. Throughout his whole childhood this man had taught him about tradition and the mystical connection between mankind and the spirit world. As a bright eyed kid it had all seemed magical, but as he grew the magic faded and the stories had become simple fairy tales to him.

People often say: show, don't tell. I don't agree with this as a hard-and-fast rule - I think the author is often required to summarise and to use the narrative voice to make judgements on occasion, as dictated by the pace and texture of the book - but here you will have noticed an awful lot of information being palmed off on us. We're told, straight, about the relationship between Sammy and Bold Eagle, and about Sammy's pride in his heritage, while things like the Chicago Police Training Academy are smuggled in rather apologetically, clinging to some character work.

The worst thing you can use a prologue for is info-dump and exposition. There are some weird ideas about prologues floating around, I find, including the notion that they are not often read (the unspoken corollary being that you can put unreadable stuff there.) If your prologue is a dark bolus of preparatory matter, it's like starting a five-course meal with a packet of dry cream crackers.

Kathy's prologue is not nearly so bad as all that, but I suspect that it could easily be left out, or just cut to the bone. We don't have to have names; we don't need to know anything about the characters or the surroundings or the Police Training Academy or Bold Eagle's mystical maunderings. The important story point here is Sammy's eyes meeting the girl's, in some timeless moment, to the sound of the singing sands. It's a page, no more. Because at the beginning of the first (second) chapter we are with Sammy, now a cop, on assignment in LA. It's no great matter of technique to connect the cop to the boy in the boat, and then we know where we are.
So Sammy's out on the street, laying in wait for a cop killer, when he spots a girl...

Sammy frowned, trying to asses the situation logically. Ten years of police work had caused him to become overly paranoid sometimes and he told himself to relax. She was probably just waiting for someone to arrive.

"Sid, this is hardly the time to be girl watching," he admonished his partner with a smile on his face. Still he positioned his rear view mirror to get one more glance at her. When she finished her call and turned towards the runway, he tried to get a peek at her face. She was wearing sunglasses and the hat she wore cast a shadow that masked most of her features, but something about her tugged at Sammy's gut.

A sense of familiarity swept through him, which grew even stronger when she suddenly turned her attention to his mirrored reflection. She didn't move for a minute, as if she recognized him too.

Sammy felt the customary stirring in his body and he could hear Bold Eagle's voice inside of his head telling him not to ignore this gift.

Er ... a customary stirring?

Some would call it a sixth sense, heightened awareness or intuitiveness. His grandparents called it instincts. Whatever it was, Sammy had learned to live with it, and even used it to help out in cases without any leads.

Ah. Phew. Wouldn't you know it, it's the same girl from the lake. Now might be a good time to turn to the synopsis:

Martial arts expert Jenna Richardson and Chicago Police Detective Sammy LaRue have a few things in common. They were born with intense instincts, they were raised to believe that the spirits have blessed them, and they were lovers who died together in another lifetime.

Other than that, they are as different as east and west.

The only thing Jenna has ever wanted to do since she was ten years old living in Okinawa, is to grow up, find the people responsible for her family's deaths and kick their ass. Fourteen years later she sits in a Chicago police station waiting to be interrogated on a bogus murder charge. The interrogation she can handle. It's the being whisked back to protective custody by U.S. Marshall Dan Janovich that upsets her. The Marshall is the only obstacle in her way to accomplishing her goals, but she is about to meet the second.

Why Sammy volunteers to help protect the very person who just ruined his stake-out, he isn't certain. His partner, Sid, who also volunteers, thinks it is because she's a looker, but Sammy knows in his heart that it is much more than that.

It isn't who she is that attracts him to her; it's who she once was.

Sammy is a full blooded American Indian, raised by his grandparents on a farm in Indiana. For years, since a mysterious encounter just before he entered the police academy, he has been experiencing strange dreams, which abruptly turn into visions as he and Jenna draw closer to each other. When his grandfather suggests they take a spirit journey together, they reluctantly agree. Through this journey they are warned that their horrible fate in a past life is destined to repeat itself if Jenna continues on her path for vengeance.

...and it turns out that this path includes terrorist bombs, Interpol, the CIA, the FBI and a secret martial arts tournament, which I have to say kicks ass because I own Best of the Best II on DVD. (Eric Roberts fans: you owe it to yourselves.) There is also, to my taste, a slightly goofy subplot about being lovers in a previous life, and at one point Jenna regresses to her past where she finds the strength to defeat her enemies. But I bought Jean-Claude Van Damme winning a secret fighting tournament while blinded, in Bloodsport; I bought Jean-Claude Van Damme's budget lookalike winning a secret fighting tournament by doing the Dim Mak Touch of Death in Bloodsport II; I was prepared to accept that Scotland might have sent a useless kilt-wearing boxer to a secret fighting tournament in order to be punched in the balls by Jean-Claude Van Damme in The Quest. I suppose some past life regression is not so very much to ask.

Kathy's tried to make it sound blurby, but sometimes it fights with the info: "The interrogation she can handle. It's the being whisked back to protective custody by U.S. Marshall Dan Janovich that upsets her." Again the information that Kathy's trying to tell us, that she needs us to know, is packed in to the sentence in an attempt to establish character. Try reading those two sentences out loud in the manner of that gravelly man who does the movie trailers, with the exaggerated emphasis. You will have trouble packing in that whole clause about being whisked back to protective custody. That means it is not an easily readable sentence, which in this context is undesirable. It might be better just to stick to a fairly representative precis of the book, trying to preserve its pacing, and leave out the fancy touches.

Is it an enticing synopsis for a novel, rather than for the kind of chop-socky movies I dote on? Possibly, if Kathy can do action scenes really well, it might be a good thriller, aimed around about the Dan Brown readership. She'll have to be really good at the chop-socky, which seems to form a decent wodge of the book and which I have never seen put across well in prose. (I am happy to suspend my disbelief in goofy plots when there is the spectacle of Jacky Chan on stilts running away from a helicopter to divert me. If not... what are you left with?) But I still think it's a tough sell. The synopsis is a little clunky, but that isn't going to be the problem.

The prose needs work. It does a lot of telling, not showing, and not in good ways. It is all of the same texture; the authorial voice rarely changes tone or pace, and when it does (Sammy's eyes meeting Jenna on the lake) it is not entirely successful. It lacks music. How can you work on those things? Read the book out. Every word. Record it, even, and listen back to it. As you read, you'll see where the music and rhythms of the paragraphs are interrupted, where the blockages are, where the Tai Chi dance is tripping over itself. Take all the commas out. Put them back in where you need a pause. Look at individual sentences. Are they boring? Redundant? Vague? Could a long sentence more profitably be two sentences? It's only ready when the whole thing sings.

Without a Prayer

2005-09-25T01:09:00.000+01:00

Zoise writes:

I've been trying to sell this novel for most of a year -- had lots of bites but nobody wants to take the plunge. I suspect the problem is within the first couple chapters, but I sure could use a professional opinion.

So let's have a look at her novel, Without a Prayer.

My mom always claimed that the reason I came out a girl was because my daddy never went to church. Daddy claimed it was the other way around. He claimed he never went to church a day in his life because prayers never go anywhere, just float around our heads like swamp gas, stinking up the place. He had a reason to think that, of course. It's well-known Riddleback lore that not a single one of his prayers ever came true.

For starters, when he was a kid, he prayed every night that he'd grow up to be a famous magician with a mysterious handlebar mustache and quick slender hands made for plucking exotic animals out of thin air. Preferably one with a dramatic Houdini-style death to boot. But when, in his mid-twenties, it was discovered that the only facial hair he could manage to sprout looked at best like cookie crumbs and that his hands were more like mallets than they were wispy and quick, he had to set his sights a little lower.

He began concentrating instead on praying for money and women. He prayed for a supermodel and got my mother, all five feet, 200 pounds of her. He prayed for riches, but being a door-to-door rubber eraser salesman, could barely afford cheese puffs on a regular basis. None of his prayers ever seemed to be answered.

So when the time came for him to pray that his expecting wife would have a baby boy to carry on the proud Riddleback name, it really was no huge surprise that I came out missing a few parts he'd really been counting on.

With all those unanswered prayers floating around his head like mosquitoes, it's a surprise that he believed so vehemently that his prayer for an heir would be answered. But somehow he managed to eek out enough faith to believe just that. According to my mother, this is how it went:

"Margaret," he called to my mother, who was busy drying dishes. He was all red and sweaty from the vigor of his prayer. "Buy one of them footballs, ya hear? We're gonna have a boy."

My mom, never given to believing any statement of fact, waved a hand towel at him. "Oh, Cletus, now you know you can't count on those darn prayers of yours. Why, I think you're praying to the wrong person."

First impressions: quirky, folksy territory. Perhaps too folksy - Mom there sounds rather forced. I like 'red and sweaty from the vigor of his prayer' and I like 'never given to believing any statement of fact' even though it seems to be a non sequitur (it's a character trait with possibilities for wit). I don't quite understand the logic of the first paragraph: Mom thinks it's Dad's fault for not praying; he thinks prayers don't work anyway because they've never come true for him; and yet he does continue to pray, and is disappointed every time. It's a bit muddled.

But Daddy was persistent, bringing home footballs and buying a large-pawed slobbery mutt, and eventually even my mom became a believer. They began painting everything in sight blue and even came up with a name for me: Gary.

I was born and after they were both finished crying over their misfortune, they made a command decision. The world might have seen them as pioneer battlers of sexism, but really they were just too lazy and forlorn to do anything else. They kept the footballs, the blue paint, and the name Gary. Even the big mutt, Juliet, stuck around. When I was five, I renamed her Fred so I wouldn't feel so unusual.

Still, they each blamed God for the fact that I was born sans-penis, either one way or another. They argued about it often, especially after it came to light that my mom would have no more children. They were stuck with me and they both hated the very idea of it.

"Cletus, quit blaming God," Mom would say. "You're the one at fault. If only you'd stopped praying long enough to go to church every now and then, that girl would be a boy right now."

"You're right," Daddy would holler back. "It's not God's fault. It's yours! Why just look at what your constant yammering about church has done!" He'd point at me as if I were Exhibit A in the Trial of the Riddleback Sins.

I didn't take their disappointment too hard. I didn't feel bad about myself particularly; I just tried to be what they wanted. I tried to be a boy. I rejected anything feminine, ripping heads off of any stray dolls that I happened upon, using fingernail polish for war paint, and always insisting on playing full tackle football with the boys rather than "house" with the girls. For my parents' sake, I ran the streets with no shoes, my feet as black as snake eyes. I scratched my butt in public and got quite good at blowing a snot right out of my nose and into the grass.

It's just ... not excellent. It's gently amusing - very gently - and it is pretty well written, nothing obviously bad in there. But I would not shed a tear if I were never to read the rest of it. Gary's voice is not compelling, and it might be that's because I'm never 100% convinced by it.

The attached synopsis sets out a list of Gary Sue's 12 disastrous marriages, few of which last more than a few days, ending in zany breakups. There are a few good comedic ideas (I like the breakup where Gary is so repulsed by her new husband's - er - back hair that she resorts to shaving him in his sleep) - but it is rather episodic and does not develop much - 12 or so variations on the theme of ill-suited newlyweds. Of course, in the end, true love prevails: "Happiness is as close as the hedge in her own backyard."

This needs to be laugh-out-loud funny, or people won't keep reading it. Zoise may be right in that the problem is near the start - perhaps it perks up lots further in - but this is unlikely to make an editor really sit up and pay attention.

I'm not an expert on 'women's fiction' by any means, and am not entirely sure of the market potential of this book. I would imagine, though, that what it needs more than anything else is a good laugh on every page. There is in my opinion no better way of holding the attention of an agent or an editor than to make her laugh. Right now, this doesn't cut it.

This is a difficult type of piece to critique because the main reason it would get rejected would be, as I said to begin with, lack of excellence. Zoise is competing with publishers' and agents' lists, not their slushpiles, and although this is several cuts above the average of the latter, there are better things out there already. There's little I could suggest doing to it structurally or at sentence level to make it sell. It might be a case of reevaluating the whole book: what can be done to make this so funny and charming that it stands out from the crowd? And that, as you can imagine, will not be easy.

FAQs (part 2)

2005-09-24T14:40:00.000+01:00

A new critique'll be up this evening, but first a quick question from Stephen Newton (via comment threads):

Torgo, Do editors care what font is used in manuscripts? I've heard one should use a fixed width font like Courier others claim they only want to read Times Roman. Can you shed some light on MS preparation?

Yes. The first thing to say is read the submission guidelines very carefully. Some, as you know, are very specific about manuscript formatting. Others don't mention it at all except to say that manuscripts ought to be typed (nobody wants longhand scripts.) So, that's pretty straightforward.

If there's no specific guidance, Courier is safest. I have no problem reading 12-point Courier or Times, Arial or Helvetica at a pinch. I like the document set up with 1.5 or 2 lines spacing, because it's easier on the eyes. I like a line space between paragraphs and standard margins. I think if you go very far astray from those settings, it just makes things a little harder to read, and editors will feel a trifle irritated.

However, unless you've totally ignored strict submission guidelines, or printed the whole thing out in an unreadable, tiny or very wacky typeface, your work will get read. It's not going to be the sole thing that makes an editor decide to reject it. Don't fret too much about the formatting of the book, fret about the quality.

(For submissions to this site, it'd help me out if it was plain text with no smart quotes (you can turn them off in Word) or smart dashes, line space between paragraphs, no indents.)

Hollywoodland

2005-09-21T01:13:00.000+01:00

Chapter one.

1910
Gravitas, Wisconsin

To call Gravitas a town would be doing it a favor it didn't deserve. It was barely a place in-between two places that were actually on the map, two places so important they needed a highway between them. That highway did what most highways do, it crossed another one, and that other road led to a bunch of farms in every direction. I grew up on one of them. It only made sense to put a feed store and a granary and a post office at that very intersection between those bigger towns. The granary at the intersection was called the Gravitas Granary because it was once owned by a Greek guy named Gravitas who went back to Greece. Soon there was the Gravitas General Store where you could buy clothes made for you by someone else, the Gravitas Barber Shop where you could get someone else to cut your hair or even shine your shoes, and the Gravitas Diner where you could get someone else to cook your food. My daddy thought these establishments were a waste of money because any damn fool who couldn't make their own clothes or cut their own hair or shine their own shoes or cook their own food didn't deserve to live.

That's how daddy talked. There were a lot of people in his eyes didn't deserve to live, but his favorites were the local busybodies coming round our farm trying to tell him how he should do his business or raise his family. My main memory of my daddy is him chasing varmints away from our home with his shotgun. That's what he called them. Varmints. I wouldn't make this up.

My mom and dad called me Joshua so that's what you can call me.

Joshua is in town one day and comes across this

For some reason there was a ruckus, a whole bunch of people gathered around the feed store where there was this funny, smooth talking guy in a fancy suit who was giving quite a speech about something he called the marvel of the century. Somebody mentioned the new century started only ten years ago and somebody else shouted out everywhere but here and everyone laughed because they was right. Looking around Gravitas, I couldn't see nothing or nobody that hadn't been there at least ten years. Didn't look like no new century to me.

This guy in the suit wasn't like anyone I'd ever seen before. He sure wasn't from around here with his fancy clothes and strange way of talking. He stood in front of his wagon which he parked in the empty lot next to the feed store. He explained that he was actually on his way from one town to another when he broke a wheel in Gravitas. It was going to take a day to fix so since he was here anyway, he'd do us all the big favor of setting up his Kinematographic Theater. It was like one of them gospel shows where everyone got their souls saved only there weren't no preacher, just a big tent with some chairs and a machine he called a projector, which looked sort of like a lantern with a crank on the side. He set it up at the back of the tent and he said it was going to do something we wouldn't believe, it was going to make living pictures on the wall of that tent.

...and Joshua is thunderstruck.

There was a light shining from the Kinematographic projector and you could stick your fingers in it and make a dog that looked like he was barking which I thought was pretty entertaining but everyone else didn't and asked me to stop. I sat right down front and suddenly it weren't no screen no more but a window into another world and in that world I was sitting somewhere in some other place, some town with a lot of people who were walking around. There were lots of carts and horses and them new Model T automobiles on the street. The buildings were real tall and the title said New York City and I could read it now because I was facing the right way. I sat there watching these people in the city and it's like I was there, just sitting somewhere, looking out at the real world, but a different real world, a world where things were not what they seemed, a strange and jerky world where something was missing. I know it sounds stupid but it took me a while to realize what it was. There weren't no color. Didn't matter. Color would have been too much.

Then it changed to somewhere else, I think it was Paris cause there was this building in it called the Eiffel Tower and right away it felt like I was really there, sitting at a cafe with all these people walking around even though I knew I'd never been to France. Man, these moving pictures were something else. I was enjoying the tarnation out of them.

[...]

He let me sit through three shows and I just kept watching and watching. Turned out the work he wanted me to do was turning the crank on the projecting device when his arm got tired. At first it was hard to get it to go at the 20 frames per second it was supposed to run at, but I couldn't help myself. I just kept speeding up and slowing down the cranking and it was the funniest thing I ever saw, people jerking around and walking fast, then I'd slow down the fast stuff and speed up the train, but never stopping, like Buck said, or the film would burn. I couldn't stop laughing and the audience liked it too, especially at this one part where they were showing a scene from some Shakespeare play, I think it was A Tale of Two Cities.

It was a love scene that turned into a fight scene that turned into a love scene again. You were supposed to read all these titles to know what they was saying to each other but you didn't really have to because you could tell what they was saying just by the way they was looking at each other. This guy was dressed up and rich and clean shaven except for a little mustache that he must have spent a lot of time on. He was really angry-like and I didn't know why because the title went by too fast.

The lady with him was so beautiful, her skin so white, her hair and nails and dress were the prettiest I'd ever seen. I could look at her forever if that guy weren't yelling at her. What was his problem? How could he treat her that way? Why wasn't he treating her like the princess she obviously was because when she started crying, actually crying, you just wanted to go up to her and say hey baby, it's all right, nothing's gonna get you, I'll protect you, let me hold you my precious and protect you from all harm forever and ever.

It wasn't long before I realized I was feeling something I'd never felt before. Either I was getting sick or I was in love. I figure about four seconds was all it took. It was true love, I guarantee it, because after all it's only true love sets you on your way, like a cannon, straight from the heart, and I was on my way. I couldn't believe such beauty could exist. She was perfect, my heart's unknown desire come to life in a magic lantern show.

Michael says:

Chapter two changes to the third person, in which we meet the real Ashley Welles and find she's an egotistical dipshit, the exact opposite of Joshua's dreams. The rest of the chapters alternate between first and third person as Joshua, my Candide, works his way to Hollywood. It's an interesting device I've never seen anyone use before, and I do it so smoothly that most readers don't even notice.

Yet I just got a rejection from an agent who told me to fix it. I'd hate to lose Joshua's first person voice, which I think is entertaining and very fun to write. But a lot of the story takes place when he isn't there, and I can't lose those parts either. Making those parts first person from a different character's perspective would be even more confusing.

I know it's hard to tell without reading the whole thing, but don't you think my original concept is sound?

I've seen that technique used before, successfully, although I can't bring to mind any examples at the moment - I think maybe Iain Banks does it? First person and third person alternating can certainly work. However, if one part of the book is weaker than the other, that can be a serious problem.

I recently had an MS in that was set alternately in 15th-century Europe and modern-day Oxford. The 15th-century bits were terrifically good, and the modern ones rubbish. It was a shame, because there wasn't much more we could do than pass on it - by that time, we were already in an auction.

Looking at this excerpt, I have to say that the first-person voice doesn't quite work. Michael's presumably going to spend quite a lot of time working out ironies between the narrative voice and the reader's understanding of the situation - here, we know much more than Joshua throughout - and it's laid on rather too thickly. To have Joshua leap out of his seat hollering at the sight of a projected train 'rushing towards him' is quite a familiar scene, almost the cliche situation of any book or film that deals with the early days of cinema. Equally, we know that Joshua is going to end up a mark for every huckster and mountebank in LA. If the book unfolds in pure Candide fashion, it might well be rather predictable, and in turn his naivete might become wearing (the reader has to do the whole job of being cynical.)

And, indeed, how much does narrator-Joshua know at the time of telling? Sometimes the prose seems as naive as the character; sometimes it's more sophisticated and knowing, throwing terms like 'love scene' and 'fight scene' around which seem to belong to the lexicon of film. To resolve the uncertaincy that this creates, it's necessary to get to know exactly who Joshua is at the time of telling, not just at the time the novel is set.

Joshua has to be funnier and more charming than he appears here, and to react in surprising ways. It's OK at this length, but I would feel apprehensive about it stretched into a novel, or even half of one. I would certainly get tired of phrases like 'I was enjoying the tarnation out of them'. (Professional mimics often have a key phrase they use to get into character, something they particularly associate with the person they're doing an impression of - is 'tarnation' a word used to get Joshua back when the voice is slipping?)

I'd suggest that Michael shouldn't try shoehorning his third-person scenes into someone else's POV, but should maybe look at third-person throughout. Have a look at Roderick, by John Sladek, one of the very best modern Candides - third-person, but full of brilliant character voices, the essential ingredient of this kind of tale.

If Michael can't bear to lose Joshua, well, tarnation, he needs to be more fun to be around.

Constant Never

2005-09-15T23:26:00.000+01:00

Just a morsel. La Marqueza has sent me a link to her blog, saying "This is a short personal essay type of piece. I would like to expand it further. Insights would be greatly appreciated."

Click across there to read it now. Got that? Good. I'm not sure exactly what insights I can give for this - I'm not sure what she's thinking of doing with it - but I will say that the second paragraph is much better than the first. The odd rhymes in the first bit - 'been' and 'seen', 'place' and 'face' - are jarring in prose, unless you've established the sort of voice that can say things like that. There's also some very dodgy sentence construction : "Then there is the line going east, first across the Mississippi river washed up on a truly decadent city then on to another more subdued place with no less a fantasy than the one in Nevada." I can't quite tell what that means. And, indeed, the big problem with this paragraph is that I don't know what these lines are or what I'm being told about.

La M. gets more into her stride in the second paragraph, which has some good images - I like the cemetery "thrown down and forgotten by the side of the railway tracks". In the list, the artless longing for sensation, for the sausages on sticks and the feel of rough fabric, feels genuine. On the other hand the 'living statue' is peculiar.

"Lovers are lucky they have a lifetime but the anonymous bodies in the empty rooms across the landscapes of America's hotels are even luckier because they have the freedom to choose where they go, who they see, and where they lay their heads down for the next night, in the next city." I keep reading it and thinking there's a glimmer of poetry there; but when I try to get a good long look at it, it slips away. You could sprinkle some commas and things through there and make it grammatical, but would you lose the flavour? The charm of the person who says "Perhaps you could join me in each and every place. That I would like too"?

Anti-advert

2005-09-14T09:04:00.000+01:00

Oh dear. The top ad in my little ad block is for PublishAmerica, who say - "We want your book, not your money."

Just in case anyone reading this doesn't know about PA, here's a link to the Absolute Write forums, with all the information you need. And please, please don't touch them with a ten-foot pole.

You can probably check out most of my other advertisers there too...

FAQs

2005-09-14T00:30:00.000+01:00

A couple of questions from David -

I was wondering if you could tell me how a slushpile is organized. Are they generally arranged in a FIFO system or is it more random? Also, is all unsolicited work that gets submitted to a publisher bound for the slushpile? One last question; is it acceptable to submit to several publishers at the same time? Or should submissions be done one at a time?

I reckon FIFO means First In First Out, and that's broadly the case. The exact order of submission may not be perfectly preserved. It may be also that the quicker you get a response, the worse your submission was; if something's half-decent, an editor might have it knocking around their desk for a while waiting for a proper read. But then again, they might just have lost it. The sheer weight of manuscripts arriving at most houses usually plays havoc with the most well-intentioned administrative system.

As to the second question - yes, by and large. Agented submissions - from agents known to the publisher or who appear to really truly be agents - are turned around much more quickly, because you don't want to get on the bad side of agents. Unagented stuff goes in the pile. Even if you send in your MS with the name of an editor affixed, intending to bypass the pile, they will open it up, see it's a manuscript they weren't expecting, and send it right back to sit with the rest of the slush. That is one trick that Does Not Work.

The third question - you need to check the submission guidelines really carefully (but you did that anyhow); and if they don't say, No simultaneous submissions, go ahead. I suggest, however, not labouring the point in your cover letter. Things like 'this book has also been sent to 15 other people, so look sharp' do not endear you to the reader.

Buried Alive

2005-09-13T22:19:00.000+01:00

A short story from Cheri, 'Buried Alive'.

Moisture, cold and penetrating awakened her senses. The smell of damp earth was overwhelming to her. Wiggling around just a bit brought it home in crushing fear.

"Oh God," she thought, "I'm in the ground! Buried alive!"

She screamed and struggled but eventually understood that the screaming was all in her mind. With that thought came overwhelming despair and she just lay quiet, unmoving. After what seemed a very long time she began to contemplate her future, or lack thereof, and she began to plan a resolution to her problem.

Realizing that she was able to breathe, to somehow exist without surface air, soothed her enough to relax and think coherently.

"At least I'm not claustrophobic," she thought.

She would grasp at anything for a little comfort. Knowing that she would have quickly become mindless with terror if she had been claustrophobic, she clung to that little bit of knowledge like a drowning person clings to a life jacket. She wondered how long she could survive buried God knew how deeply in the ground. She felt the bone-chilling cold creeping through the darkness of her involuntary confinement, making her drowsy, and in time she fell into a deep sleep of renewal and nourishment. After an indeterminate amount of time had passed, the ground once more began to warm. Slowly she awoke, squirming just a little to test the boundaries of her unearthly subsistence. She thought she felt a bit more room around her and heartened, she thrashed and kicked and struggled until she exhausted herself. Once more her tomb of dirt smelling of unknown minerals and dank, unseen things she refused to acknowledge, began to cool. Dejected at her lack of progress in freeing herself, she fell into a fretful sleep. She dreamed of the sun on her face, raising her limbs to the skies and reaching up and up as the sun smiled down at her while he moved farther and farther away. There was no sun on her face, only dampness. Was she crying? She could no longer tell.

Bejazus!

But hold on - skipping ahead -

On the second morning of her 'dormancy' she awoke to muffled voices above her. With an urgency born out of desperation she pushed higher and harder until, Oh God, is that sunlight? She reached higher and sod began to drop away. Encouraged, she struggled harder and was at last rewarded for her grit and determination.

Breaking free of her earthen tomb, she stood tall. Shaking off the last clumps of dirt she finally succeeded in reaching her goal. Lifting her face to the gloriously blazing sun she heard...

"Oh, look honey, the sunflower's come up."

A trick ending. They always make me think of the time I was seven years old, at a Chinese restaurant with my mum, and she said she'd give me two pounds if I ate a water chestnut, which initially I was disinclined to do. When we got home she went into the kitchen and came back with two pounds of self-raising flour. What a rotten trick to pull on a trusting young soul.

Endings like this to short stories make me feel that way because all my expectations of the kind of story it will be, along with any emotional investment I might have made in the characters, are just dashed. I don't mind it in a mystery, but then I'm reading a mystery precisely because I want a trick ending. My advice: Sorry, Cheri - but avoid this sort of thing.

Even to get to the ending, there's a fair amount of contortion involved to preserve the apparent premise - it doesn't quite feel like a person buried alive, but then the thoughts and behavior attributed to the sunflower seed are rather disquieting, particularly the screaming and struggling. It doesn't really work either way.

Darkwing

2005-09-13T21:54:00.000+01:00

25,000 people in Trafalgar Square this morning, and me stuck in the office. Oh well.

Here's Emmet's fantasy novel, Darkwing.

Til's linen tunic was soaked through. His mail hauberk chaffed. Five days on a reave and it lay heavy on him. His bones ached, his eyes were gritty with tiredness, his legs like swollen birch held too long in water. Still, he was pleased. His little band had acquitted itself well. The Ri had complimented them on their courage. They had claimed the heads of a half a dozen Firbolg and lost none of their own, though one of the young bloods had been wounded. The herd of dun cattle they were coaxing home only sweetened the deal.

He paused in shade beneath a copse of alder. No breath moved in the valley floor. Like a heavy hand, the sun pressed pressing him into the earth. Still, he could smell the river ahead and knew that Pale was less than a league away, over two forested hills, known as Maiden's Pair. Wildgrass on the hills wove delicate green patterns as the wind caressed it. Poppies and lemon Filam grew in wild profusion. He quickened his pace. He would be home before Jahila birthed. He had promised her as much, and he was a man who kept his promises.

#

The village swept down two sides of a hill toward fields on the Meridian Plain below. A ring fort, fires burning on its stone battlements, crowned the hill. Below it, reed-thatched longhouses lined the streets, arcing toward the quays, their eaves steep triangles almost touching the ground. Cattle and sheep grazed on the long swathe of the grassy commons in front of the temple of the Dagda. Outside the wooden palisade surrounding the village, barley and rye danced, a pulsating emerald wave in fields ringed by unmortared walls stretching away from the River Sila. The green river wound through the plain, its muddy banks covered in reeds and clusters of willow.

A small crowd, alerted by outriders and the hill pickets, waited for them outside the bronze-plated gates of the Main Guard. The clan leaders stood amongst the mothers and wives and children of the returning warriors. Two priests decked out in saffron cloaks, sporting antler helms, intoned the gruss, a prayer for the safe return of travelers.

Garl the Tanaist, known as Giant, strode forward to meet them, his braided hair glinting like autumn wheat. He smiled a troubled smile, wrapped Til in a bear hug, and said, “It is her time, wife-brother. All is not well.”

Til’s blood chilled; his heart froze. He sprinted up the hill, past the market square and the cattle grazing on the commons, to his longhouse. The door opened before he reached it. His mother strode out, rubbing her hands on her kirtle. The look on her face told him all he needed to know.

#

Mag the Midwife, his mother's maiden sister, pulled back the woolen blankets as he ducked into the recessed alcove. Jahila lay on soft heather on a long bench of packed earth, sided by planks of pine. He knelt beside the bed and clasped her hands in his.

Runnels of grimy sweat meandered down her forehead. Her face was a sickly, pale. She smiled weakly and tears welled in her winter-green eyes as she whispered something he could not hear through cracked lips. He held her hand, cradled her head, and wiped the matted hair from her fevered forehead. He soothed her when the contractions again wracked her tiny frame.

Hours passed, punctuated by the coming and going of the two midwives, clucking together as they toted water and medicine. A priest came. He brayed prayers to the Dagda in Ogham, and tied a staff of elder at the foot of the bed.

Halin, the leech, appeared, sniffed the air in the tiny alcove and shook his head .

Til pulled him aside. "Will she live?"

Halin shrugged. His turned his eyes skyward and signed a Souling Ward; the gods and spirits would decide.

Quite assured stuff from Emmet. Maybe an adjective or two too many (grimy, sickly, pale, winter-green (?), cracked, matted, fevered and tiny all in that last paragraph) and occasionally there's a conflict between the POV character's voice ("his legs like swollen birch held too long in water") and the author's voice ("the herd of dun cattle ... only sweetened the deal" is very 20th century). But in general, it's pretty good.

I get slightly anxious these days whenever I see a Prologue, as I think I've mentioned before; very often they appear to have little connection to the main action of the book, and seem to answer a need to let some awkward piece of back story stand on its own rather than be artfully incorporated in to the main body of the novel. At worst, it seems merely to be fashionable. It's hard to say what Darkwing's prologue is being intended for without seeing the rest of the book, but if it's just the birth scene of the main characters, it might not be necessary.

There has been some discussion on the Absolute Write Water Cooler about prologues, and someone said that many readers skip them. I think that if any part of a book can comfortably be skipped by a reader, it is not required in the first place. (On the other hand if people go around skipping the beginnings of books, what are you to do? Madness.)

So, we seem to be in Celtic High Fantasy mode here - the names, the prayers to the Dagda in Ogham (is Ogham a script, in fact, or a language, by the way?) - so what's the story? Let's turn to the synopsis.

Our cast:

NIANA, daughter of Til of the men of Pale: Born a warrior, to the despair of her mother and the exasperation of her father. Her will is fierce and unbending and her heart knows no defeat but her penchant for rash violence may lead to disaster for her people.

HARN: Niana's twin. Physically weak but with kenning of the Dreamways. An accomplished seer and walker on the Paths of Power. In his heart he guards a secret like a viper and guilt threatens to destroy his soul.

CONSTANTE Di Silva. Master of Henlia, Commander of the First Lardron Riders, victor of Kildan's Pass, Redburg and White Ford. The most accomplished of Caedian generals. An honorable man, a man who loves his family, his land and the ideals of duty. A man who, if he is to succeed, must choose victory over honor, duty over love, death over life.

JULIAN Di Silva, Constante's cousin, inquisitor in the church militant, Governor of the New Lands. A half-blood whose only duty, as he sees it, is to himself. There is nothing he will not stoop to for power and wealth.

Representatives of:

The Tribes of the Free Peoples.

A loose coalition of related tribes whose lands stretch from the Mountains of Mourne and the borders with Caedia to the towering mountains known as Landspine. They hunt, they fight, they laugh, they drink copiously and guard the borders of their humble realm, blissfully unaware of the approaching storm clouds.

Caedia:

An ancient empire. Famed for the stark beauty of its cities, a beauty that mirrors the starkness of the mountains which gave birth to its people. Famed too for its cruelty and the injustice bred of its social order. A place where corruption is a byword for justice, where both money and blood flow towards the lowest common denominator. Caedia is surrounded by enemies and, to defend its borders, has turned to armies of the half-dead, the ferocious hilka, whose damned souls are parasites in living bodies.

The empire drowns in the blood of those it sacrifices to maintain these hilka. To survive it must find another way to fund its army.

So, there's a sort of Roman Empire vs. the Celts thing going on here, in an invented world. I think it might be an idea to switch some of the references about, so that the Celts seem less Celtic and the Romans less Roman; the names in particular could all be invented, as long as they're done well. You can nick whole theologies as long as you find new vocabularies for them (but then, vocabulary is half the trick, as Tolkien showed.) Careful not to veer off into Asterix.

I like the armies of the half-dead. A good macabre touch and an original one as far as I know. The story arc (which I won't reproduce here) sounds like there's plenty of opportunity for drama. There are battles, brother against brother, and finally a quest for the all-important McGuffin that will destroy the Empire's power - this is all less than original, but can be dealt with in an interesting manner.

The trick will be keeping the tone various. The prologue, above, is very steady and grave in the manner of much high fantasy. That's fine, but if it marches on in its stately way just so for 500 pages, it will be a tiring read. If there's room for humour as well as heroism, and the skill with human touches that makes the best fantasies breathe, this could turn out well.

By the way - interesting that Emmet has included a theme for his book in the synopsis:

Can people survive in a corrupt society and not be either corrupted or destroyed? Can people fight despotism with violence and not be made despotic and violent?

A good touch, I reckon. Sometimes a synopsis is just a narrative of invented facts, which is unlikely to make an impression on an editor. I rarely read synopses, as you can get rid of 90% of the slushpile just by reading the first ten pages. It's only when you're wondering if you want to read the rest of it that you have a look at the synopsis, and I'd much prefer a short, spoiler-free statement of what the novel is about than a great long list of the things that happen in it. (If you're unsure what your novel is about, there may be problems with it.)

"Seven weeks of emotional turmoil"

2005-09-12T18:57:00.000+01:00

Well, Ian said it right when he said 'I hae ma doots'. I've just sat, pinned to my seat, through five days of the most brilliant cricket - and of course through a five-match series of the finest cricket I have ever seen. To see Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath at their peaks, matched and outdone by Flintoff, Pietersen, Vaughan, Giles - it's been heart-stopping, terrifying, and finally joyful stuff. As Andrew Strauss put it: seven weeks of emotional turmoil.

Americans might not get what the fuss is all about - well, in baseball terms this was like Babe Ruth's Zombie All-Stars vs Ming the Merciless for the fate of the human race.

And we won.

We won the Ashes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There, that's my quota of exclamation marks for this month...

So: I have two pieces almost done, and I'll post those tomorrow come rain hail sleet or snow. I'm sorry to keep everyone waiting, and to have been somewhat dilatory while the cricket's been on, and while the Sales Conference was pressing on me in my day job. (It went really well, by the way.) Normal service will be resumed this week.

To those people who have emailed asking where they are in the queue - I don't want to get into a habit of emailing people back on this issue, but the queue at present will keep me busy now for the next three weeks or so before it's cleared, so that's the longest you will have to wait. I still need to mop up a few people who have been waiting for four weeks - thank you very much for your patience.

Right. I'm off to the pub. See you all tomorrow.

Slight hiatus

2005-09-06T18:10:00.000+01:00

Nope, not in a Superman-induced time-warp, buried under manuscripts, or in a ditch - just incredibly busy. It's Sales Conference this week and I'm too snowed under to do much in the way of reading when I get home from work. Sorry to Emmet and Michael, who have been very patient.

If you're interested, there are two of these conferences every year. What happens is, the sales reps come in and sit at a long table, and then us editors get up one by one and present our books for the next six months (or, actually, the six months from February 06, in this case.) The idea is to get the sales force clued up about the novels they won't have time to read and the picture books they won't get finished copies of in time to sell, so that when they go into their local Borders with their sample case of proofs they can talk intelligently and persuasively about them. (This is one of the biggest hurdles any book has to get over.)

What it means for me is a week or two of chasing around after proofs, sales figures, biographical tidbits, hilarious jokes and fascinating morsels of trivia to whet their jaded palates. As you can imagine, this is a far cry from my usual routine - dozing off gently in my hammock, a glass of Dom Perignon in one manicured hand, with only the occasional trip to the telephone to sneer at an author, or outside to toss red-hot pennies to orphans in the streets.

Anyway: very busy. I'll be finished on Friday, and hope to be back on track at the weekend. Thanks to everyone who's kept reading.

Tomorrow...

2005-09-03T02:38:00.000+01:00

...I've got Emmet's fantasy novel Darkwing and Michael's update on Candide, Hollywoodland, for you. Tomorrow, meaning Saturday, that is.

I see Google Ads have decided this is a good place to advertise essay-cheating services. Nice one, Google. Can we have the ads for perineal massage oil back, please?

Why not click here instead?

Vampires

2005-09-01T23:39:00.000+01:00

I'm bumping this up the queue. David says, "I am a first time author who is looking to publish a first person story about a vampire's search for the woman who changed him. The story is titled The Light in the Darkness, and is told in three books.

"As this excerpt takes place at the very end of Chapter Nine, allow me to set the scene as quickly as possible. This is the scene in which the main character, Vincent Walker, captured while searching for Raine (his love), is changed by the ruling body of vampiric society. The woman in this (Lannis) scene has been described earlier in the chapter. When Vincent first meets her, Lannis' eyes are black, nearly all pupil. At this point in the story several other Chosen (the ancient and formal name of the vampire race) have restrained Vincent using Psalms (spells)."

They were taking no chances this time; all eight webs remained on me as Lannis' face came into view. I tried not to look, but trying not to breathe would have been easier. I had to look, I had to see.

Lannis was dark and beautiful, yet hideous. The evil in her made her appearance appalling, it clung to her features like rouge. Between dark red lips, two sharp points emerged, and as I saw them I knew my own death was near. I thought of Raine, and the tears flowed freely. Lannis saw this, and laughed.

She brought her wrist to her face and bit deep, savoring the taste of her own flesh. Her expression then was one of exquisite pleasure; almost erotic. Blood flowed around the edges of her lips and ran down her chin, much as my tears coursed down the sides of my face. Eyes closed, she let out a soft moan that spoke of an ecstasy beyond my comprehension. She was clearly lost in her own taste and touch. Lost in the blood.

Then, in one unforgettable moment, her eyes opened, and they were no longer dark and foreboding. Instead they glowed with a welcoming, pinkish light. She removed her wrist from her mouth.

"And now, Vincent," she said, "I will show you the Light in the Darkness." With that, she placed her torn wrist against my lips.

"Drink," she commanded.

I tried to resist, but all at once the hunger swooped in like a raptor, devouring my strength. My insides burned with it. If the webs hadn't held me in place, I would have doubled over with the pain. The urge to feast was maddening, the Hunger demanded to be fed. Here was blood, right in front of me. It poured from the wound in Lannis's wrist and made a macabre goatee around my tightly closed lips. I could smell it. God, but it smelled wonderful! The heady aroma filled my nostrils and whispered the truth of Life as Chosen live it. Predators feeding on their prey. All creatures must eat, and I was no exception.

And so, with the hunger pounding nails into me, the scent and feel of her blood on my face intensified the already incessant need to taste... to feed... to live.

"Drink," Lannis said again.

...and, God help me, I did.

Why am I bumping this up? Because I have a complete blind spot for vampire fiction, and I think I should mention it ASAP. I can't get excited about something like this. It pushes buttons that I don't have. So, apologies, David - but I'm going to have to leave this one. (The same thing goes for inspirational religious fiction - find another editor, I'm afraid.)

Actually, Salem's Lot was pretty damn scary. Maybe it's vamp-as-hero or vamp-as-glamourpuss that I can't get along with. Anyway, it's my problem, not David's.

I will say that the phrase that caused me the most horror in David's email was 'told in three books'. I rarely see an unsolicited trilogy that is not stuffed to the gills with padding, and which would not be a leaner, tighter, more focused story in one volume. Editors I work with have been known to weep at the sight of a fantasy trilogy.

Then they heave them over to my desk...

Evil Communist Plot

2005-09-01T22:04:00.000+01:00

So it seems that the reason my blog is filling up with bizarre hieroglyphs is because of those damn smart quotes and en dashes that programs like Microsoft Word enjoy sprinkling all over the place. Even if I paste Word docs into Notepad, the little buggers remain, and Blogger is violently allergic to them.

Can I please ask, due to Blogger's naffness, that any submissions come with the minimum of formatting? Raw .txt files would be preferred, unless your MS is swarming with italics or Lord B'azzterdd speaks only in Cooper Black, in which case I'll do my best to fix them up.

Flying Close to the Ground

2005-09-01T21:51:00.000+01:00

Ann says, "This is my first novel and so far I have a 100% rejection rate on it - 10 out of 10, all form letters. It's a young adult novel, so I imagine this is not your normal reading material, but good writing should be the same across genres."

I've edited YA stuff, and believe me children's book editors like horse stories - which Ann's book is, in part. Well, unless they're already swamped with them, but in general it's a good solid genre. I've seen horse stories reissued with more horsey covers and the sales double instantly, even on old titles. Series fiction, 8-12, about horses, that's my tip for the day. (1% of the royalties is fine, thanks.)

"I have a feeling I suffer from a common rookie malady - an inability to use anything other than straight-forward plodding plotting. A start at the beginning and continue directly to the end approach, which is probably part of the reason why I don't get out of the slush pile. (There might be more wrong with it than that, but let's start there.)"

OK. This is Flying Close to the Ground.

I've wanted to be a jockey ever since I can remember. When I was five, my dad took me to the racetrack during one of our Sunday afternoon visits. I still remember the hush that came over the crowd before the bell sounded and the horses burst out of the gate. I was mesmerized by the colorful silk jockey outfits and in awe of the muscular horses. I loved the way the losing betting slips carpeted the walkways inside the concourse. The concept of betting meant nothing to me – I just loved the idea of tearing around the oval track on a fiery horse.

Plus, I noticed immediately that all the jockeys were very small people. Munchkins, in fact, just like me.

My mother was annoyed that my father hadn't taken me to the park or the zoo like a normal dad. They had a heated discussion on the front porch and seemed to forget that sound travels through open windows. She said something about selfishness and inappropriateness. I heard my dad say "But Lily, she loves horses. The best thoroughbreds in the world run on that track."

Eventually, my mother had to cave-in to my father's earnestness and my non-stop campaign to see the racehorses. I became obsessed with horseracing. For kindergarten graduation, we had to tell the teacher what we wanted to be when we grew up. She would compose a rhyme about our future occupation and then we'd dress up and recite the rhyme on graduation day.

When I was called to her desk, I had no doubt.

"I want to be a jockey."

The teacher furrowed her ancient brow, looking like one of those expensive Chinese dogs. "Wouldn't you rather be a nurse or a schoolteacher or maybe an Olympic gymnast?"

It does plod a bit.

The opening line doesn't quite grab me - in Goodfellas the almost identical "As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster" is exciting and interesting because it's something really exotic. A jockey... I wouldn't expect a general readership to be gripped instantly.

Of course, these things can be fixed, so I keep reading. The problem then becomes that it leads in to a discussion of the sort of cultural opposition the narrator has faced in her life. This is one of Lemony Snicket's Ten Tedious Stories, which you can find linked to below.

--No Girls Allowed. Those words rang in my ears as I raced across the soccer field, my cleats glinting in the afternoon sun which beat down on McGilly Field here in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I had been living for all twelve of my years with my dad Horace and my mom Cindy, who were both veterinarians. No Girls Allowed! It was so unfair!

OK, it's not nearly as bad as all that, but Mr Snicket is on to something there. If this book is No Girls Allowed, then it's instantly terribly predictable, and hackneyed, and nobody is going to be able to sell it. Remember, the final battle in the life of your book is not getting an editor to like it; not getting the sales and marketing people to love it; not getting Joe Public to pick it up; but, when a sales rep has to take the cover proof out of his sample case and wave it in front of a vinegary, cynical book shop Buyer (or regional Sales Honcho) - it's giving her enough to work with to sell the book on to a shelf.

No Girls Allowed isn't going to cut it. So as an editor, I'm going to have a look at the synopsis, and see if there's a more interesting story in there.

After a visit to the track, her mother reluctantly agrees with Jessie's plan and her career is off to a flying start. Life at the track is challenging and exciting, as Jessie must contend with a rival apprentice, Bradley Suskind, who becomes increasingly more aggressive, even knocking Jessie off a horse. Jessie overhears one of Bradley's conversations and suspects that his aggression is fueled by a secret agreement and mysterious deadline.

Despite Bradley's interferences, Jessie quickly racks up the five wins she needs to change her weight allowance. She is allowed to gain five more pounds, but months of regimented dieting have deprived Jessie. She overindulges and gains seven pounds, putting her at odds with her agent, Mickey, who tells her she has to lose the weight quickly.

[...]

On the last day of the racing season, Jessie is thrilled because her father is finally going to see her race. Her father is married to his fifth wife and has several children. He and Jessie haven't had regular visits in several years, but he's the one who introduced Jessie to horse racing and she wants him to see her race.

Jessie's father is a no-show, having skipped out for a week-long fishing trip. Jessie returns to her house disappointed and hurt, only to find her friends, mother and step-father waiting for her along with Dr. Wyler, the director of Apple Creek, an in-patient treatment center for girls with eating disorders. During the course of the intervention, Jessie's favorite trainer, Patch, arrives and takes away Jessie's defense that she's only doing what every other jockey does. Patch explains that Jessie actually weighs far less than her required racing weight and that she's taken things much further than the other jockeys. Damon repeats his concerns and Rachel reveals that she is angry at the way Jessie has treated Damon because Damon is in love with her.

Ann's sent me the first 2,000 words of her 53,000 word novel; and right up to the end, there's no sense of what the theme of the book might be. But from the synopsis, I would expect that it is largely about anorexia. It is interesting that it is not, apparently, about the dysmorphic aspect of the problem - Jessie's is bound up in her ambition rather than her self-image. That's a story that is less often told, but would appear to have similar opportunities for drama - a story with some promise.

Ann needs to look at the structure of her book. From the synopsis there appear to be various strands of plotting weaving through each other - racing, school, weight loss, romance, family drama, therapy - and Ann has started right at the beginning - early in Jessie's life. That might not be the best way to tell the story. what's the most important of those series of events, the one that holds everything together? How can the other strands be used to counterpoint and add depth to the main one?

How is the chronology going to work? In the excerpt, there's a moment when the narration shifts from flashback to present tense:

That was twelve years ago and I've never forgotten the rhyme or the intensity of my desires. If anything, they've grown stronger as I've gotten closer to my goal. As soon as I could secure a work permit, I got a job at the local stable. After a year of mucking out stalls, I got a job at the closest racetrack. Before I got my car, I had to ride my bike 8 miles each way to get to the track.

I practically lived at the track on the weekends and in the summers. Three months ago, I passed my test, got a license and was taken on as an apprentice jockey.

I'm counting the days until summer, when I can get out of boring school and spend my days at the race track. In Geography class, I'm completely ignoring the lecture on soybeans or some equally boring export of Brazil. It looks like I'm intently taking notes, but really, I'm writing the characteristics of the different horses I work with and using those characteristics to develop possible racing strategies. A lot of people think horse racing is all about luck. That's part of it. But knowing the horse and understanding the conditions necessary for the horse to succeed are important. Strategy plays a bigger role than most people think.

See how the texture of the book changes? The way the voice of the book shifts, the way the fuzzy glow of hindsight drops out? Not much more than a tense change, but the story shifts into a different gear.

I've edited audiobooks, and one thing I learned doing that is that the voice actor has to keep the listener interested with the pitch and the intonation of his voice. Sometimes he'd break down at the end of a page because it all had the same cadence, and we'd have to go back to re-record, putting more 'light and shade' into it. Remember: 'light and shade'. Works for print too.

If this is the last time in Ann's book where there's a shift like this - a different way of speaking for the book's main voice - then plodding is exactly what will occur.

There are a million ways to tell a story, and straight narrative is rarely the best way. Sorry to be a ponce for a minute (not that that's ever stopped me before) but you can score the book, like a piece of music. Find what needs to be expressed in each chapter, what emotional and dramatic crescendoes and diminuendoes need to be at each point. Play up the things that need to be played up and let the rest drop out. There appears to be little need, for example, to play up "No Girls Allowed" right at the start.

The prose is clear without being beautiful. It's pretty functional, but it has the odd good image (the teacher frowning like a Pekingese) and the odd good joke:

Damon thinks my house is crazy because of all the "halfs" and "steps". I think his house is crazy because he has five brothers, all of them built like linebackers, and a mother who actually stays home, wears an apron, and bakes cookies. It's like stepping into a time warp and finding yourself in Leave it to Beaver, only Wally and the Beaver have been replaced by the front line of the Chicago Bears.

(Nitpick: But will the readership get the cultural reference?)

Light and shade is not just a chapter-level thing; it operates at the level of paragraphs even more. The book will seem to plod less structurally if Ann pays attention to the rhythm of sentences.

Last thing: Ann's query letter.

For 17 year-old Jessie Reilly, life moves very fast – in perfect ovals. She's an apprentice jockey at the local racetrack. To Jessie, nothing beats the feeling of tearing around the track on a fiery horse, an experience she describes as "flying, only very close to the ground".

But, as any pilot will tell you, flying close to the ground is a dangerous business. You have no margin for error and little chance of recovering if you make a mistake. And Jessie's certainly under a lot of pressure both at and away from the track. Her rivalry with an aggressive fellow apprentice, the lengths she must go to in order to meet her sport's low weight requirements, and the dangerous nature of horse racing challenge her at the track. Away from the track, Jessie dodges the concerns of her friends and family, tries to establish a relationship with her distant father and struggles to balance school and racing.

That's not too bad. There are still too many subplots in there, but the combination of danger, horses and anorexia sounds good. Perhaps Ann should take her cue from the story she has crafted to sell the book in order to rewrite and refocus the book itself. Nix the school-balancing subplot, it's not interesting. Nix the aggressive apprentice, that's not particularly interesting either. This book might have good bones, but it may not be making the weight.

Sorry...

2005-08-30T22:03:00.000+01:00

...not to have posted for a bit. All weekend I was glued to the cricket in the daytime and recovering from the cricket in the evening. I'll get back on track tomorrow.

Two essays

2005-08-25T21:11:00.000+01:00

I've had two humorous essays in. One is from Margie, and comes from "'The Newfangled Grandmother.' ... a collection of humorous essays from the point of view of an older woman.I'm looking for either an agent or a publisher and so far, no luck."

Now, that might be difficult. It's newspaper column length, really, and you seem to have to be a nationally-syndicated columnist to rate a collection of these pieces.

I won't post it here, as it's short enough that it'd be meaningless to excerpt bits, and I don't want to publish the whole thing. But it does rather hop around, discussing Margie's grandchild's fantasy that he has a family of five living in his ear, and his first scurrilous lie. There are asides about the explosion in child safety warning labels and equipment and about how children learn to tell truth from fiction. It rather rambles. It would be difficult to get a newspaper to print this piece, let alone to get a publisher to buy a book of similar pieces.

I think it'd be best to try a more focused column out on local newspapers.

That's what Kim tried with her piece on substitute teaching, but they told her they only work with their regular journalists. I think the trouble might be that it isn't quite funny or interesting enough. Essentially, Kim tells us how she got her teaching license, how she is booked, and how the bureaucracy works when she gets to the school. What is rather passed over is the actual experience of teaching.

That's partly the point: the teaching is apparently limited to setting work and supervising the pupils. But an essay which is essentially about the sort of annoying administrative paperwork that most of us face every day is not going to particularly amuse or divert the readers of the paper.

It's not badly written, but it needs something more to make an editor's ears prick up.

Patty and Jamie

2005-08-25T21:02:00.000+01:00

Jane has sent the first page of her novel:

That was the summer I lost everything. Passport, car keys, wallet, birth certificate, watch, sunglasses. One by one, as the weeks passed, I surrendered the trinkets of my adult identity, dropping them out of my life like a mermaid stripping the artifacts of her terrestrial visit, preparing for her return to the sea.

The driver's license was the hardest . There's not a lot you can do without a license. I had to drive just over the speed limit at all times, because I couldn't risk getting hauled off to jail (do they actually arrest you for driving without a license, and if so, why haven't we citizens risen up in protest?). I thought about applying for a new one, but as the weeks passed and the old, lost one silently expired in some thief's drawer or perhaps under one of my own couch cushions, the task began to seem impossibly complicated. I called the town where I'd been born to request a birth certificate. "Just send us a check for $5 and a copy of a photo i.d.," said the clerk on the phone, a kindly sounding sort, no doubt the mother of two school-aged kids, a boy and a girl. "Thank you," I said brightly, and hung up the phone.

Oh, I managed, all right. I had no bank card, of course, but there was a teller who would cash a check without i.d.. Better yet, she worked at the drive-thru, so I never had to risk rejection in front of the other customers, women, mostly, with bulging purses full of clipped coupons and tickets and photos of Campbell’s soup type children. Keys and emery boards and business cards from the plumber and the electrician and the man who'd refinished the hardwood floors. Mints and cell phones and antibacterial hand gel. These women had whole worlds at their fingertips, portable universes, and they didn’t even know it.

That was the summer that Jamie went away. I still don’t know who is to blame, and I don't know what I'll do when I find out.

The narrator is Patty, and her son Jamie goes away because she is falsely accused of abuse. He's taken into foster care. In her job, Patty "translates buzzwords and corporate jargon into real language, fending off attempts by her colleagues to foist terms like 'bucketing' (bizspeak for categorizing) and 'evolve impactful action points' onto the public." So it's appropriate that in her quest to win back her son, she has to learn to speak the language of the social services and game the system that way. There's a mystery involved, too, as to who in her life had made the false complaint.

It sounds like a pretty interesting idea, with the main theme being Patty's need to interpret the world around her in ways that make sense. There's much scope for satire there, and with tight plotting it could be a satisfying story of a woman using her skill with words to reorder her life.

As to the extract: it's a bit confusing. I love some of the writing here. The portable universes - great image. I like the way Patty sees the world, assigning properties to the people around her, the kids, the emery boards, the mints. It's a good technique for characterising a first-person narrator - getting the way they observe things across to the reader. However, I couldn't quite follow some of the threads here.

The first paragraph seems to imply that Patty is intentionally divesting herself of 'the trinkets of her adult identity'; that they are no longer important to her. But then it seems she's trying to get them back. Then, I don't get the driver's license bit (why does she have to drive just over the limit? Mind you, I can't drive, so what do I know.) The drive-thru scene is great, as discussed.

Then suddenly it jumps across to Jamie. I like the way it's been set up - the trivial problems in juxtaposition with the main crisis of the book. The trouble is that, because Jane's done it in the three slightly confusing paragraphs, it doesn't have the impact it might do. I'd suggest rewriting them to make it more focused. Change the mermaid image, perhaps. It's nice, but it implies a voluntary process. The slightly poetic feel of the mermaid image should stay, though.

Then Jane could use the second paragraph to narrate a few of the losses - driver's license, wallet, birth cert, maybe. A more prosaic feel here, maybe a touch of comedy, which she can get away with after the first para. We should by now know that she's had a string of mishaps and setbacks that she is trying to manage.

The third paragraph should stay. Those mishaps, which seemed like annoyances, now appear to be serious problems. A touch of character for Patty, and good writing. Then we're all set up for the fourth paragraph's emotional punch.

If this voice can be sustained and there's a compelling and witty story to be told, it's looking good to me.

Poetry

2005-08-25T20:35:00.000+01:00

Ils says, "I'm curious to see if you critique poetry as well as prosy
whatnots. If not, don't abuse me too heartily on the blog for making the
enquiry!"

Pitiful fool! No, I'm joking of course. I don't have much of an insight into the poetry publishing industry, and I'm wary of publishing anything in its entirety here on the blog, so I'll steer clear of poems in general. Sorry.

More in a bit.

Funny and not so funny

2005-08-22T19:32:00.000+01:00

Point yourself over here - it made me laugh, anyway.

The site is still knackered in various significant ways, after my massive hubris in fiddling with some browser settings and declaring it fixed. In doing so I have in fact probably re-broken it in a subtle and cunning manner that would be the envy of malicious hackers everywhere. So I may have to look at getting a new template or a new web address somewhere. My brother, who is to IT what Michael Bay is to bad movies, is on the case.

Lunchtime

2005-08-22T19:18:00.000+01:00

Another short, this time from Stranger, and in the same sort of territory as 'Weightless' (below).

Lunchtime

Be casual, I told myself. I clenched my lunch-box as I meandered towards the four girls who sat on the carpet, their legs folded underneath themselves. Jenny and Liz leant against the walls, with Maggie and Sharon facing them. Pockets of students dotted the walls but there was plenty of space around these four. I agonized over how close to sit beside them. Be brave. I plumped myself down with my shoulder almost touching Jenny's but at the last minute pulled away, leaving a foot between us. I tucked my skirt under my legs keeping my head down, silently berating myself for my cowardice.

Another awkward, self-conscious narrator. She finds herself eavesdropping on the girls' conversation, which is all about Jenny's new boyfriend:

Jenny always had a queue of guys interested in her. I remembered her kissing Patrick Branagan at the last school disco. They had been wrapped around each other, swaying to the music of Moon River. I had felt sick. But I couldn't stop watching her, trying to share the experience, imagining his warm tongue in my mouth, his lips sucking mine, the tips of his fingers resting on the top of my arse. Dirty bastard. Imagining it was as close as I'd come to having Patrick kiss me. Or any boy. Who wants the fat ugly nerd when they could have Jenny Ryan?

"You should let him sweat for a few days," said Sharon. Sharon always sounded sure of whatever she said.

The girls discuss whether Jenny should have sex with her boyfriend, while the narrator listens uncomfortably, waiting for an opportunity to contribute to the conversation. But...

"Let's get some air before class," said Sharon, standing up. The others got up and followed her out. I looked down at my sandwich, I still hadn't taken a bite. Red spots marked where my fingers had broken though the bread to the jam below. I wiped my fingers on the bread and dropped it back in the box. It now repelled me. I wished I could treat all food with such distaste.

Shades of 'Weightless' again. And it ends up in a similar, inconclusive place:

Did it mean anything that they had had an intimate conversation in front of me? Was it their way of tormenting me? Or their way of inviting me to be friends? I sighed.

I had sat beside them today, maybe tomorrow I'll speak to them.

Good for her, but is this a story?

I don't think it is; I don’t think 'Weightless' is, either. It's a character sketch. Stranger says: "I'm not sure if the characters in the story have a longer story to tell - or even if I'd let them." Well, it needs some sort of shape to it, because right now there's just the narrator's feeling of social awkwardness, and some other characters who don't seem to exist for any reason other than to throw that feeling into relief.

Weightless

2005-08-22T17:58:00.000+01:00

A short story from Jess called "Weightless"

I think about going to the Y.M.C.A. and swimming laps, lots of laps; at least enough laps to reduce the size of my ass and thighs and flappy underarms. The idea to exercise came to birth on a day I sat down on my couch. I'd brought my laptop from the office, prepared to do a bit of work and as I set it on my lap, the keyboard was gobbled up by the overlap of my gut. The day was filled with a stunning uneasiness of the inevitability that I would surely have to lose a grave amount of weight.

I visualized driving there, which is always of little consequence: jeans, T-shirt, a button-down, long sleeve shirt, sweater, black military boots, a jacket, a big jacket, a baseball hat, a raspberry jelly filled donut, a cup of hot coffee with cream and three sugars, and a lit cigarette. I steer the car along the well known path to the gym with my knees, maneuvering coffee, donut and cigarette from hand to hand while I negotiate the shifter. As I park the car and turn off the engine, I lean back against the head rest, closing my eyes. A sense of fear fills my lungs as I inhale the last puff of my cigarette and flick it out the window. Today, I believe, is about as good a day as any to start.

This is going to be a story that's pretty much a stream of consciousness. Detailed, immediate description is a big part of it. It's not quite down at the level of a Nicholson Baker piece, but that?s the way Jess is going.

I'm seeing too many modifiers and the odd unhappy phrase. For example, "a stunning uneasiness of the inevitability that I would surely have to lose a grave amount of weight" is wordy and unclear (can uneasiness be stunning, and what does "uneasiness of inevitability" mean? "A sense of fear fills my lungs" is another odd image that doesn't quite work.

This sort of thing is scattered all the way through. I quite like the image of the narrator's little duffel bag bobbing along obediently behind her, but then you get this: "I am weary, weary of the looks I will encounter... soon enough, I will begin the fretful journey back downstairs to the swimming pool." The melodrama of this sort of language may be intentional, but it seems to sit uneasily with the overall tone of the piece, which describes in minute detail the ordeal of being hypersensitive about one's appearance in a very public place.

Once I get downstairs, I open the squeaky metal green door to the pool area. Maybe someone will be sitting on the bleachers, maybe not, but the lifeguard will be there, watching as I make my way down the long stretch of beige tiled flooring. I can feel my heart beating as if I'm already there. I don't want to swim without the warmth and safety of the blanket I have covering my body. I'll be exposed for the person I really am; fat. I walk down the aisle, pretending not to care, counting the number of people in the pool. Every lane is taken which means I'll have to swim in a lane with someone. I mutter offensive words inside my head but convince myself I am worth the effort. I'll feel better about myself. I will. I know it, especially in a few months when my weight loss is noticeable and everyone is telling me how wonderful I look; and asking, however did you do it? It's so nice to see you! I think no one ever says that to me now, and for a second, I consider bypassing the entire pool concept because I don't want all of these people I've just imagined telling me how great I look. I'll take revenge and never lose weight. That'll show them! It's not about those people, I think, switching gears, or the people I'll meet when I'm thinner or who will like me because I have a nice body. It's about me, the way I will feel, and how much happier and healthier I will be. Yes, I nod, agreeing with myself.

I take another step, closing in on the moment when I will have to discard the comforter and lower myself into the pool. Each step is agony. As I pass her, I smile at a lady sitting on the bleachers watching everyone swim with such ease, back and forth, back and forth, and urgently survey the pool to see if there is someone, anyone, bigger than me. Not today. I know that I will offer a great amount of comfort to someone. Ha! Look at her. Phew! I don't feel so bad. Yes, someone will say to herself, I am doing something right here. Maybe it's a poor projection on my part, another step, but I don't think so. People are always comparing themselves to others to feel better about their bodies, better about their lives. I'm one of those people, and I'm obese. I really hate the word obese.

[...]

I am afraid to be seen. I have the best bathing suit one could buy, and a horribly plump body. My thighs ooze out of the leg holes, my arms have stretch marks and dimples and flap with each swishing movement they make, and my boobs- I don't even want to think about those droopy things. The only parts of my body that I like are my hair, my eyes and eyebrows... and my calves. That's it. Those are the parts of me that I like. Everything else is covered with fat.

So it's rather a mournful read. We're being asked to watch a woman hating her body, and asking us not to judge her so harshly as she judges herself:

I used to run 5k's until I had knee surgery, four knee surgeries. Why do people make fat judgments without asking questions? There are circumstances to which I can not be held accountable.

It's a believable attitude. The problem is, there's nothing else in here besides a dramatization of that attitude. The narrator enjoys her swim - "I really do feel weightless. Nice! I think" - but she still feels self-conscious, and when she has run back to get changed,

I get dressed as quickly as possible. I don't want to be seen. I hope someday I will see myself for who I am, not just my weight. Someday, I think I will. I study the gangly, long-limbed women as they smile uncomfortably at each other. They act the way I used to act, their eyes saying to one another, if I ever get that big, shoot me.

Good for her. But is it a story?

Site problems

2005-08-20T13:37:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Ian, for letting me know something's up with the site. It seems if you are using Internet Explorer, all my apostrophes and quote marks are coming up as Euro symbols and things. I had not noticed myself because I am using Firefox.

I will try to sort it out but in the meantime why not get Firefox yourself? It is free for personal use and vastly superior to IE in every department.

OKAY: this is how to fix it if you're using IE. Click on the 'View' menu and select 'Encoding'. Now uncheck 'Auto-select' and look down the drop-down list until you see 'Unicode UTF-8'. Select that, refresh the browser, and it should all be displaying correctly. If not, let me know.

If anyone knows where my little Edit Post and Email Post icons have gone, though... I never should have started messing with the template...

S-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d

2005-08-19T21:11:00.000+01:00

Marcelle says: "I'm about 15,000 words into my first novel... Here's the synopsis for S-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d."

What happens when you nearly succeed as a dancer, only to have your dreams dashed after an accident? When Kate meets horror film director, Joachim, an unusual bond is forged. His career is in tatters, the love of his life has left him, and his drug use is spiralling out of control. Kate is haunted by her failure as a professional dancer and must find refuge in Joachim's idealisation of his voluptuous ex to accept herself. She is prepared to endure a torturous emotional journey with him, imagining this as a rite of passage to the dark arts. But Joachim's desires may have murderous intent, his aims more treacherous than even Kate could have dared imagine...

Written in minutely drawn attention to detail, this raw and original portrait champions the unrealised dreams in all of us that refuse to die. At last here is an erotic novel that dispenses traditional notions of a virgin/whore dichotomy, assumptions about dancing folk and people who like to wear black. A frank testimony, full of wonderment for experiences supremely felt and a place where all the songs of Courtney Love finally make sense.

If this is what is being sent out to agents and publishers, the book is going to struggle. Marcelle included it into the email I got, so it might just be for my benefit, but I suspect it isn't. So let's go through it in detail. If I got it wrong, Marcelle, sorry! Skip down a screen or two.

The first paragraph, which is setting out the plot, has some problems. It starts with a question that few people will have asked themselves. Is that what the novel is really going to be about, or is it going to be about what happens to one specific ex-dancer? Marcelle could as easily just start with Kate. I then don't understand what it means to say that she has to find refuge in an idealisation of a voluptuous ex, and I feel rather apprehensive at the thought of a torturous emotional journey. The dark arts suddenly pop up (I had no idea that the supernatural might be making an appearance) and it then goes into psychological thriller mode with the murderous intent and treacherous aims.

In short, it's rather confusing. I'd like to have a better sense of the story here. If the story sounds interesting and original, the reader's much more likely to want to read the rest of it.

The second paragraph is... bad. I wonder how many query letters are like this. I don't see the query letter in all its glory - agents, rather than publishers, see those more routinely - and barely read cover letters. But this is bad blurb writing and will only serve to get the mickey taken out of Marcelle in the reading room.

Blurbs are hard to write. Publishing companies pay people good salaries to do nothing but boil the marketing message of a book down into a snappy, irresistible little block of text. I can't do it. Most authors can't do it well, in my experience. It's a specialised skill. So, beware: the harder you try to make your book sound fabulous, the closer you will get to making it sound ridiculous.

Up close: things are written 'with' minute attention to detail; attention to detail will rarely be 'minutely drawn', unless you are writing about Sherlock Holmes investigating a crime scene; 'a portrait that champions unrealised dreams in all of us that refuse to die' is a too-complex bit of hyperbole; 'at last' is even more hyperbole; 'dispenses' ought to be 'dispenses with'; I can't think of any 'traditional notions of a virgin/whore dichotomy' or assumptions about dancers that urgently need dispensing with; 'dancing folk' is hokey; 'frank testimony' makes me think this is going to be a memoir, whereas the first paragraph made me expect the occult or a thriller; 'full of wonderment for experiences supremely felt' is hilariously over-the-top; and I do not wish to visit a place where the songs of Courtney Love suddenly make sense.

Given all that, what's the book like? Marcelle will be lucky to have many people request to see it on the basis of this synopsis.

Here's the first chapter.

At fifteen, time seemed different. I simply wanted to be a gymnast. Back then, I had no fears of not making it, the world, and I with it, was relentless. Often I had the feeling I was rushing towards something, like a train cramming itself fiercely into the blackened gape of a tunnel. People didn't know what to make of me. I walked around school with a fixated face, energy I could not channel bristling from me in all directions. Above all the talk of underage sex, short skirts and cigarettes, I had an aim. It is easy, so easy to be obsessive when you have no friends.

My day would start early in the prehistoric calm of dawn, still a magical place, where even late starters with well developed hips and budding breasts can turn themselves into Nadia Comaneci. Usually it was cold. The grass damp. I'd start out in layer upon layer of lycra-tracksuit-leotard ensembles (warmth protects muscles) and move through my warm-up routine, somnolent, like a sleepwalker. Then, as the sun began to dry my father's lawn, I began the jerking tumble-runs as best as I could in the limited space: roundoff, flic, flic, straight back somi. The first pass was the worst, every joint threatened to stall, not to bend or spring back, a state I call 'bone creaky'. Whoosh. Breathe. Four turbulent seconds and then your whole frame seems to relax into place. With one snap, you are a gymnast a performer with the right to do what you are doing. You gulp for breath. The neighbours can look if they want to.

Dirt, mud, gravel and blades of grass get meshed into your hands. Mud splashes up, sometimes into your eyes. You don't care. You have to wear the same dirty tracksuits for several days anyway. It's not worth dressing up clean to get dirty. My Dad is a keen gardener and his lush green lawn is surviving majestically, despite a daily onslaught of my fumbled tumbling routines pushed in hard by bare feet. You can see the shapes of my exercises ground into the lawn, which end with trampled mud dips where I drop the final somi.

The whole garden has been occupied by me, Dad's flower life has to content itself with the space I can't use: the edges around the borders. An old rusty square telegraph pole held in place by huge nail wedges serves as a floor beam. I hate putting my hands down on it for too long, the metal feels lethal like it's come from a seawreck. That's why I'm so fast on it. Fear is the key. If I can cope with this, on a real beam it will be oh so easy. Between two silver birch trees Dad has secured a heavy metal pole, a makeshift bar, so that I can practise upswings and beats. Again it's the wrong shape (too wide) and is too heavy, repeated use has bruised my pelvic area so much I am left with permanent yellow roughened skin around the bikini line. While other girls at school are having sex, my thighs have toughened, the skin steeling itself against the onslaught of puberty.

But then, I'm not allowed to have sex, have boyfriends, go out. After the last party when my Dad had to pick me up when I had collapsed drunk on the floor, surrounded by boys, normal life was over. It was the start of the summer holidays, the year of the Olympics 1984. And I was grounded for like, forever.

Er, where's Kate the dancer and Joachim? Marcelle says the book takes place over ten years, but... anyway. The prose is a mixture of the good - "Four turbulent seconds and then your whole frame seems to relax into place. With one snap, you are a gymnast" - the bad - "I'd start out in layer upon layer of lycra-tracksuit-leotard ensembles (warmth protects muscles) and move through my warm-up routine, somnolent, like a sleepwalker." - and the ugly - "I am left with permanent yellow roughened skin around the bikini line." Ewww! Sometimes Marcelle's backflips come off, and sometimes they end in a bit of an unsightly tumble. So, there's a good deal still to be done at this level.

I also feel a little bit uneasy about this as the beginning for an erotic novel, although it's hard to tell - even with the synopsis - where this is going.

At the end of chapter one, where are we? Does this novel begin in the right place? Marcelle might need to have a good look at the way it's structured, too.

Two paragraphs

2005-08-19T14:06:00.000+01:00

Jason has sent in the first two paragraphs of his novel.

That's me, lying on the bed, stuck like a pig over the fire and taking in nutrients like breathing because I don't have a choice either way. If sanitizer is life then I can smell it as it passes my nostrils and nourishes my atrophied muscles the best it can. White is the only color that gives the illusion of cleanliness and I know I'm in trouble when my eyelids get the strength to open and I see that everything in the room is covered with it. The last white I remember seeing before I fell was a woman’s teeth and the marshmallow white of her eyes. For some reason I think she was smiling when it happened but I can’t for the life of me remember her name.

There's a tube down my throat, a needle in my arm, and I follow the white clip on my pointer finger to a cord that is connected to a machine on my left. It beeps a rhythm I remember from a very long time ago. I’m guessing this is the machine that tells the doctors I still have a pulse. My hand twitches and the clip falls to the floor faster than the machine flat lines. I hear a laugh in the room and am startled when I realize it’s my own. My life is a dream that the doctors say I’ll never see. My eyes close as the nurses run in to save my life.

Jason might be trying a bit too hard here. Some of the effects he's going for aren't coming off. A person lying in a hospital bed does not in any way look like a pig stuck over a fire, for instance, and so already the reader has the sense that they are not in safe hands.

There are some awkward sentence constructions here that add to that impression: "If sanitizer is life then I can smell it as it passes my nostrils and nourishes my atrophied muscles the best it can." What is the object of 'smell' here - 'sanitizer'? 'life'? Can sanitizer or life nourish muscles? I think what Jason wants to say is that breathing air is nourishing the atrophied muscles, and that the smell of sanitizer is the only impression his protagonist has of this process. Whatever he's saying, it's muddled.

Or this: "White is the only color that gives the illusion of cleanliness and I know I'm in trouble when my eyelids get the strength to open and I see that everything in the room is covered with it." What's everything in the room covered with - white, the illusion of cleanliness or trouble? It's supposed to be the colour white, but the object of the verb is right at the other end of the sentence and so it's difficult to make out.

It would be better to ditch things like "My life is a dream that the doctors say I'll never see" and just concentrate on clear description of where we are and what the protagonist is thinking, feeling and observing. Make some of those troublesome sentences into two sentences, provided there are two things that need saying. Smooth the whole thing out.

I've picked on the bad bits. It's not all bad. There are as many OK sentences as iffy ones. The thing is, readers, agents and editors will spot the iffy ones instantly and think that it's not worth the effort to keep reading. Rewrite, think hard about every word, and don't give people an excuse to think that.

The Boy Who Was A Football

2005-08-19T13:59:00.000+01:00

There once was a boy who really loved football. He watched every match he could on the television. He went to every home match with his father. He went down to the park every Sunday morning, come rain or shine, to watch the local football games.

But this boy didn’t have dreams about being a goal-scorer. He didn’t want to be a striker or a defender or the goalie or even the referee. He wanted to be the football.

He practised crunching himself into a small ball and rolling around the lounge or the garden. He tried bouncing around his bedroom. Once he even broke his wrist when he fell off his cupboard while trying to bounce.

Ouch! And this in a 4+ picture book text. We're in weird territory here, people.

Obviously this child's insanity is a problem for his parents and his teacher, but the teacher has an idea:

“Today”, he said, “we are going to do something special. We are going to have a big football match. I am going to divide the class into two and you,” he said, looking at the boy, “are going to be the football.” The boy’s eyes lit up and he could hardly stop himself from jumping in the air with delight.

The class split into two and the boy walked to the middle of the pitch, rolled himself into a ball and waited for the game to start. The P.E. teacher blew his whistle and the game began. He was kicked from one side of the pitch to the other. Even the smallest child in his class got a chance to kick the boy who was a football.

He's kicked savagely off the pitch by his classmates and the PE teacher picks him up for a throw-in:

“NOOOO!” shouted the boy who was a football. “I don’t want to be a football any more”. The P.E. teacher lowered the boy and said “Are you sure?” “Yes” said the boy who was a football. “I don’t want to be a football ever again.”

And the teacher looked at his mother and his mother looked at the teacher and they both smiled.

I must say, it's a refreshing change to see a children's book as unashamedly violent and nasty as this. Usually when the child has a bizarre notion like this he's shunned and then saves the day and we all learn a valuable lesson about tolerance. Here he has his delusion leathered out of him by his peers and with the tacit approval of his mother. (Billy Elliot would only have been five minutes long set in this kid's school.)

This is not going to sell. What with the broken wrists and the ceaseless kicking of a defenceless child, it's certainly too violent to be a picture book, and does not have a message that most publishers will want to get behind.

If you had ten or so more tales as dark and dysfunctional as this, you might be able to bind them up with a Lemony Snicket cover look, some Edward Goreyesque art, and sell the book to 9+. That might be something.

Inundated

2005-08-18T20:15:00.000+01:00

Hello everyone.

So, I now have more than 25 things awaiting critique. I credit the Statue. I'm going to try to do one a day, so reckon three weeks now from submitting things and hopefully I'll do better than that.

I suppose if I keep getting things at the rate of four or five a day, I'll have to think about a week's submissions moratorium, but it's not too bad right now.

I hope this is a useful experiment for everybody who's reading this. It is certainly proving to be useful for me. It's making me think very hard about how to respond to people who I would normally be able to blow off with a form rejection note, and that can't be a bad thing. If it were to make a few authors think more carefully and in a more informed way about how editors are going to respond to their work, that would be excellent.

A Weekend Jaunt

2005-08-18T01:05:00.000+01:00

Well. Here's an odd one.

Samantha has sent in a short story called "A Weekend Jaunt". It begins with the reading of Henry Fromm's will. He leaves little, and his relatives are annoyed. Among them are Celia Ferguson, Henry's niece, and her mother Janice, who "was viewed as one of the most beautiful (and most vicious) women in town. Celia took after her mother in a number of respects. Unfortunately for Celia, attractiveness was not one of them."

They turn their anger and frustration on Charlie Haverly, the lawyer ("Nickel Creek's hotshot young attorney".)

“You can’t mean that is all there is.” Janice traced a finger along his jaw line. “I know the old coot was hiding something up in that big house of his.”

Charlie cast a lingering glance at Janice, deciding the best course of action. He brought his face so near Janice’s she could taste the avocadoes Charlie had for a snack earlier. He drew in a breath and...

“Nope.”

Charlie snickered, turned and walked back to the podium.

So Charlie leaves, and strolls off down Alhambra Way:

Charlie walked past rows of ramshackle old mansions and makeshift apartment buildings. At one time, Nickel Creek was a hotbed of tycoons and opportunists, but since the oil market went bust, it had become a haven for criminals and squatters.

In the distance, Charlie could see a young girl standing at the fence in front of Henry’s old house. A slow grin crept across his face as he approached her. The girl, wearing a fuchsia sarong and cut-off white tank top, heard Charlie approach. Charlie stood next to her at the fence and looked at the house with her.

Could this be the same young girl who had quietly slipped away from the reading of the will? No one had paid her any notice. "Henry was notorious for collecting an array of odd characters. Surely this girl was no exception."

Now read on:

“I like that one. Easier on the eye.”

“Yes. I had a feeling you would approve.” The young girl glanced at Charlie for a moment before returning her gaze to the house.

“That place needs a paint job in the worst way.” The girl opened the gate and began to walk up the path to the door.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Because Henry is dead, remember? If someone sees you go into the house, they will call the cops or something.”

The young girl gave Charlie an irritated look and walked back to the gate.

“Well, it is my house. Technically.”

“Do they know that?”

The girl sat down on the curb, took a drink from her water bottle and offered a drink to Charlie. He took the bottle and drained it.

“Why did you have to go and pick someplace so hot?”

“Are you seriously complaining about the heat?”

Charlie sat next to the girl on the curb.

“Are you saying I have no right?”

The young girl glanced at Charlie and burst out laughing.

“Well, if you think about where you live most of the time, I would say no, you don’t have a right to complain.”

Charlie looked at the girl and smirked.

“Point taken.”

They sat quietly for a few moments. Across the street, two small children were taking turns kicking a dead bird. The girl would watch the children for a while, look at Charlie as though she wanted to say something, stop herself and glance back at the children. Charlie broke the silence.

“You know we have to get back to work.”

“I know.”

“Now that Henry is dead …”

“I know.” The girl stood up, dusting herself off. “I’m just getting used to this one though.”

“I don’t know why you got another one. The timing for the return was perfect. You know how attached you get.”

“I know.”

“I can go first, if you need a minute.”

“No, you’re right. We should do it together. The weekend just went so fast.”

Charlie stood, looking around. The girl stared at the children who were still kicking the bird and paying no attention to Charlie and the girl.

“Ready?” Charlie was watching the girl bemused.

“Yeah. Sileo!” The children froze in place. The girl looked around her and everywhere all activity had ceased movement.

“I’ve always loved that trick.” Charlie looked at the children for a second.

“I thought you were in a hurry. Did mean old Janice scare you?” Laughing, the girl looked down at her apparel, swiped her hand across the air and suddenly was dressed in a simple white gown.

“Very funny. Do you want to or is it my turn?”

“I’ll do it.”

“Thanks for suggesting this. It was fun.” The girl looked at Charlie for a long time.

“Yes, almost like the old days. Before you decided to become a jerk.” The girl gave Charlie a big grin and reached her hand to him. Charlie took her hands in his.

“Sir?” Charlie searched for the words.

“Yes?” The girl gazed at Charlie expectantly.

“I am doing okay, aren’t I?” Charlie appeared unsure of himself.

“Of course you are.” The girl replied. “What fun is good without evil? Next time, though, you have to be the old guy and I get to be the cool dude. Deal?”

“Deal.”

With that, the girl gave a quick nod of her head, sending the two of them skyward. When they reached the clouds, there were two distinct explosions. One black. One white.

Now, what's going on there?

As near as I can get: the girl and Charlie are an angel and a demon (a fallen angel) respectively. Every now and again they meet on Earth, where they have a little fun messing with the heads of mortals. Perhaps one is performing good deeds and the other evil deeds, but it's rather blurry.

I have to say, if that's the idea - they're just playing pranks on people - I really quite like it. Well plotted, it could be a strong, funny story. The difficulty with this treatment of the idea is that it's a gimmick ending with a very hard-to-make out plot leading up to it. I do not get the business with Henry's house and his relatives at all. Perhaps I am being very dense and some time tomorrow I will suddenly kick myself, but it doesn't make sense to me even having read it through once.

I bought M John Harrison's last book of short stories, and they're so elliptical and jewel-like you can barely grasp the mood he's going for, let alone the details of What Is Supposed To Be Going On. Nevertheless, they are still effective because he's a brilliant stylist. You come out of one of his stories, or - less extreme - one of Kelly Link's, and you have a powerful sense that you've seen the shape of something unsettling. (I couldn't say for sure that there is a real knowable plot behind every single Harrison story. Sometimes I suspect him of using his technical skill to Cloud Men's Minds like the Shadow.)

The writing here is very uneven. To begin with, there are things like: "At the sound of the door slamming, Charlie, shaking his head, turned towards the rest of assemblage." There are a few sentences like that, interrupting themselves to tell you something different: "During the gathering, attended by those who knew Henry the best (and most likely loathed him the most), no one paid any notice to the young girl standing quietly in the corner." These are the sorts of things that you can usually iron out by reading the story out loud. Imagine you're doing the audiobook. Anything you have trouble saying, or saying well, needs to be rewritten. It's particularly hard to say things with lots of parentheses.

It gets better towards the end, with more dialogue. The narrative voice wavers between pretty good - "They sat quietly for a few moments. Across the street, two small children were taking turns kicking a dead bird. The girl would watch the children for a while, look at Charlie as though she wanted to say something, stop herself and glance back at the children" - and pretty awful - "The girl stared at the children who were still kicking the bird and paying no attention to Charlie and the girl."

So: it needs lots of attention at sentence level. That work has to be put in before Samantha tries to sell it. Compounding that, the plot needs looking at, and I can't really help there, because good short stories are tiny delicate mechanisms. You need to be the one who put it together originally to fix them when they're broken. Until it's ticking, it's not going to sell.

Lucky Thirteen

2005-08-17T18:36:00.000+01:00

The Irrelevant Easter Island Statue must have some sorcerous power of attraction, judging by the fact that I've just got home to find thirteen new bits of writing in my inbox. Among them are a short story or two, a children's book, some Celtic fantasy, and this: "At last here is an erotic novel that dispenses traditional notions of a virgin/whore dichotomy, assumptions about dancing folk and people who like to wear black. A frank testimony, full of wonderment for experiences supremely felt and a place where all the songs of Courtney Love finally make sense." Blimey.

The Time Pool

2005-08-17T13:36:00.000+01:00

I was going to post this earlier, but WM sent me a synopsis as well, and I've only just had a chance to have a look at it. It's a fantasy novel for 9- to 11-year-olds.

Jason Edwards leaned on Lady Lee’s aft rail, gazing into the motor yacht’s bubbling wake. The warm Caribbean breeze ruffled his auburn hair, his eyelids drooped and his thoughts drifted back to England. If his schoolmates could see him now, they’d be green with envy.

A high-pitched whine snapped him back to the present.

The long fishing rod in the handrail socket whipped over in a trembling arc. An unseen marauder had snatched the distant bait and was tearing the line off the reel.

Jason flung his Coke can aside. “Strike!”

He dashed to the railing and heaved the bucking rod out of its socket. Gripping it tightly, he edged himself into the fixed chair and manoeuvred the butt of the rod into the swivel hold. The reduced growl of the engines told him Dad had spotted the strike from the bridge. “You got it in securely, son?”

“Yes, I’m okay,” shouted Jason, feet braced on the hinged plate. The reel ratchet clicked furiously. Jason’s breaths came in short gasps as he hung on to the rod and tried to locate his quarry.

The flip-flop of running sandals announced company.

From the corner of one eye he glimpsed his twin sister Michelle’s cut-off jeans. “Undo my watch for me! Don’t scratch it. And keep out of the way!”

She flicked her long hair back. “Oh, pardon me for living. I’m not your slave, you know.” She removed his watch, anyway. “It’s one o’clock, near enough. I’ll time you.”

Some distance astern, a metre and a half of angry silver and blue blasted through the surface. The hooked fish stood on its tail in a frenzied lashing of spume and
spray.

Michelle pointed. “Look! I see it.”

“Wow! A kingfish!”

She punched the air. “It’s a beauty. Can I hold the rod?”

“No. You’d lose it.”

The kingfish sprinted for freedom, the line screaming off the reel.

“The bucket!” yelled Jason. Cool the reel!”

“Yes, master.” Michelle ipped the nearby pail over the humming reel.

Sprayed water spattered Jason’s sunglasses. “I can't see! Wipe my specs.”

She smudged them, giggling.

Sweat ran down Jason’s back as his white-knuckled hands kept a firm hold on the rod. The ratchet fell silent but the kingfish maintained a steady pull. Jason took a deep breath. Now for the tough part. Haul the rod upright. Then lower, winding as fast as possible. Over and over. The rod grew heavier and heavier. His tongue sandpapered his lips. “Find my Coke. Pour some down me - my mouth preferably.”

“I can hardly miss. It’s big enough”

“Oh ha, flipping ha.”

With another arm-wrenching sprint, the fish reclaimed all the line so preciously reeled in. Jason groaned. Back to hauling and winding.

Michelle clutched her forehead. “Don’t lose him!”

The commotion brought Mum rushing out from the cabin, camera ready. “Get closer to Jason, Michelle. I’ll get you both in.”

“Keep going, son!” called Dad. “You’ve got him.”

Got him? Jason grimaced. Why didn’t someone tell the fish?

The majestic kingfish fought on, but eventually exhausted, it surrendered. Vanquished, it lay on the deck, an accusing glint in its dying eye. A touch of sadness mingled with Jason’s feeling of triumph as he knelt and admired the beautiful markings and elegance of the streamlined silver and blue body.

“Took you thirty minutes,” said Michelle. “It’s a whopper. My turn next.”

Dad had cut the engines and climbed down from the bridge. “Sure, next one’s yours but we’ll let that one go. Only need one for the freezer. Beautiful creatures, aren’t they?”

“Yes.” Jason rubbed his cramped muscles. “What do you think it weighs? Fifty?”

“Kilos? No. Pounds? Maybe. Congratulations, son. You beat me – I was in my teens before I landed my first fifty-pounder.” Dad shivered. “Where’d that wind come from?”

Jason had felt it too. Then it was gone. A dark strip lined the horizon. Probably only a change in water depth, he thought, turning back to help Dad stow the fish in the side locker.

Suddenly a shadow swept over Lady Lee.

A cold wind rippled Jason’s T-shirt. Goosebumps prickled his arms. He looked up. An umbrella of dense clouds roiled and swirled towards the motor yacht from all sides. Pea-size raindrops stung him on the head and shoulders.

“Pa! We got trouble.”

“What the…?” Dad slammed the fish locker shut. “Get in the cabin! Quick!”

The clouds closed in at speed, blotting out the sun. A howling wind engulfed Lady Lee. Heaving waves sent her rolling from side to side.

Jason clung to the handrail. Straining to see through the now blinding rods of torrential rain, he struggled towards the cabin door.

Ahead of him, Michelle held it open. He could barely see her frightened, rain-streaked face. “Come on, Jason!”

He inched towards her outstretched hand. Then a hard shove in the back sent him flying into her. They stumbled into the cabin.

Behind them, Dad forced the cabin door shut and rammed the bolt home.

“What’s happening, Ron?” Mum shrilled, clinging to the table.

Dad didn’t stop. He vaulted the table and rushed up to the wheel. “Hang on, Jean. Kids, check the portholes!”

Michelle secured the two within reach, then huddled close to her mum.

Jason checked the other portholes. A wild roll flung him against the bulkhead. The cabin lights flickered and died. He clung to the nearest stanchion and flipped the light switch. Nothing. Lady Lee rolled again. Angry, white-crested waves tossed her back. Loose ornaments and paperbacks flew off the shelves.

Jason prayed the engines would start; if Lady Lee could face round into the wind they stood a chance. A sickening lurch hurled him against the cabin door. His elbows hurt. He needed something soft. He tossed seat cushions to Michelle. “Haul the blankets and stuff out. Use it as padding. Your head. The table, whatever.”

A sizzling flash of lightning lit up the cabin. Close on its heels, a deafening thunderclap attempted to shake Lady Lee apart. Jason shot a scared glance at a porthole. Visibility zero. He braced himself. Two pillows and a cushion kept the table edge at bay.

Vibrations under his feet filled him with fear that Lady Lee was breaking up. Then he realized Dad must have got the engines started. His spirits soared at the surge of two hundred horsepower. That should get Lady Lee round. His cold fingers
gripped the table edge. “Please, Lady, please.”

Above the fury of the storm and the roar of the engines powering up, he heard Dad’s yell. “Come on, Lady! Turn! Come on!”

Lady Lee rolled way over. She lurched back. Then, an anguished cry from the bridge. “No! Please. No-o-o!”

The engine vibrations stopped.

A cold hand pinched Jason’s heart. Why had the engines stopped?

Dad punched the red distress button and faced into the cabin. The pale emergency lighting showed the anguish on his face. “Power’s gone. Wheel’s locked. She won’t move!”

Jason’s knuckles turned white. Dad couldn’t be serious. No power or steering put Lady Lee – and them – at the mercy of the storm.

The shrieking wind drowned his dad’s voice. “Hold on! We’ll have to ride it out until…”

To a succession of lightning flashes and peals of thunder, the storm intensified. Relentless rain hammered the cabin roof, demanding it be granted admittance.

Jason buried his head in the pillows. He jammed his feet against the table legs. A stomach-churning forward pitch accompanied Lady Lee’s next roll. She swung upright. Then rolled the other way. To Jason’s horror the roll refused to correct itself. He heard the frantic shouts of his dad, mum and Michelle, and then the shelving and cupboard contents showered down on him.

With a groan of agony, Lady Lee flipped over. Jason’s world turned upside down. And blackness charged out of the mayhem.

Good stuff here from W.M. His prose is generally fine. There are bits here and there where an editor would want to get in with the blue pencil: "The flip-flop of running sandals announced company... From the corner of one eye he glimpsed his twin sister Michelle’s cut-off jeans" - could he not just glimpse his twin sister Michelle? Or the 'suddenly' at the start of the storm, or the rain asking to be granted admittance. Little things that don't quite work. But in the main it's fine. The storm scene, with its short punchy sentences, is well done.

There's not a lot wrong here, without getting to the level of line editing, which I'm not going to do. For all that, it doesn't have the sort of really special style that would make me sit up and take notice purely in terms of technical skill. The really important thing, then, is story, and that would be what determines its chances of publication.

I've read the synopsis, in which the twins find themselves transported to a magical kingdom, and are involved in the search for a wizard who can help them get home (shades of Oz) and in the rescue of a kidnapped princess. Finally the wizard, the twins, and their friends are caught up in some sort of cosmic battle with an otherworldly monster.

There are some good character ideas - I like the idea of the wizard's secretary, bespectacled, bun-haired Miss Quilldipper, who is small enough to fit inside a pocket. It all seems to be quite traditional and gentle, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but which might make it a tougher sell to cynical, gimlet-eyed editors (thank you, by the way, WM, for not having written a trilogy. They're such a dismal prospect, in the main.)

If this crossed my desk, I'd give it four or five chapters in which to be thrilling and original, I think. A solid effort which (like a few sent to me so far) would need to be read into further.

A slightly better look?

2005-08-17T00:07:00.000+01:00

The irrelevant Easter Island statue stares deep into your very soul. At this rate I will have to learn some HTML, curses.

Why not go and Ask Unca Mike? I'll be back tomorrow with some more of your writing.

Poor Tom's a-cold

2005-08-16T13:54:00.000+01:00

Something from Batgirl here, set in 1627. I've taken the liberty of adding some italics here and there.

Tom huddled under the eaves, hands tucked close to his body for warmth, water dripping coldly off the thatch onto his elbows and bare feet. It'd be night soon, and they'd be calling him again, trying to draw him from the chalked circle that kept him from walking into their jaws. If they could find him, that circle'd do naught to keep them out, they'd pluck him from it and suck him like a marrowbone. He'd seen what was left from that.

Damn you to hell, damn you, you said you'd teach me, seven year safe you promised me and bare five of it gone. Devil take thee.

The devil had, too, but his master walked abroad by night still, and he'd have Tom if Tom stepped wrong.

Damn you, you might have let me go free from the bond.

Death cancels all debts, men said, but he felt the blood-bond yet, and his master would all his blood this time.

He must finish this before dark, and make himself safe elsewhere. The door was barred, he knew, so he glanced quickly at the window above him, the shutters open for what poor light was left in the day, and went straight up the wall to it, his calloused fingers and toes digging into the scabby plaster, clinging to the lath where it showed, hooking over the timbers, with a charm muttered under his breath to keep him from falling. He'd tumbled through the window onto the floor within before seeing that he'd reached it.

O let this not be where he waits for me.

He scarce knew whom he prayed to; Our Lord never having taken much interest in Tom that he could prove, and the Devil taking more interest than he'd ever sought. Quickly, quickly, night was coming on, he could feel it, more than he felt the scraped shins and elbows from the climb and the bruises from the wooden floor, or even the hunger that griped his belly. It was another's hunger that drove him, not his own. He rolled to his feet and looked about the room, that had once been his own and a refuge. His clothes he'd abandoned, the cup and platter, but the spoon he'd taken for the silver of it.

He stepped as light as he could into the next room, where the ladder led up to the attic, fighting a sure seeing that his master waited there for him, smiling and gaping his mouth wide and wider that Tom might step inside, no more running and hiding, no more.

There was no one, for it was day yet. The grey light seeped through the glass mullions above the shutters, these closed and barred, not warped out of true as Tom's had been, so the bar had never fit snug.

Up the ladder he went now, his belly quaking, and if he'd had aught within he'd have spewed it up as he lifted the trapdoor and rose into the close dark below the thatch. O let him not be here or let his sleep be so deep he never knows I've come here. Could they walk by day? Could they rise by day an it were dark enow where they lay? Would he even lie here, where he might be sought by those who knew or guessed his nature?

All was silent and still, but that proved naught. He waited hanging on the rungs, ready to let himself fall if clawed hands caught at him, knowing even that unhindered fall would be too slow. His eyes found light spreading from the opening he stood in, and no great casket or tun was here, no shrouded shape that kept the small light out. He breathed once more and scuttled into the low room, able without thought to snatch up the books and bound packets that his master had sent him for so many times. By times he felt the pricking in his fingers that warned of wards and tracings, and those he let lie, that his master not send to find them and find him thereby. The others he stowed in his slop breeches.

Here take I my rights, for my two years thou cozened of me. Here take I arms against thee, for my life. Quickly quickly, an thou'd stay quick thyself, Tom.

He would to take more, for his anger and hurt, but his life and breath weighed greater, so he dropped through the trapdoor and slid down the ladder, his feet striking the wooden floor with a hard slap. Glancing round the room below, he marked that the light was weaker, paused a moment before the door, as if his hunters could after all be heard by their breath did they wait for him in his former chamber, then gathered himself and flung into it.

Dare he take his jack? It was murdering cold and wet without, but if it were spelled--. He ran his fingers over it and felt no tracing, then reckless threw the jack on and seized his shoes and hosen as well, stuffing them in his shirt, and was out the window again, careless now of his grip on the rotting plaster and lath.

Out from that treacherous shelter and splashing through the foul puddles on the street, muttering a see-naught charm as he ran, though that held only for mortal eyes. Better not to forget those, natheless. A 'Ware Thief shouted by one who'd seen a ragged dirty boy come out a window with his shirt stuffed heavy of what was never his own, that would have him held after dark here, or hidden up where he wouldn't choose, trapped where they'd smell his blood and find him.

Tears ran down his face with the rain, both unheeded. Now was he in worse case than five years gone, when he'd no master and no roof, but neither had he been blood-bound to one who'd have him for meat. How far need he go to be safe? How long would they seek him? What recourse could he find?

Batgirl says: "I’d like to know whether it makes for a strong beginning, whether the character is someone the reader can care about, whether the period language is too confusing, and that sort of thing. I'm gathering opinions as to whether this looks like something that could become a stand-alone story. It started off as backstory for a secondary character in another novel, and for a while was the prologue of that novel, but the beta-readers recommended cutting it."

I like this very much indeed. It certainly makes for a strong beginning. There’s a compelling horribleness to the prospect of Tom being sucked dry like a marrowbone, and it drives forward at a fair old clip. I particularly like the fact that the salient features of the world and of Tom’s situation are dropped in unobtrusively but effectively. It’s a good place to start the story.

Can the reader care about Tom? Sure, why not? From this bit, he’s a poor kid trying to escape from a ravening hellbeast. There’s not a lot more to the character here, but it’s probably not the place for that sort of thing.

The period language: it’s my favourite thing about this. It gives the extract real flavour. One of the nicest things to see in a manuscript is a distinctive voice; so many things you read have the same competent, plodding voice, but this is something strange and interesting and skilful. Kids will find it hard, if this is YA, but at least it isn’t patronising them.

That said, Batgirl might have to compromise now and again over stuff like “Could they rise by day an it were dark enow where they lay?”, which is lovely, but tough for anyone. With a bit of careful recasting the flavour can be preserved without scaring off the reader (or indeed a publisher).

Coupla line-edit-type things for what it’s worth. “Damn you, you might have let me go free from the bond” – not great as a one-line para. “and his master would all his blood this time.” – archaic use of would particularly difficult. “so he glanced quickly at the window above him” – ‘glanced’ seems an odd choice. “He'd tumbled through the window onto the floor within before seeing that he'd reached it.” – tense? “His clothes he'd abandoned, the cup and platter, but the spoon he'd taken for the silver of it.” – didn't understand this the first time I read it, needs to be clearer. “The grey light seeped through the glass mullions above the shutters, these closed and barred, not warped out of true as Tom's had been, so the bar had never fit snug.” – sort of a run-on sentence. “as if his hunters could after all be heard by their breath did they wait for him in his former chamber” – this clause makes it too long a sentence. Could put this ominous bit somewhere else.

Overall: very promising.

The City of Seasons

2005-08-16T00:33:00.000+01:00

OK, I lied, but this is the last one for tonight. Mistri’s fantasy The City of Seasons here. I’m guessing YA, but it’s 100,000 words long, so some editing to do, methinks.

The City of Seasons

Part One -- Summer

The City of Seasons lay like a splendid blot upon the landscape of Thacar. It looked beautiful, from afar (and many claimed the same up close), yet it reminded all Thacarites that their beloved country was in decay. For the city was all that remained of the glorious past, and some wanted it buried forever.

Can I just break in here? Mistri calls this the mini-prologue, and says she’s not sure if she will include it or not. Mistri, please don’t! It does nothing besides vaguely allude to some of the conflicts of the book you’re about to read, and contains the phrase ‘splendid blot on the landscape’, which is just horrid. I don’t think she will use it; Mistri said she partly included it because it amused her I was getting so much prologue-d material. I’m quite surprised myself, because they rarely add anything. This reads like something cooked up for the back cover.

Anyway, on to…

Chapter One

They were calling me a fraud? I looked up at the clerk behind the Academy's front desk, but couldn't begin to express my confusion. I stared at him blankly.

“We're sorry Miss Ardent, but we simply cannot accept your application at this time. Not until you supply us with the proper documentation.”

“But I've already given it to you. My application to the scholars, my maja-essay, and my birth information.”

He shook his head. “Not quite.” He pulled something out from under a towering stack of work. Yellowed and torn around the edges, it could only be my birth papers. He pointed at the first few lines of writing. “See here. The registrars in this quarter have never phrased this segment of the birth document in this way. Also, this word is misspelled: very sloppy. Finally, we cannot trace the name of this registrar to anyone in this city.”

What he was saying began to sink in. I'd dreamed of joining Summer's Scholar Academy since the earliest days I remembered.

“Maybe,” I said, my voice strained, “maybe they used a registrar from outside of the city.”

He snorted, and his disapproval came at me in waves. “We at the City of Seasons do not look Outside for skilled workers. There is no need.”

“What does this mean?” Holding the birth document up to my eyes, my hands shook so much I could barely read the lettering. I put it down on the desk again and willed my eyes to keep any tears at bay.

“It means your birth document is a fake. We cannot include fraudulent material in any application to the Academy, and consequently, your application will have to be delayed until you can provide verifiable documentation.”

He stood still and folded his arms. What was I to do now?

“Miss Ardent,” he started.

“Espe, my name is Espe,” I said.

“Espe. I have to see other potential students now.”

I grabbed my fake document and turned around, legs trembling with both anger and sadness all the while. I stumbled towards the door and headed out into the blistering heat.

It was a long walk from the one side of the quarter to the other, but I didn't have the coin to hail a cart to take me home and in any case, carts rarely moved far from the city centre. I winced at the smell lingering on the hot air. Much of the city stank during my most favourite of seasons. Despite being an overwhelmingly prosperous community (so my father always said), the Council of Firsts and Seconds had never figured out quite how to staunch the all-pervading and usually indescribable stench.

I strode towards home, wrapped up in my own thoughts. I barely noticed the parents telling their children to be quiet, or the lovers who walked so close together they might as well be one. Instead, I saw my dreams dying, and didn't understand why. Perhaps the Academy clerk had made a mistake. But that was unlikely, especially after everything he had pointed out to me.

In the district where my parents lived the pathways were dry, dusty and empty; my hair stuck to my head and sweat trickled down the back of my neck. As much as I enjoyed the warmer weather, summer had its downsides, not that I'd ever admit them to anyone from Spring, Autumn or Winter. Of course, if I got into the Scholar Academy, I'd get to learn more about its upsides. More about the magic a season could hold.

It sounds arrogant perhaps, but I really did love Summer above all the other quarters. Winter had its towers, Spring its gardens and Autumn its festivals, but Summer was mine and nothing else mattered. I couldn't help but smile whenever I was in my home quarter, even at my lowest. And the opportunity to learn advanced Summer maja had been my only goal for the longest of times.

I'd had a basic magical grounding throughout my early schooling, of course, but I wanted to specialise in academic maja, and I could only do that at the Scholar's Academy. I couldn't bear the thought of not being able to go. Even having to defer for a year would near kill me.

Why did I have a forged birth document? It didn't make any kind of sense. My parents lived a fairly mundane life. Nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to them, as far as I knew. Did they know about this? I shook my head. Something was very definitely wrong here, and that scared me.

I stopped when I reached home. There was movement through the windows: my parents had guests. A moment later, someone exited the house. As the figure came into focus, I recognised Maura, my godmother and relaxed a little. We'd never been close, but she'd known my parents for almost forever. She didn't see me until she came onto the pathway, and jerked roughly before giving a weak smile.

“It is a pleasure to see you,” she said.

“And you,” I replied.

She shrugged slightly and started to walk past me. “Goodbye, dear.”

I didn't say goodbye back.

So what’s going to happen? Luckily I have a synopsis. Here’s the City of Seasons, a city-cum-magical university divided into four specialist areas. I can’t quite tell from the synopsis if there are complicated Jack-Vanceish differences of custom and temperament between them. (The synopsis was dashed off by Mistri for my benefit – thanks Mistri – so no criticism is intended of her synopsising skills.) The King of the surrounding area wants to destroy the City, as it represents a threat, and so has formed a long-range plan; he’ll plant a child in each quarter, enhancing their magical powers by ancient and forbidden ‘birth magic’, and manipulate them into destroying it from within at adulthood.

The kids (now teens, I’m guessing) discover each other and then find themselves threatened by the King, who now sees them as a threat (not sure why), and then they band together with the King’s army to save the City from raiders, after which the King’s changed his mind again and wants two of the children to set up a second magical school.

The plot needs to be stronger and clearer. At a couple of points the survival of the protagonists is just down to the whim of the King – and he does seem a whimsical fellow. It’s a fifteen-odd-year plan he’s put into effect, and that would have to be shown to be the only possible course of action open to him. When he gets to the end of it he changes his mind twice. There also appears to be a lack of action.

The latter won’t be too much of a problem for Mistri if she is really giving us a great sense of place, full of colour and detail. If I can namecheck Jack Vance for the third time today, look at how he creates a fantasy world in Lyonesse or The Eyes of the Overworld, or look at Gene Wolfe in The Shadow of the Torturer showing us his marvellous cities. Astonishing travelogues can take a fantasy novel a long way. I can’t tell from this excerpt if it’s going to be a strength of the book, but it would be criminal to waste a fertile idea like a City of Seasons.

Mistri has maybe missed opportunities here and there, going by this excerpt. She needs to make us feel the amazing City all around us. What sort of place is it? What sort of people inhabit it, and what are their idiosyncrasies? What’s the clerk’s office like here?

You’re right at the start of a novel and you want to get a sense of place. It’s a fantasy, so Mistri can go hog-wild with it if she wants to. But here there are only a few images. There’s a stack of papers, a cart, a smell (‘staunch the stench’, incidentally, is an unhappy phrase), some allusions to gardens and towers and festivals. Let’s see some more cool stuff.

Where would a clerk be plying his trade? In a little dusty candle-lit office full of papers? Well, kind of predictable, and we could see that any day in our real lives, no need to have it in fantasy fiction too. Why not have them in a grand sort of Gothic cathedral, seated on carved thrones. The clerk’s dry and by-the-book, anything but outlandish, so let’s set up some contrast to heighten that characterisation. Have them draped in weird robes or wearing a strange hat. You only need one image to do the job here. Maybe sunlight through stained glass windows makes a patchwork quilt of his bald scalp. Whatever the setting, it just needs something to make it vivid.

What are the mannerisms of the people in the story? Mistri could try acting out the clerk’s lines, improvising a bit, trying to get something – a gesture, a look – that adds some flavour to the scene. Or, what does the narrator see when she first steps out onto the street? Is it some sort of boringly generic middle-ages fantasy city, or are we going to see towers so tall there’s snow on the top of them, a huge statue covered in flowers on the sunny side and casting permanent shadow on the street below, a monorail powered by magic beans, I dunno. It doesn’t have to be massive or even really dwelt on; even a throwaway image is better than nothing. The best kind thwarts genre expectations – I expect that there are no guns in the world of this novel, hence maybe the city watch carry matched duelling pistols. Or maybe they have electricity, but not the wheel. It’s a fantasy! Have extraordinary kinds of fun!

That’s what the prose is crying out for – vivid imagination, the spice and sunshine and cloth of gold that will make each paragraph come to life. Not endless descriptive chunks, of course, but detail woven into the story so that it is a part of it. It’ll keep the interest of the reader for much longer than this version.

As it is, I'd pass on this. It's an exotic and abstract idea for a setting, which is the story's strongest suit, and Mistri is underplaying it.

Backlog clearing

2005-08-15T23:56:00.000+01:00

Hello,

I've got a few things queued up. Mistri, yours is first; W.M.'s "Time Pool" will follow almost immediately; Batgirl and Zolah next; and I've got something else from Julie Worth too.

There will be no more posting tonight seeing as England failed to win the Third Test and I have spent most of this evening in a pub with a Russian.

Source's Code

2005-08-15T16:02:00.000+01:00

Back after being away for the weekend. Here’s a bit of SF from Karen, called Source’s Code:

At Dafydd’s signal, Jack, at the engineer’s console, finished the power-up as Molly reconnected to the ships’ interface. She adjusted the headset, pulling the exterior monitors to eye level before she reattached the finger sensors. This trip had allowed Molly to put the final touches on her bio-integrated piloting system. Once she was hooked in, she was able to control the ship as if she were the ship. She had cut out reaction time and allowed pilot to monitor all vital ships’ systems simultaneously. Molly was planning to sell the system to a USRMC contractor, and Dafydd’s share for giving her free hand with his ship, was an even half.

Dafydd watched the comm screen carefully as Molly prepared for the jump.

“Initialize the jump field and ready... five... four... three... two...”

“Jump engaged... emerging into home space at coordinates... what the hell...”

“Yow!” Jack exclaimed as a sudden wave of turbulence hit their vessel and tumbled it end over end. Molly regained control stabilizing the vessel just kilometers from their emergence point. Dafydd looked at the view screen just as the planetary base of Mabigon exploded into fiery debris. Then the ships’ warning klaxons began to wail. He looked at his systems monitor just long enough to determine the ship was not damaged, then started to rise just as the shockwave from Mabigon slammed the ship. He tumbled over the console, heard a snap, then felt a stab of pain in his left hand.

“Broken,” he thought as he pulled himself up. He closed his eyes momentarily and was able to focus his mental facilities enough to will the pain away. It was a technique that his father had taught him and was one of the disciplines practiced by Avalon natives. He looked about the cockpit and determined that he was the only one with an injury.

“What in the hell is going on out there?” He bellowed above the noise.

“Sir, the fleet is under attack, sir!” Jack shouted in reply.

“That’s ridiculous, there weren’t any open hostilities in the Pelouze sector when we left,” Dafydd said,” as a matter of fact, there weren’t any hostilities brewing in any of the settled sectors. Do you know if they were scheduled for exercises upon return?”

“No, sir!” Ned Taylor announced, and then added, ”Dafydd, those ships don’t match any known design. Those ships aren’t human.”

A third shockwave hit the vessel followed quickly by a fourth. The ship rolled again before stabilizing. Only Molly was able to remain at her station.

“What the hell is going on here?” Dafydd yelled.

“The alien ships are taking apart the fleet, and from a quick scan of the wreckage, not one of the convoy ships is still intact,” observed Molly.

“Life Pods spotted, sir,” piped in a youthful, heavily accented voice,” but there’s a large alien ship that seems to be rounding them up as fast as the ships are destroyed.”

Dafydd turned and nodded to his newest and only earthborn crew member.

“Keep scanning, Jason. Put a tractor on any pod you can without attracting attention. Remember we only have defensive weapons.”

“Yessir!” Jason replied and returned his full attention to the scans.

Dafydd turned his attention to the controls in time to observe a huge alien ship heading toward them. The approach was so close that the spacial wave caused the small ship to rock in its wake. He half turned and shouted to Molly who was again struggling with the stabilizer controls.

“Roll with the shock waves and merge with the debris field to make them think we’re dead. We’ll try to locate any survivors and then we’ll sneak away while they’re occupied,” Dafydd said.

He looked around and saw the expressions on the crew’s faces.

“We’re science-branch and we would have heard if a new contact had been made. These... aliens... have come out of nowhere, it’s obvious that they’re not friendly. We aren’t military, we can’t defend ourselves against that, we’re just not equipped. Hell, even the military has been scaling back on weaponry in favor of long range exploratory facilities.

Aside from trying to find some survivors, we’re getting out of here before those aliens decide that we’re interesting. It’s our duty to report this, don’t you think?” Dafydd looked around at the crew, then continued, ”I seriously doubt USRMC has any idea of what’s happening out here so we better get closer to the center of the United Space Regions, and find some big guns to send back and sort this out.”

Dafydd collapsed in his seat and reached in the panel under the arm rest for a med kit. What he found instead was an extra cache of rations. He patted the box fondly, grateful that he hadn’t let greed completely over come common sense. For once it was likely that food was going to prove more valuable than maltonite. He grimaced, partly from the pain that was beginning to edge back into his consciousness and partly from turning down the impulse laser that could have accompanied the maltonite.

A weapon like that would come in handy if the alien ships decided that they were more than debris. He quickly suppressed the thought. A battle class weapon might actually attract the attention of the attacking vessels. He wondered if he should dump the maltonite, but no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the ship was his by another shock wave which knocked Dafydd from his seat and he hit the deck with his broken wrist. Molly had abandoned her attempts to stabilize the ship and the Shamrock rolled like a lifeless vessel.

A wave of nausea hit Dafydd as he tried to sit up. Motes swam before his eyes and he tried another mental exercise to banish the pain long enough to get to the sick bay. The break wouldn’t heal itself, although he knew tricks to speed up the process once it was properly treated and set. He pulled himself up smiling to himself ruefully. If the ‘Natural Humans’ or even the Deacons from Redemption knew the extent that many abilities had been developed by the people they derisively called ‘Elves’, it would make them more paranoid than they already were.

Karen’s also sent her synopsis in so I can see where this is going next.

I love SF. That said, I don’t think this is a particularly excellent example of the genre. The prose is a bit loose (the clunky first line, trying to pack too much in to a sentence, is a good example) but mostly it doesn’t seem to have the big idea that distinguishes the best SF from the run-of –the-mill.

Essentially, a dimensional breach lets an alien invasion force into human space, and the aggressive bad guys start to take over planets. They appear to be stripping them systematically of their natural resources; the synopsis mentions water, which seems odd as water is one of the most abundant compounds in the galaxy (and pretty simple to get hold of if you have interstellar travel.) These days I’d expect the bad guys to be processing the planets into computronium or something.

The crew of intrepid little starship the Shamrock is caught up in the initial invasion and the rest of the book is spent as they evade the aliens, find their way back to friendly territory, and then go on a mission to save a science team. The book ends with the aliens undefeated (there’s a trilogy in the works) and the humans beginning to train pilots to use the prototype ship technology alluded to in this excerpt.

Karen’s synopsis is pretty long and dense, and despite that doesn’t contain much that will excite a jaded editor. The whole thing feels rather dated; the crew being hurled about, seatbeltless, in the excerpt, is something that Star Trek watchers have been chuckling about for years, and you might have caught the flavour of the Millennium Falcon at Alderaan in it too. It’s the Trek feel that predominates here. Is Daffyd’s seat with the handy little cupboard in it Captain Kirk’s?

When I see something like this

If the ‘Natural Humans’ or even the Deacons from Redemption knew the extent that many abilities had been developed by the people they derisively called ‘Elves’, it would make them more paranoid than they already were.

I worry that the ostensibly pejorative term might be a way to smuggle Legolas in to an SF novel, apologetically. (Even if not, it’s a naked bit of exposition.)

Nothing dates so quickly as the future. Karen’s bad guys are a symbiotic/parasitic dual species that reminds me strongly of Jack Vance’s The Brave Free Men, from back in 1973 – and you’d never call Vance the most cutting-edge of authors. (One of my favourites, nevertheless.)

Neither the prose nor, I’m afraid, the story, look likely to create the sense of wonder that SF buffs will be looking for. If it’s thrillingly told, there might be a niche for it.

A last note: Source’s Code is 106,000 words long. That could well be twice as long as is warranted.

The Chosen One

2005-08-12T14:12:00.000+01:00

'Alaska Matt' has sent in this short prologue (aaagh! prologues!) for an SF novel.

Overhead, a bird's wing beats broke the night's silence. Phoenix listened until the desperate flutters faded away over the jungle canopy. He knew what would come next: first a predatory howl, then the screams. He glanced over his shoulder. Half-obscured by hanging vines and twisted boles, he saw the village huts cowering in their clearing, metal roofs reflecting starlight. He wondered how long it would take for the predators to arrive. Not long. A rush of wind stirred the ferns to either side of the path; dark scales glinted as they passed between the shadows. Not long at all. Nervously, Phoenix hiked his backpack up on his shoulders and continued.

As he worked his way east, he heard the first cries risebehind him. Feral snarls in a familiar tongue sounded through the wind-stirred branches. Phoenix tried hard to put the sounds out of mind as his fear drove him deeper into the jungle.

In the air ahead, a ghostly woman materialized. Her black, tattered, hooded cloak obscured her face with shadows. Phoenix recognized her anyway.

It's good to find you alive, she said, her voice flowing smoothly into his mind.

Phoenix's eyes traced the outlines of the undergrowth, searching for the sleek outline of a tooth-filled snout. To his relief, he saw nothing. Only the woman walking along the path in front of him.

"I may not survive the night," he said. "They have come to this village, too."

Under the shadow of the woman's hood, Phoenix glimpsed a smile. You've survived worse encounters with them before. The smile disappeared; a concerned look replaced it. Why have you not come to Bereas, Phoenix? You would be safe here.

Phoenix blinked. In the darkness behind his eyelids, her apparition remained clear. She was projecting herself into his mind.

"I'll never set foot in your city," he answered. "I know you mean well, but I won't let you use me to destroy the Key."

There is one who will.

Phoenix breathed a heavy sigh as he ducked under a curtain of twisted vines. "It will be a long time before he comes to this world."

But he will come. Whether it be six years or six hundred, he will come. And when he does, I will greet him.

Phoenix said nothing as he pulled himself over the top of a decrepit, moss-covered log. He slid off the rotting mass of wood and landed in a dense mat of ferns and dead leaves. Brushing away the worst of the mess, he continued down a narrow gulley cut into the ground by a recent storm. The old woman followed.

Phoenix, do you despise me?

He stopped. "No," he grunted. "But I despise what you want to do. When the Wielder comes, I'm going to find him. I won't let you throw away all that we've accomplished here."

Then there is no purpose to our conversation, she said. Remorse dwelled in her
words. I really do mean well, Phoenix.

"I know," he said, starting down the gulley again. By the times the words left his mouth, the old woman had vanished. A rush of air filled the place where she'd stood. Far behind, the last cry in the village died away; ferns rustled as the predators streamed back into the jungle.

Determined to survive, Phoenix pushed forward.

Is Matt going to be getting all Thomas Covenant on us here - the man or woman who comes to the secondary world as a saviour? (TC was known as the Wielder now and again, too.) I can imagine Chapter One, in which we meet the protagonist, who through occult or scientific means gets hurled into the alien landscape of Chapter Two, where the plot begins.

Just going on the assumption that is indeed what's about to happen, can I declare a personal allergy to Prophecies and Chosen Ones? They're all over genre fantasy (particularly) like a cheap suit. For me, they tend to kill tension, and provide a lazy way for the author to move the plot about.

I can take it in 'Dune', because that's all about precognition and people being unglued in time to some extent, but imagine how much Lord of the Rings would have sucked if there had been some sort of Ancient Scroll right from the beginning, that told us in a bunch of tricksy rhyming metaphors that Frodo was going to defeat Sauron and it was all going to be OK. (Fine, people were expecting Aragorn to pop up with his reforged sword and the Witch King gets his Macbeth-style, all that, but the overall fate of Middle Earth is in the balance. Galadriel doesn't have too many comforting visions for Frodo in her mirror.)

Isn't it more exciting if there isn't that crutch to lean on? Really, what's the appeal of the Chosen One?

Last thing on the actual story: 'Phoenix'? Not a very believable name. I'm not saying he has to be called Nigel, but it's hard to take him seriously as it is.

On the writing: it needs some tightening up. A really picky rewrite would do a lot for this. Among the little things I'd be looking at: "desperate flutters" (why desperate?); "He knew what would come next" (because of the bird, or because of something we haven't been around to see?); "a predatory howl" (if you're generally referring to them as 'the predators', find a less redundant adjective); "cowering in their clearing" (a clunky bit of alliteration, not to mention the 'pathetic fallacy'); "feral snarls in a familiar tongue" (can feral snarls be verbal?); "a ghostly woman materialized" (quite a matter-of-fact way to describe something very spooky and outlandish); "rotting mass of wood" (redundant since we had "decrepit moss-covered log" in the previous sentence; pick one); "Remorse dwelled in her words" (ugh.)

I'm getting picky because there are moments of good style here, but the awkward or fuzzy bits really take the shine off. Needs more attention to detail. As a publisher, I'd be looking at this manuscript and thinking that I'd have to do so much editing at sentence level that the story would have to be a real humdinger to make it worthwhile.

Serial Killers and S&M

2005-08-10T20:57:00.000+01:00

Clotje’s sent me the start of her thriller, a serial killer story set in the S&M community. It’s 3000 words long, so I’m not going to post the lot of it, but you can read it here in its entirety.

We start off back in 1983, in a pretty horrid situation:

The teenage boy glared at his drunken foster father lying on the sofa. Hate welled up inside him as he watched the fat bastard snore, drool dripping from the left side of his open mouth. The stench of stale cigarette smoke, sweat and flat beer made it hard to breathe. The boy moved carefully around the room, stepping over the numerous empty beer bottles, full ashtrays and newspaper stacks. Yeah right, he thought, as if the old man ever read anything. The only thing he ever read - if you could call it that - was Playboy magazine.

It becomes obvious that the father has been abusing the boy and his sister, and so the boy sets fire to the house, burning him to death.

This is another prologue. (Three in a row!) For a really strong hook for a thriller, I suggest getting in to the action right away, starting the book at the point that our protagonist becomes involved in the plot of the book. Take the seminal serial killer novel, Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. From memory, this starts off with Jack Crawford asking our hero Will Graham to help him on a terrifying new case. That’s a great hook. We know about as much as Will at this point, and have an opportunity to get to know him as he reacts to the facts of the case.

Here, I am guessing we’re seeing the serial killer’s back story right up, and we won’t get back to his/her plot for a while yet. Harris likes to put the killer’s back story way to the end of the book. That way, the book still retains some of the features of the traditional mystery thriller – a whydunit instead of a whodunit.

Stylistically, there’s probably a little too much squalor here, and Clotje’s in danger of actually repelling the reader. If there’s a general style point to be made, it’s that too much detail is sometimes the enemy of description. For example, referring to the ‘cheap synthetic fabric’ feels redundant, given that we’ve already got a good sense of the place. Or, the ‘liquor filled slumber’ – we know he’s dead drunk, so saying this feels like hitting the guy’s unpleasantness rather too hard.

The story breaks off with the boy watching the flames devour the room, and then we’re in 2004. A woman called Andie is waking up with a hangover.

She felt as if she had been run over by a truck. The room still seemed to be spinning and the light hurt her eyes. She had a splitting headache and her mouth felt as if she had eaten cotton balls the night before. She vowed she would never drink so much wine again. The bedroom smelled as if she had been marinating in garlic all night. In retrospect that Take-away with extra garlic sauce proved to be a bad idea. She opened her eyes again to have a look at the alarm clock and cursed when she saw the time. Only ten minutes left before she was due at New Scotland Yard.

Again, might be too much of the hangover here. Over the next few paragraphs we hear about her bloodshot eyes, pounding head, sensitive skin and all sorts of symptoms. As a reader, I’m keen for her to get to work so that the plot can get going, but she has a hard time of it.

She scanned the street to see if she could spot an empty cab somewhere. Cars were racing by in the rush hour traffic but not one cab was to be seen. Typical. Andie started sprinting to the tube station instead of wasting any more time, dodging pedestrians left and right, all on their way to work. She prayed that the Northern Line would be running without problems for once.

After leaving the tube station she ran down Broadway towards Victoria Street and New Scotland Yard. Her head was pounding in time with her heartbeat. Her throat hurt from gasping for air and the pain in her side alerted her that she’d have to slow down. A little voice in her head was mocking her, reminding her that it had been months since she had been to the gym.

Andie, I hear you about the Northern Line.

Clotje could probably cut straight in to Scotland Yard. This sort of scene isn’t really appropriate at the beginning of a thriller, being, as it is, the sort of thing I go through every Monday morning. If this were a film, it might take up 30 seconds of screen time and serve to establish Andie as a slightly ditzy, Bridget Jones-y character. We’d probably be surprised when she turns up at the Yard. (Actually, why not conceal her job until she gets there?) But here, it takes a thousand words or two, and that’s a bit long.

When she gets there, it turns out that she’s a DI and we meet the new member of her team, Dave Jameson. It’s very jarring to suddenly shift into Dave’s POV here.

He waved her apology aside. “I want you to meet your new team member, Detective Sergeant Dave Jameson. He’s just moved to London. Done a good job in Exeter. He’s the officer responsible for solving the Tiverton killer case.”
Now it was Andie’s turn to raise her eyebrows. She couldn’t believe this was the same guy the media had named “the pit-bull”. She walked towards him to shake his hand.

A knock at the door interrupted Dave’s conversation with DCS Jenkins. It opened and a slim redhead with blazing eyes entered. A tea stain, the size of a football, covered the front of her blouse, which was probably the reason that she looked like a volcano about to erupt. She was a petite woman; he guessed little more than five feet on high heels.

For a fleeting moment Dave wondered if she was a member of his new team but dismissed the idea immediately. He was gob smacked when he heard DCS Jenkins introduce her. Not only was she in his team, even worse, she was his new boss. Dave tried hard to suppress a groan. How could someone like that be in charge? Not only did she look like she was nurturing a hangover, she was also an hour late for work.

I think this book needs just one POV, really. You can do two or more but it’s best to keep them separate; if they collide all the time it can be difficult. Especially as we have ditched Andie entirely and Dave now starts thinking about a tiff with his lover Chris:

“Thanks.” Dave didn’t know what else to say to her. Best not encourage her by getting too friendly. He had noticed the absence of a wedding band and he was in no mood for unnecessary complications. He had left all of that behind in Exeter. As he watched Rose sashaying back to her desk, he remembered the final altercation he had had with his lover Chris.

“I don’t believe it. I just bloody can’t believe it. This is the third time you’ve cancelled our trip. What the hell do you think a relationship is? Do you think I’m just here for you to shag whenever you feel horny? To cook for you and do your laundry like a housemaid? Do you think-”

Dave interrupted the waterfall of angry words. “You know that I don’t think that. Christ, you knew what my job was when we got involved. Weren’t you the one who said that you wouldn’t make demands on me like that? I thought we agreed from the beginning that my work came first when I I’m in the middle of-“

One difficulty is that I don’t really know who the hero of this book is yet, or what the story is, and already there are some subplots brewing up. So, structurally, the book is going to need some work.

Clotje might have to have a good comb through for cliché and the odd infelicitous phrase, too. For example, ‘Gob-smacked’ is not that lovely; ‘the waterfall of angry words’ seems a bit off to me.

There might well be a great story here – without seeing a synopsis, it’s hard to tell. I’d suggest there’s a lot of work ahead before this is ready to be sent out.

Crikey, three in a row.

2005-08-09T23:55:00.000+01:00

Three bits of writing popped into my inbox over the last hour. It's midnight now, so I'm going to bed, but I'll respond to these tomorrow. Thanks to W.M., C.J. and K for submitting their work.

The Irrelevant Death of Jack Murphy

2005-08-09T20:22:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Julie Worth, who has sent the first chapter of a thriller. Julie says it's "the coming of age story of a boy whose father may be a serial killer."

As Jack Murphy held his hand in the sun, a few specks glinted in the deep crevices of his palm. He dipped it in the clear water of the shallow pan, then poured the half-ounce of fluid with its tiny flakes of alluvial metal into a silk pouch. The silk allowed the water to seep out, leaving only scintillating dust. That was his method, born of necessity. He panned because he had no mercury for amalgamation.

Murphy had once dreamed of striking it rich, but after a year living in a lean-to with only a hinny and a horse for company, that dream had faded. His endless swirling of the pan produced just enough gold for supplies and an occasional night of drinking and seven-card in the saloons of Tent Town, more than twenty miles away. The dirty-white tents were long gone by the time Murphy arrived, replaced by unpainted wooden buildings, bordered by narrow plank sidewalks, raised above the often muddy streets.

In Digger’s Supply, Murphy stood at a glass covered counter, watching a big man by the name of Little Sweet as he weighed weeks of Murphy’s hard work on a beam scale. Murphy didn’t trust the man or his balance, so he asked Sweet to switch the square of tissue and its tiny pile of gold with the brass weights.

“Do what?” Sweet said, his stool squeaking under him.

“No offence, but I’d like you to put gold there, and brass there.” Murphy indicated what he wanted by wagging an index finger. “And we’ll see.”

Sweet did as he was told, carefully lifting the small items with his corpulent hands, smiling so broadly that Murphy knew he had to be crooked. The scale again balanced. Still, Murphy suspected that, somehow or other, Sweet was cheating him.

“You satisfied?” Sweet said, holding up his pink, unlined palms. “Why don’t you trust me?”

“Well,” Murphy said, “I had to see, ‘cause this ain’t all there is.”

One of Sweet’s eyebrows twitched, his expression otherwise bland. “You got more?”

“Not with me.” Looking first at the two men at another counter, Murphy leaned forward and whispered. “Keep this to yourself.

“Of course.”

“I found it,” Murphy said.

“You found . . . what?”

“A golden Blarney Stone. Weighs three hundred pounds if she weighs an ounce.”

Sweet leaned back and chuckled.

“I’m deadly serious,” Murphy went on. “So anyway, I’ll take my money in dynamite, so I can break it up.”

Sweet stared at him. “You don’t want credit?”

“Don’t need it, Mr. Sweet.”

No doubt figuring Murphy wasn’t smart enough to con him, Little Sweet gave him the dynamite on credit, even though Murphy protested he didn’t need or want credit, because he was rich—soon to be, anyway—and it wasn’t long before the word got around that Jack Murphy had found this enormous nugget. By that evening, Murphy’s money was no good; no one would take it. And everyone was his friend. He got drunk on free whiskey in Leventon’s Saloon, laid by Miss Molly Whitefeather free of charge (if not of syphilis), and obtained his provisions from several merchants on the easiest terms, at their repeated insistence. When he saddled up and left town with his hinny in tow, six of his new friends followed him as he headed out to the west, and dogged his steps as he circled in a big loop back to the east. Murphy was crafty, but his new friends had enlisted a Blackfoot Indian to help them, and so they had little trouble following his tracks.

It was two days later, under a cloudless sky, that Jack Murphy lay dying with a .45 caliber hole in his leg. It was purely in self-defense that Landry Deville had drilled Murphy as the big Irishman came charging out of his lean-to, drunkenly firing away at his friends with a Springfield rifle. Everyone easily believed that, because Irishmen were widely known to be hotheads, drunk or sober. Still, it was a shame, because Murphy never revealed where his golden Blarney Stone was, even though his new friends broke all of his fingers with the butt of a revolver, to help him remember.

Although Murphy had passed on without speaking anything but obscenities, his friends figured it would be easy to find the nugget if it was as big as Murphy claimed, and anyway, where there was one Blarney Stone, there’d be more. These first men were soon joined by others, and a mini-rush was on. Over the next few years, some gold was found, but not much, and certainly not Murphy’s nugget, which many began to suspect was purely imaginary. Still, nearly fifty prospectors worked on, operating the sluice boxes and panning in the nearby river. The occasional thud of dynamite blasts echoed off the hills in the distance, joined later by the hissing steam engines of the Yellow Metal Corporation—the engines that drove the pumps that supplied the jets of high-pressure water the miners used to scour gold from the sandstone cliffs.

A primitive town grew up around those men and their meager profits, the town taking the name of its first sheriff, the dandy but ferocious Landry Deville. People called it Deville’s Town, because Deville kept it under his tight control. Hangings were fairly common until Deville himself got hanged one night by person or persons unknown. After that, it came to be known as Devil’s Flat, same as the surrounding territory. This was rather more appropriate, as it wasn’t where anyone in their right mind would have thought to build a town. There was fertile ground some miles to the south—that would’ve been a good place—but here the land was crumbling sandstone and dust. It never saw much rain due to the peculiar topography of the nearby mountains, which funneled wet air from the Pacific to either side, bypassing the town. In small recompense, nature had meandered a river along the edge of the flats, the same miserly river that gave up the occasional flecks of gold. But the river was deep down in a gorge, far too deep down there to be of much use for irrigation, at least, not until the Yellow Metal Corporation went bankrupt and Captain Vincent Cannon, just home from the splendid little war against the Spanish, had the bright idea of using its rusting steam engines to pump water up to the town.

And so, unlike many gold-rush settlements, this one persevered. Its schools were decent, and many stayed on after graduation, not bothering with college. Perhaps they grew fond of the climate, becoming enamored of the dry wind and the enormous sky. Few under the age of fifty knew of Jack Murphy or his Blarney Stone, or could tell you with any certainty why a town had grown up here, when it could easily have been twenty miles over there. No, it just was. Just one of those places where things were going to happen, so they happened.

We have a similar problem to CP's extract earlier. Where is this story supposed to start? I don't detect anybody in here who is a boy, a father or a potential serial killer. It reads like a scene-setting prologue, and these are often a sign that the author doesn't really know where to begin.

I have an author at the moment who is good at these sorts of prologues; they're used to create atmosphere and maybe set up a teasing little plot point that will pay off later. But by the end of this first chapter, I have no idea of what or who the book is about. There's a story here, but save for the whereabouts of the nugget, it's all resolved by the end.

And Julie's having a little trouble telling that story. Let's look at the first three paragraphs.

The first para is awfully clunky. We're watching Jack Murphy pan for gold and getting too much information. "He panned because he had no mercury for amalgamation" - that's a hell of a thing to run into right at the start of a thriller. It doesn't grab and the prose is awkward.

The second para tells us that he's hard up but just surviving, and then digresses into a description of the town.

The third para has Murphy suddenly in town, about to reveal his wealth to Little Sweet.

Those three paragraphs do not appear to have any sort of connection between them. You want to be swept along into the main flow of the book, but instead you're being switched around from place to place. Actually, it feels like three separate tries at beginning the book, with the third selected as the right time and place.

I quite like the prose. It's a pretty good clear voice and the story of Jack Murphy's death has a good ironic touch or two. Not too woolly, not many wasted words. The difficulty is, what is it trying to tell us?

After Murphy's story's done, I must confess I don't really care for the rest of it. Why would I care about the topography of the area, or the climate, or the schools? Is that really relevant to what the book's about (the serial killer, remember, and the coming-of-age?) Is the Blarney Stone going to be the book's McGuffin? If not, why would I care about the whole of this apparently irrelevant chapter?

Even if Julie is going to use the Stone as a big plot point, there's much to be said for placing all this back story later in the book. Our main character, whoever that is, could go and research the founding of the town, for instance. It might not be that important for the reader to have this information right from the beginning.

If Julie wants to keep this the way it is, then there's going to have to be some sort of plot point left hanging there in plain sight, at the end, to hook in to the next chapter.

As it is, we have "No, it just was. Just one of those places where things were going to happen, so they happened." Ok, so we're in folksy territory here, but that's over the line into meaningless. As a reader of a thriller, I'd like have the feeling that everything I've been reading is slowly revealing the shape of the plot; that every past sin has a bearing on the present. I don't want to feel that things 'just happen because they're going to happen'. That's kind of dispiriting.

To sum up: this is the sort of thing where I'd probably ask to see the next chapter before I decided about rejecting it, because it feels like Chapter 2 might really be where the story starts.

Is this worth going on with?

2005-08-05T13:24:00.000+01:00

Welcome to CP, our first contestant! Let's give her a big round of applause.

Here's what looks like the start of a fantasy story, and CP is wondering if it's worth going on with. It's pretty long; I'd generally prefer slightly shorter than this, but what the hell.

I am three years older than my stepmother Amna. The traveling ballad-singers don't mention the lack of real healing skill in our society—when a woman dies in childbirth in a story, it's always for purely poetic, never physical reasons. My mother died of a fever five days after bringing me, blue and underweight, into a frigid December world. My father, seer to the local lord though he was, could do nothing beyond what the neighborhood midwives had already attempted.

A wet-nurse had already been engaged, so feeding and caring for the now pink and skinny but cheerful infant that I was did not pose an immediate problem. However, as I grew, providing for my care became more of a challenge, as Papa's fortunes waned with his employer's. Serfdom is a primary source of income for the landed upper classes, and though we were not severely affected by the plague which wiped out whole villages in other regions, a famine produced by low crop yields during several successive years caused a drop in the laboring population.

Within a few years, our district had wasted from fat prosperity to thin subsistence, and clearly something drastic had to be done. My father's solution was marriage—a purely business arrangement. The noble Papa attended was likewise inclined to matrimony, for the same financial reason. Lord Calb soon contracted, by means of couriers, negotiators, exchanging portraits and promises of a large dowry, to marry a noblewoman from a nearby principality. They were to be wed once the snow-melt-filled rivers between his land and her father’s were safe to ford.

Papa’s reasons for desiring a second wife were not merely mercenary. I was already almost eighteen, without matrimonial prospects of my own, having no title and no exceptionally pretty face. Papa needed money for himself and for me, another woman to care for the home when I was absent, temporarily or permanently, and a renewed possibility of begetting a son to inherit what entailed property he had been awarded in thanks for his otherwise unremunerated spiritual services. Lord Calb’s coffers being empty, he offered Papa land and the peasants on it, which, I once heard my father remark, were considerably less portable than a stout case of gold pieces.

The merchant class, whom our local working-class guild-members envy, makes its money by bringing goods from the distant East and far south of us. Naturally, some of the people who once lived in those hot climates have migrated northward over the centuries and settled among us. Because they speak different dialects, and worship differently from us, this group has been the object of hate and fear in many places, sometimes, though rarely, even here. In response, our king has established laws protecting them from harm, and offering nobility and riches to those who convert to our faith. In fact, Amna, my lovely stepmother, is the daughter of such a new noble.

My father had to call in many favors owed him over the years by various members of the aristocracy in order to be able to marry Amna. Her father was not eager to part with one of his well-dowried daughters to an unknown seer. But, having heard of my father's great learning, not only in the sciences, but in the arts--that papa even owned two books, vellum-bound--and that he had had me, a girl, instructed in reading and writing (though he could not have known that papa did this in order to speed my way to becoming the head of a religious house, not out of a special urge to see a woman become literate), the careful nobleman blessed the betrothal, and Amna joined our household as its new mistress. She was barely fifteen.

Marna was born ten months later. I assisted at the birth, as I had been doing at the bedsides of rich and poor for some eight years, though I admit that at the age of nine, I wasn't a great deal of material assistance. As a child, my main jobs were to keep hot water ready at all times, to wash out bloody rags, and to try to keep from getting sick at the sight and sound of the whole messy, noisy spectacle. I have become more useful as I've gotten older. Amna stayed in bed to mend for almost two weeks, all the time insisting on nursing the baby herself, which the wet-nurse grimaced at, but endured. Since the nurse was also contracted to another family in the neighborhood, she was not inconvenienced too much.

While Amna was immobile, but for short trips to the pail in the corner which one of the peasant men would dump daily, I acted as her maid, plumping her pillows and helping her to put on a fresh blouse for whenever my father came to call. We talked a lot. Actually, she talked and I listened.

She spoke about the city where she had been born, a metropolis besieged by heat, a place almost unimaginable to me in the middle of our cold climate. She remembered tall stone buildings, great shadowy halls where the merchants would assemble to trade goods and news from their travels. And she recalled the curious quarters of the city: In one district there were twisted alleys into which hypochondriacs emerged at night, coalescing in groups to howl their miseries to passersby, begging hopelessly for cures for their imagined ills. In the green light of the streetlamps, their faces loomed as unnaturally pink orbs with black mouths and eyes, making them even more frightening. At dawn, the ragged bands scattered, and beggars occupied the spots where mental malady ruled at dusk. In another area, the god-makers sculpted images out of tempered glass, and apprentices carried them to the priests to be invested with divine power, which would leave them cool and clean in the most miserable weather. Amna had lived in the flower district, where greenhouses grew roses and the fodder for the animals which supplied milk and meat. She said she missed seeing the god-rainbows most of all.

“What are those?” I wanted to know.

“The gods sit in windows—they catch the light and cool it, and scatter rainbows indoors.”

“Why did your family leave?” I asked.

Amna shifted unhappily. “Our gods broke. My parents came home from the greenhouses one evening and all four of them were lying face down in the street, broken in half. They were hot and covered with dust. This hadn’t happened to anyone before. That night, we left. Mother demanded we go to a place where no one would shame us. But we knew that we shouldn’t go beyond the edge of the trading league—we would need some living. So we came here—it’s the farthest outpost.”

There are two problems with the prose style here, and a wider structural one that suggests it might be the best thing to toss 99% of this extract and rewrite it. That said, let's look at the actual writing before we get in too deep.

We have here a mutant strain of "As You Know, Bob." The one we all know and love has the author dumping exposition on the reader, disguised as a conversation between two characters who both know the information already. When you have a real, natural conversation, there's a set of expectations on both sides; usually that the content is going to be relevant, interesting or practical. "As You Know" conversations fail because of this.

CP's narrator is addressing the reader. It's 1st person, so it's easy to identify that side of the conversation. What CP hasn't done too well is to identify who the reader is. Exactly what kind of information requires laying out in detail? What can remain unsaid? What can we assume Bob the Reader already knows?

Take this, for example:

Serfdom is a primary source of income for the landed upper classes, and though we were not severely affected by the plague which wiped out whole villages in other regions, a famine produced by low crop yields during several successive years caused a drop in the laboring population.

Unless Bob the Reader is the narrator's economics professor, this is not interesting. Or, again:

Since the nurse was also contracted to another family in the neighborhood, she was not inconvenienced too much.

Why would Bob be interested in the possibility that the nurse is inconvenienced? Nobody is interested in that.

So: who is the narrator talking to, and why? When CP knows that, she'll know what is relevant, what is interesting, what is natural for that narrative voice to be saying.

The second stylistic problem here is that sentences are often tripping over themselves in their haste to pack in information.

Lord Calb soon contracted, by means of couriers, negotiators, exchanging portraits and promises of a large dowry, to marry a noblewoman from a nearby principality.

I read 'couriers, negotiators' and expect that the next item on the list is going to be another plural noun. Then I'm tripped up by 'exchanging portraits', because I have read it as 'portraits that are exchanging' instead of 'the exchange of portraits'. Once I've got over that, I find myself thinking that 'exchanging' also modifies 'promises...', which it probably isn't supposed to. By the time I've sorted that out, I've forgotten what the verb was in the first place. So, in telling us four things at once, CP is making it hard to read. Or here:

Papa needed money for himself and for me, another woman to care for the home when I was absent, temporarily or permanently, and a renewed possibility of begetting a son to inherit what entailed property he had been awarded in thanks for his otherwise unremunerated spiritual services

.
CP's telling us about eight different things in this long, troublesome sentence. If this is going to be interesting information, significant to the story, she can afford to unpack it a bit; to give those ten-dollar words a bit of breathing space. Ditto for the sentence beginning: But, having heard of my father's great learning... Ten bits of information there.

Here's the big structural thing: is this the start of the story? What's the story about? I can't tell from this. It seems like CP is not quite sure of what is going to happen, and has decided to start from birth and hang around until something interesting happens. Which, eventually, it does:

“Our gods broke. My parents came home from the greenhouses one evening and all four of them were lying face down in the street, broken in half. They were hot and covered with dust."

There's a genuine bit of strangeness and romance there, but we had to wait awhile to get to it. Actually, Amna's story is the most interesting thing so far. Imagine the difference if the story began:

Our gods broke. My parents came home from the greenhouses one evening and all four of them were lying face down in the street, broken in half. They were hot and covered with dust.

Draws you in, doesn't it? Although "I am three years older than my stepmother Amna" is not a bad first sentence, CP then gets bogged down with the narrator. It might be better to jump right in where this extract ends. (The Last Outpost! A good place for adventures to happen. Anything can happen on the borders. Let's get that to the front.)

There are other nice touches in Amna's story. The hypochondriacs are a spooky idea, but CP probably needs to treat them more elliptically. She could get away with:

She recalled the curious quarters of the city: the twisted alleys into which the hypochondriacs emerged at night, howling.

Or something. The more information, detail, and metaphor she adds, the less effective it becomes; 'Mental malady rules at dusk' is failed-ominous. It sounds like it could be a TV wrestling special: tonight on Channel 62, Mental Malady takes on the Pink Orb!

CP needs to resist the temptation to be tell us everything twice, decide what's important enough to tell us, and tell us once, in the most effective and economical way. (Sorry if I'm repeating myself...!)

CP asks whether it's worth going on with. Well - yes, if there's a good story waiting to be told, then thought and care and polish and practice will bring it to the surface eventually. This is already better than the average slush-pile manuscript. However, to stand a chance of publication, you need something better than the average published manuscript. If CP sent this out as it is and tried to sell it, it'd be rejected. That's the bad news.

Unless you do go on with things, even the fairly unpromising things, you'll never get anything finished; and often it's only when the story's all there that you start to see how to improve the way it's told.

What This Blog is All About

2005-08-04T23:03:00.000+01:00

I edit books for a living. Where I work I manage the slush-pile, among other things, and read hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts every month.

The general level of quality, I'm afraid, is really, really low. Really low. Some of the things I see, it's amazing people will let you see them, really. But the only response I can give in an official capacity is: thanks, but no thanks. If I said what I really think of much of this stuff, it's likely the author would never buy any of our books again.

This is an anonymous blog. You don't know me, I don't know you. I don't have to be polite to you, or fob you off with form letters. If you send me your work, I will give an honest and forthright critique, and an assessment of its chances with a publishing house. All you need to do is email it. And of course: no charge. You might even save yourself the cost of a few stamps.

Anything you send may be posted here, along with my comments, for the amusement or edification of anyone who happens to wander past.

So what do you say? I'm waiting to hear from you.