Karen Sandler

Tag: TANKBORN

  • I Love You, You’re Perfect…Now I’m Gonna Revise You

    rewriting_265x265This week, with November and NaNoWriMo in the rear view mirror, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, How do you approach editing/revising?

    So, here’s the first most important thing about revising. You should write your draft knowing that you not only don’t have to get it perfect the first time through, you’re not expected to get it perfect. That’s one thing about NaNoWriMo that’s pretty great. The demand is so enormous (having to average close to 1700 words a day, every single day of November), you can’t possibly revise as you go. You just have to barrel ahead, getting the words down. But you have that freedom every time you write. You can always fix it later.

    Here’s the second most important thing–nothing that you’ve written is sacred. Nothing. Nothing. Every chapter, scene, paragraph, word, even character must be subservient to the story. If something doesn’t work, even if it worked at first, but in the course of revising is no longer relevant, that beautiful chapter, scene, paragraph, word, or character must go. And you must be ruthless in cutting out that dead weight.

    Here’s the third most important thing about revising. You must approach your revisions as if you were the editor rather than the writer of the book. You must go in there looking for trouble, not expecting a masterpiece. And you should never take it personally. Even the best manuscripts go wrong sometimes.

    Now that we’ve got those three basic musts down, here are a few other things I’ve learned over the course of writing and revising 20+ books.

    1. Give it a rest. After you’ve finished your manuscript, give yourself some time so you can return to it with a fresher eye. How much time? I personally don’t like to go longer than a week, and it’s usually just a few days. But you might need a couple weeks or even a month.
    2. Give it a read and think story as you go. Are the story questions answered? Are all the setups paid off? Is there extraneous material that doesn’t move the story forward? Are there characters who don’t pull their weight? This is where your major revising will be happening, where your bigger problems are solved.
    3. Give it another read and look at characters and details. Are your characters’ actions & dialogue consistent for them? Have you introduced word or phrasing repetitions in the course of your first big revision? Ditto for typos?
    4. Give it a final read. Are there any parts that just don’t flow? Awkward phrasing, expository dialogue, settings that are either overly detailed or not detailed enough? Anything confusing that you think a reader might stumble over or have a problem following?
    5. Let someone else give it a read. If you have a critique group or a beta reader, preferably someone who has never heard about the story, ask them to read it. It has to be someone whose opinion you completely respect and trust. And you have to be open-minded about their feedback.
    6. As needed, give the manuscript one last revision based on reader feedback.

    So is it a hard and fast rule that you must give your book three (and only three, no more, no less) readthroughs? No. But is it necessary to pay attention to all of the above elements while revising? I’d say yeah. If you can do that with one pass through the book, that’s great. As long as you’re reading with an editors eye, and are brutally honest with yourself about what’s working and what’s not.

    Happy revising!

  • Lee Child is a Pantser (and So Can You!)

    Lee Child 11-29-12The other night, I had the fortunate opportunity to attend a talk by mega bestselling thriller author Lee Child. He is funny, charming, and down-to-earth, not at all the prima donna stereotype of an internationally successful writer. Even in the face of reader controversy (and these were some passionate readers in the audience of about 650) Child stood his ground, explaining why in the upcoming film, Jack Reacher, his main character, standing six-foot-five and weighing in at 250 pounds, will be played by Tom Cruise, who stands a tad shorter and is a wee bit lighter weight. (Short answer–there aren’t too many actors who can “open” a movie and none of the ones who can are of Jack Reacher’s physical stature).

    One of the best parts of the talk was when Child described his working style as a writer. He’s not a morning person. He’s up by around 10:30am and doesn’t start working until about noon. He tends to write for 4-5 hours, then the well is pretty much dry. (Side note: My husband was there, and I was glad he heard this. Because my experience is similar in that I have a limit after which I just have to walk away from the book).

    It takes Child about 90 days like that to finish a book. I’m going to guess his books are at least 120,000 words long, which means he’s writing close to 1500 words/day. That’s a hard pace to keep up. Could be even more words if that 90 days counts editing time.

    One tidbit I found especially interesting about Child’s method is that he does not outline his books. At all. He wants to have the same experience as an author (gee, I wonder what’s going to happen next?) as a reader does. This is utterly amazing. He writes big, complex books, and I’ve never seen anything in them that seems out of place or extraneous. To write all that off the cuff is awe-inspiring.

    http://leechild.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/A-Wanted-Man-News-320-FR.pngAfter the talk, I had an even more delightful opportunity–to exchange a few words with Child. I’d bought two of his books at the event, the newest Reacher novel, A Wanted Man, which came pre-signed, and a backstory book, The Affair, which wasn’t signed. So I stood in line with hundreds of other equally excited fans wondering if I would just stand there squeeing like a fangirl, or if I would be able to say something coherent.

    I’m glad to say I was mostly coherent. I said to him, “So, you’re a pantser,” and he confessed he was. I then told him that I was a total plotter, my very unsubtle way of announcing that I was also a writer. He asked my name, asked me what I wrote, I told him young adult, and squeezed in that I’d just sold two mysteries to Angry Robot’s new Exhibit A imprint. His assistant (publicist?) said, “Oh, we’ve heard really good things about them,” and I was totally chuffed. I moved on, not wanting to monopolize his time any more than I had.

    Very fab night. But here’s the grand revelation I experienced. Yes, I’m a plotter before I start writing. I’ve got a 21-page synopsis of Revolution, the third Tankborn book. But when I’m writing, an entirely different process takes over. I almost never look at that synopsis. I get brilliant inspirations. I have someone come into a room and have no idea why they’re there, and they’re looking for something, and I have no clue why that thing even matters. But then something clicks, that pantsing moment, and I realize this seemingly mundane scene I’ve written is a set up for something wonderful later on down the line. Something very important to the story.

    So, by God, I am a pantser. And I’m glad to tell the world.

  • Best Book in November – RTW

    It’s the last Wednesday in November and YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, What’s the best book you read in November?

    I have been reading Old School for all of November, and part of October as well, reading paper books rather than using my Kindle. In October, I bought a whole pile of books by one of my fave science fiction/fantasy authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, from one of our local UBSs (Used Book Store). I’ve been making my way through those books ever since.

    A side note: I do love finding books I want to read in USBs. I like the idea of supporting a local business. But I feel a little guilty when I do that because I know the author doesn’t get her share when I buy her book used. Not to say you should never buy books used. Just be aware of that fact when you do.

    So, among my LMB purchases was a three-fer titled Miles, Mutants & Microbes. LMB has published so many books in the Miles Vorkosigan universe that her publisher has gone back and repackaged a number of them together in various volumes. Miles, Mutants & Microbes includes the novels Falling Free and Diplomatic Immunity sandwiching the novella Labyrinth.

    Of the three, Falling Free was definitely my November best book. Falling Free takes place a couple hundred years before the birth of Miles Vorkosigan, the featured player in most of the Vorkosigan Saga books. In Falling Free, we’re introduced to the quaddies, genetically engineered humans designed to live in freefall. Their bodies thrive without gravity (where normal humans would lose muscle mass and therefore bone density). And they’re able to navigate a living environment in freefall because in place of legs, they have an extra pair of arms. Hence the quaddie designation.

    It’s a very cool story with a triumphant ending. Reading LMB’s later books that feature quaddie characters is all the more fun because we know their origin story.

    If you haven’t checked out any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books, I highly recommend her. She writes both excellent science fiction and fantasy. And I’m quite thrilled that she will be the Guest of Honor at BayCon in San Francisco, which I will be attending in May.

    So how about you? What have you been reading this month?

  • RTW – Balancing Reality and Fiction

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks the question, How do you balance hectic times like the holidays with your writing schedule?

    Um, yeah. How do you do that?

    I’m not sure I’ve entirely figured that one out. The good news is, I’ve been under contract with a publishing house nearly every holiday season for the past dozen or so years. The bad news is, that means I’ve got a deadline staring me in the face every year all through the holidays.

    Which means I have to stay focused and on task in November and December. Yes, I’m longing to go Christmas shopping (or Hanukkah shopping–our family goes both ways). I’m dreaming of baking Christmas (or Hanukkah) cookies. I’m jonesing to go up the hill to one of the local tree farms to cut down my tree. But I can’t just take off all the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas (much as I might wish it) because that darn book isn’t going to write itself.

    So what do I do? I do cut myself some slack. I choose a day or afternoon for the tree cutting, for the baking, for the decorating. I work hard on the days when I don’t have holiday festivities planned and get as much written as I can. I tend to do the Christmas shopping in one fell swoop, demanding a list from everyone, and storm the stores on a weekday when they’re less busy. And I keep an eye on my word count and the number of days remaining until the deadline.

    I do find it annoying to have to write during the holidays. Even worse, my birthday is smack dab in the middle of the holiday season, so there’s another distraction. But I also know that I’m very lucky to be working under contract, to have that deadline, so who am I to gripe?

    How about you? How do you keep working during the holidays? Christmas carols on or off? Christmas cookies stacked on your desk? Is your office decorated? I wanna know how the rest of you do it.

  • The Trouble With Trilogies

    Back in my romance writing days, I didn’t write trilogies.  The love stories I wrote were one-offs. Although half of my Harlequin books (Counting on a Cowboy, A Father’s Sacrifice, His Baby to Love, The Three-Way Miracle, and Her Baby’s Hero) were all set in the same small town of Hart Valley and had some overlapping characters, there weren’t any connections between the stories. There were two books I did for Harlequin (Their Second-Chance Child and The Family He Wanted) that were part of the Fostering Family mini-series, where the second book picked up where the first left off. Characters from the first book were mentioned in the second, but the main story revolved around a new hero and heroine.

    Then along came Tankborn. When I first wrote Tankborn, I had a hazy idea of possibly writing a trilogy. Then when I signed with my agents and we were getting the manuscript ready for submission, they suggested I write up short blurbs for a second and third book. When we sold to Lee and Low/Tu Books, the original contract was only for the one book, but we later sold them two other books to complete the trilogy.

    So my foray into writing my first real trilogy actually commenced with the second Tankborn book. With book one, I was blissfully ignorant of how anything I wrote might have a ripple effect into books two and three. Although I’d still had that hazy idea of writing two more books, I completed Tankborn and saw it into print before I ever wrote word one of the second book, Awakening.

    And that was when the hand-shackles went on. From the moment I started Awakening, I had to constantly keep in mind the Tankborn universe. The book was already printed, many, many people had already read it, and while most readers probably wouldn’t notice if some little detail wasn’t consistent, someone somewhere would.

    So I certainly couldn’t change the planet my characters were on from Loka to somewhere else. I could not make the sky blue instead of green. There had to be two suns in the sky, not one. And seycats and droms had to have six legs, not four or eight. In other words, I couldn’t fudge or goof. The first book was already in print, there for anyone to refer to and point out my mistakes.

    Still, as I wrote Awakening, I thought it was pretty cool having the Tankborn universe already defined. I didn’t have to re-invent the wheel. If I couldn’t remember whether seycats had stripes or spots, or just how tall a genetically engineered drom was, I had the best reference in the world–the first book.

    So I finished Awakening feeling pretty good about things. My editor and I had a great round of developmental edits that strengthened all my characters and added some complexity to the plot. Then it was time for the copy editor.

    That’s when the oopsies started. For instance, Risa, a very minor character in Tankborn, is a prominent secondary character throughout Awakening. As I fleshed out her character in the second book, I gave her red hair mixed with gray. I didn’t bother to check in Tankborn to see if I’d mentioned what color hair Risa had. But the copy editor did check. And pointed out that in Tankborn, Risa is described as having dark hair. For continuity’s sake, Risa’s hair couldn’t be red.

    This may seem very minor (and it was for the most part). But I was a little sad at the necessity because Risa has a pet seycat (a wild feline indigenous to the planet Loka) and seycat coats are red (with black/grayish markings). I’d really liked the idea that Risa’s hair matched the seycat’s. That had to go away with the change of hair color, which required a bit more tweaking than a simple change from red to dark.

    The second blooper was an incorrect character name. There’s an important character who plays a very minor role in Tankborn, a slightly more important role in Awakening, and will play a major role in the third book of the trilogy, Revolution. I used the wrong name for her throughout Awakening. I hadn’t remembered that one of the last changes we made in Tankborn before it went to print was to change that character’s name. Again, it was a good catch on the part of the copy editor that saved us from using the wrong name and really confusing readers.

    Alas, there is an error/inconsistency that was my fault that sneaked its way into Tankborn. I only noticed it as I was working on Revolution. There’s a shrub on the planet Loka called a sticker bush. At least that’s what I was calling it all through Awakening, what I thought I’d called it in Tankborn. But it turns out that at some point, I decided to call the sticker bush a prickle bush instead. And I wasn’t even consistent at that, because while I call it a prickle bush twice in Tankborn, I call it a sticker bush once.

    So what to do? Prickle or sticker? I realized I liked sticker bush better and made an executive decision to call it that, inconsistency be damned.

    Live and learn. Continuity in trilogies has proved to be a tricky business. I’ll have another chance to play around with this in my upcoming mystery series from Angry Robot/Exhibit A, which begins with Clean Burn. Since it’s not science fiction, it should be a piece of cake, right?

    Right.