LitMatch Advisory Panel

I use Litmatch to track my submissions to literary agents, so when they asked for people to comment and help to improve it, I volunteered. And yesterday I was pleased to hear I'm on the panel.

I'd recommend it to any writer looking for representation. It's a handy way of sourcing appropriate agents, and logging your submissions, and updating them as the replies come in. You can see statistics for individual agents; their response times, and whether anyone has been asked to send the full typescript. It's totally free.

And it's good to know that Christopher Hawkins is actively seeking to make his site even better.

A short quiz...

Will you succeed as a novelist?

1. How much have you written?

I've begun several books, but not finished any.
I've got one or two completed books on my hard drive, and another I'm writing now.
Well, I haven't started yet, but how difficult can it be? All I need is the time to do it.


2. What's your view on grammar, spelling and punctuation?

The spellchecker is a lifesaver, but everyone makes the odd mistake. No one expects an unpublished writer to get everything right.
I take pride in getting my typescript as perfect as I can.
Typo's, grammer ect. dont matter if the story is good enough, thats what i think. Publisher's have editor's to take care of minor stuff like that for there writer's. Why do people love to nitpick? why can't they focuss on whats really important.


3. You've finished your novel, and are bursting with pride. You ask a friend to read it. She's quite critical, and makes several suggestions for changes.

That woman is no longer my friend. In fact, do you have the phone number of a contract killer on you?
Oh. I'll go through it again. Maybe some of what she says is right. Nice of her to be honest with me.
My book is my baby! She's wrong, and she'll see that once I've explained it to her. The first chapter may be a bit slow, but you have to know all that stuff about the will in order to follow the plot...when you get to chapter five, the pace picks up...


4. You posted your typescript to a dozen agents. You are now the possessor of twelve form rejections. Your reaction?
   I give up. It's too good for them. Bastards.
   JK Rowling got rejected a lot. I'll just keep sending it out. *grits teeth*
   Hmm...maybe it needs more work. I'll join a writers' group.

13-16 You're on your way. Can I have a signed first edition when it's published?

8-12 Honestly. You need to take this a little more seriously. Pull your socks up, stiffen that upper lip and buck up your ideas!

0-6 Oh dear. I fear there is no hope for you at all in the challenging world of books. I suggest you take up line dancing instead.

Fine. So I'm paranoid after all...

Reluctantly, I learnt a lot about copyright in the eighties because my jewellery designs were comprehensively ripped off. It's very easy to take a rubber mould and make as many copies as you like by the lost-wax process. The counterfeiters got them cast in Thailand mostly, where labour is cheap, and wholesaled them here, in silver, for less than I paid just for the casting.

Some unpublished authors worry they might have similar problems with their novels, and it's no good suggesting to them that if they can't sell the darned thing, there is no reason to suppose anyone else will be able to, and that they really have nothing to lose by making it available on the internet.

Titles, I think, are a different matter. Anyone who has struggled to find a catchy, evocative title will know just how hard it is. You come up with something good, check on Amazon Books and it's been used, often many times. One gets an insight into why some of one's favourite books have quite dull or strange titles.

Since Jade Goody used my title, Catch a Falling Star (a title that's been used before, but not for a notable book) I've been brainstorming for a new one. Yesterday, I think I found it. And no one has used it, ever.

So what is it? Well, here is where my paranoia comes in. Suppose a publisher has agreed to publish a novel, but doesn't like the title? It's up to the writer and agent to find a good new one. Fast. Go on a site like Authonomy, and you will find literally thousands of novel titles, all unpublished. Steal a title there, and it's the perfect crime; no one can prove you did it, that it wasn't just coincidence. And in any case, you can't copyright titles.

I think I'll just keep quiet about it for now.

Happy birthday, novel 3!

It's exactly a year since I started writing Catch a Falling Star. I know because I wrote a post, A book called...not sure yet (and I'm still not, since Jade Goody used my title). It's interesting to look back over the year.

When I started, I'd got pages of notes for the main characters, plot ideas, and a few photographs, but hadn't decided who the murderer was. I did know what the crucial scene at the end would be. I revise as I go; I spend a few days going over each chapter until I'm happy with it before going on to the next, so when I write THE END, it really is nearly finished.

I wrote the last chapter at the end of March, and have spent the time since obsessively tweaking, helped by kind beta readers. I write concisely then add bits, so since March the book has swollen by 1,500 words, making it a nice round 75,000. The new bits are mostly minor; the greatest change was to make the villain considerably nastier.

It's been a lot of fun to write. The penance now comes with sending it out to agents, who seem to have got slower than when I sent out Tor and Trav.

And the title...what about Rock Remix? I'm getting desperate.

Little-known facts about agents

Did you know...

1. Literary agents derive most of their large income from steaming off the stamps on s.a.s.e.s sent to them by writers submitting their work; they either reply by email or don't reply at all. (The commission on clients' book sales, thought by the naive to be their main source of income, amounts to a negligible sum.)
   
2. Agents swap the names of particularly annoying writers among themselves. Every agent has his own Black List of writers whose submissions go straight to the shredder (once their s.a.s.e.s have been removed and the stamps salvaged, that is.) Example: if you have the temerity to ring an agent who does not know you, your name will be added to this list.
   
3. At most agencies, the slush pile is read monthly, in the office after hours, to the accompaniment of pizzas and plentiful alcohol. Especially dire passages of submitted work are read aloud, to great and drunken hilarity. These events are looked forward to by all agents and interns. They are one of the best perks of working in the world of books. Most agents meet their future spouses at these parties.
   
4. As a new, unpublished author, you are statistically more likely to die by tripping over a red squirrel than to be offered a contract by a literary agent.

Getting published in olden days...

Yesterday I was rereading Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, and I came across this bit. Jess, a disturbed suicidal teenager, has had an uncomprehending look at a novel by Virginia Woolf, and reckons that she killed herself because she couldn't make herself understood. She goes on:

And she had some bad luck, too, if you think about it, because in the olden days anyone could get a book published because there wasn't so much competition. So you could march into a publishers' office and go, you know, I want this published, and they'd go, Oh, OK then. Whereas now they'd go, No, dear, go away, no one will understand you. Try pilates or salsa dancing instead.

I'm submitting Catch a Falling Star to agents right now. Maybe I should take up salsa dancing instead.

How not to start a novel...

There are many ways not to start a novel. The hero waking (with a start, naturally) is bad, and gets worse if you recount the dream he's just had, then make him get up and stare in the mirror so you can let the reader know what he looks like.

Personally - and this may be to do with my gender - I am unenthusiastic about novels that begin,

He gazed through the windscreen of his Mercedes-Benz SLR, tensely clicking the Halton-Ratchett RK 41.5's safety catch, his white shirt and Graff black diamond cufflinks gleaming in the dusk...

You just know that before too many pages have passed, you'll be meeting his young, slim, full-breasted, sexually enthusiastic girlfriend. She's another bit of his kit, and with about as much personality.

But my very least favourite first chapter has to be the one that starts with five or six characters sitting round a table; each one says or does something in turn, and in order to get any sort of grip on the story you have to memorize them. It's hard work. Was it Gina who had the fiery red hair, the underprivileged background she's fighting to escape and a media job? Or Stacey? No, Stacey's the tall one who's just been dumped by her boyfriend and has a pet cat...

I've come across several unpublished novels with too many characters too soon, and my question is, can anyone think of a published novel that begins in this way?

Virtual prizes will be awarded.

Authonomy: multiple backing...

...is the new friends and relatives.*

Today is the last day of the month, when, on the stroke of midnight, the top five books in the Authonomy chart get their gold star and entitlement to a critique by a Harper Collins editor. As often happens, six books are in contention for the top five places.

You may think the six authors will be sitting back at this stage, accepting that 'the wisdom of crowds' will decide the issue; that the most popular books will win.

Not a bit of it.

Imagine, if you will, you are a participant in a Britain's Got Talent where only the contestants can vote, and they can vote for as many acts as they like. What would you do? Vote for no one, so as not to help rival entrants? Vote for the acts you think are really good? Or swap votes - go to as many performers as possible and offer to vote for them, if they will vote for you, in order to amass the maximum number of votes?

It's the latter that is happening on Authonomy right now. You can see the comments a person has made on his page; how many, and whether he has backed the book he's commenting on. (Because the final sentence is invariably 'Shelved/On my shelf/Backed'.) The top six writers have backed between 40 and 120 books each in the last week alone, and the numbers are going up even as I type.

Now there are some amazingly good books on Authonomy; books I can't believe are still in search of a publisher. But, as with any slush pile, there is a lot of dross as well. It's plain that the frantic amount of swap reading/swap backing that is going on has nothing to do with the quality of the books, and everything to do with the scrabble to get to the top.

This has been going on for months. My own novel, Catch a Falling Star, was pushed out of the top five in January and February by multi-backers (I reviewed one book a day, like homework; to do more struck me as a) dubious and b) not a sensible use of my time.) It only got its gold star in March, I believe, because of an anti-Klazart backlash.

The inevitable result is that the best books are not making it to the top. Does this matter? We know that Harper Collins looks at more than the top five - in fact, by the time your book has got there, it has almost certainly been appraised and rejected. Harper Collins has only plucked one book from Authonomy so far; Coffee at Kowalski's, by Miranda Dickinson, and that was nowhere near the top of the chart. But the real benefit of the site has been agents trawling it; we know that quite a few people have been approached, and got themselves representation.

Will agents continue to watch the site if the quality of the books at the top diminishes?

It's hard to write a good book. It's easy, if tedious, to praise ten extracts a day to buy yourself ten votes, and carry on doing this for a couple of months.

Fixes have been suggested to Harper Collins. My favourite is to make a book stick to your shelf for two days once you have backed it, thus limiting votes. But, for reasons they have not explained, HC seem happy that multiple backing is now the only way to reach the top of the Authonomy chart.

* See Authonomy and the sock puppets

An unpublished writer's dream of fame and fortune...

I made this brief film more to amuse my daughter than anything...

Sex again, I'm afraid

Yes, once more I am addressing the tricky problem of sex in fiction. (Well, more trifling with it, really, running a finger down its silken skin, feeling a warm, pulsing... Stop! That'll do, thank you.)

In my novels I am a follower of the less is more method; on the theory that most of us have been there, done that, and know the geography. What is going through the character's mind is usually more enlightening and more interesting. Also, it's frighteningly easy to make the reader cringe or roar with laughter.

I've been on writers' forums long enough to see the same topics rotate like medieval crops, and one perennial is Post your sex scenes here. There is no shortage of writers eager to do this. Okay, so they are taken out of context, and one has to make allowances, but if I could quote some of them without hurting feelings I think you'd agree with me that the cringe/laugh factor is way higher than the wow/amazing factor.

Sandie Dent spoke for me when she said, 'Most of us like eating, most of us like sex - but if a writer described a character eating a meal in the sort of detail that most sex scenes employ... well, you can imagine...

He lifted the fork, shiny and smooth, held it tenderly in one hand. It felt good. His other hand moved rapidly towards the knife, grasping it firmly, feeling its weight. His plate was waiting.

"Christ, I love roast potatoes," he growled.

... and so on. I can't type anymore because I'm laughing too much.'

LitMatch - a resource for writers

I've started submitting Catch a Falling Star to agents, and have discovered just how useful LitMatch is.

It's a website to help writers seeking representation. You can do an advanced search and find agents and agencies in your own country who deal with the genres you write in, and also whether they accept email submissions. It gives you their website address, and blog details if they have one. You can join for free and Track Your Submissions; see at a glance who you sent your chapters to, and how many days it is since you did.

Click on the agent's name, and you go to Response Data; how long it has taken for them to respond, and rejection/offer statistics. These are garnered from LitMatch members who use the tracking service.

It's interesting - one agent whose website says she aims to respond within seven days has an average response time of seventeen, according to LitMatch stats. The sample is quite small (ten in that example) so I urge you all to join and make the results more representative!

You can also add a comment about an agent - but I've yet to find one...writers are all too anxious not to offend, or so rude the comments have been disallowed.

Location, location, location...

I like a strong sense of place in a novel - especially if it's somewhere I know. Nick Hornby's About a Boy happens in a part of North London I'm familiar with, and I like that. Vanity Fair and David Copperfield give fascinating glimpses of how London used to be.

So my novel, Catch a Falling Star, is set in very specific parts of London. I invented Fox Hollow Yard, the picturesque cobbled yard in Hoxton where Caz has her workshop - it's a blend of French Place, Leicester Mews and Bleeding Heart Yard with a big dollop of imagination, and it's as clear to me as if I'd been there.

Most of the other locations are real, and any interested reader can 'visit' them on Google Street View (I absolutely love Google Street View). You can see the Macondo Café in Hoxton Square (pictured; it's the one with the red blind) where Caz met Phil on a grey and drizzly day. You can work out that the Clerkenwell restaurant James took her to was Hix, or follow Caz on the trek from W2 to Shepherdess Walk she made to clear her thoughts after Emma's shocking revelation about Ric.

And the nice thing is, Google Street View images were taken in the summer of 2008, when my novel is set.

Fights - on the page and hitting the floor

Did you know the fight scenes we are used to seeing on television or in films are not realistic? As well as being choreographed, they are unlike real fights in three other ways:

1. It is clear what is happening
2. There is plenty of action
3. The combatants stay on their feet.

Real fights invariably end on the ground, as the fighters close in on each other and grapple, and one or both lose their footing. Once on the floor, not much appears to be going on. It's all quite undramatic.

My fight advisor, who wishes to remain nameless, tells me that disciplines like boxing or kick-boxing are not much good in the real world, as they only work while the fighter remains upright.

So both the fights at the end of Catch a Falling Star are desperate, no-holds-barred wrestling matches on the carpet. And here is a clip showing the superiority of Jitsu over lesser martial arts (the black disc is there to conceal the identity and shame of the loser):

Backstory - wrestle it to the floor and sit on its head

In the first novel I wrote, Torbrek, I had huge problems with info dumps in the first chapter. As a novice, I had no idea anything was wrong until I joined YouWriteOn and readers told me about it. I struggled with it for months; eventually I put most of it in a prologue set three years before the start of the story - then I deleted the prologue and didn't reinstate the information.

Sometimes on Authonomy I tell a writer he has a great wodge of backstory plonked near the start of his novel. And all too often the response is along the lines of, 'The reader needs to know this because of events later in the story.' Which reader would that be, then? The one who put the book back in its jiffy bag or back on the shelf when she got to the dull bit?

Richie Dowling posted this excellent advice recently:

'My definition: "backstory" -- the relevant events in a character's life that happened before the novel (or whatever) begins. It's not the same as a character biography, where you detail everything about your character--but only use a fraction of the information in your novel.

Backstory may refer to one or two important events, which have relevance to the current story.

For example, in the film The Name of the Rose the character of William of Baskerville has an important backstory--he was a member of the Inquisition. During a trial he disagreed with the chief inquisitor, was tortured and forced to recant. As a result a man he knew to be innocent was burned at the stake.

How is the information imparted in the story? Bit by bit. There are hints of something important in William's past. I can't remember the exact sequence but the Inquisition comes to the monastery. We learn that William was once a member. Finally, when the boy is begging William to help save the girl he loves, William reveals the full story.

The key to good backstory is that it has to be dragged kicking and screaming from the characters. This is information they don't want to reveal, but the reader wants to know.

In Star Wars, Darth Vader didn't just say, "Hey Luke Skywalker, that name rings a bell, I think I'm your father." It was saved until the very end of the second film when Vader is trying to force his son to join him and overthrow the Emperor. Save the backstory for important moments in your plot, and use it to create revelations which turn scenes from good to bad or vice versa.

But then what you're doing is called a "set-up" and the reader is clever enough to spot them, which is why you have to hide your "set-ups" and have them accomplish two things. Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark? The opening sequence? Indy is double-crossed, betrayed, almost loses his life jumping across a pit, is chased by a giant stone ball and escapes, only to have the statue taken from him by his arch nemesis. He's then chased by a horde of spear-waving tribesmen before finally making his escape in a sea-plane. He freaks out when he sees a snake in the seat and we laugh because we think, "Boy, what a day! Everything has gone wrong for this poor schmuck and now the pilot's pet snake is in his seat!" We don't notice that this is actually set-up for later on in the film when Indy is trapped in a tomb filled with snakes.

If Indiana had merely said at some point in the film, "Geez, I don't like snakes" we would recognise it as a set-up so it wouldn't work. Disguise your set-ups by making them work hard and accomplishing at least two different things.'

How Not to Write a Novel

I love this commercial - and what I've seen of the book is amusing, too. It's on my shopping list. Click here to read a bit on Amazon.

(I'm worried about the pink poodle's knees, though. They look all wrong.)

Voice - your greatest asset

A year ago I went with my writer friend Anna to a Romantic Novelists' Association talk, given by the agent Teresa Chris. What stuck in my mind was her emphasis on the importance of voice for a novelist.

She also wondered whether writers' groups and writers' courses conspired to make authors less individual, and damaged their voice. A novelist struggling alone in his garret was more likely to retain the unique qualities that would eventually make his work saleable.

It's interesting that Eve White, answering unpublished writers' questions, makes the same point. You can read her answers here. She says, when asked what mattered most, 'A fresh voice. Style is most important. One can learn structure and plot, but not style.'

Gold Star for CaFS on Authonomy

Catch a Falling Star got a gold star on Authonomy today - the second one I've won on the site (the first was for Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation, though admittedly there was much less competition to get to the top of the charts in those days).

This means CaFS will receive a crit from a Harper Collins' editor at the end of April.

Wrestling with the synopsis

Having written the last chapter of Catch a Falling Star (must find a new title, damn it) I am busy tweaking it while waiting for the last of my kind readers to report back. I have also, with a reluctance that only my fellow writers will understand, begun to write the synopsis.

The problem is that a synopsis is, essentially, one's novel with all the good bits stripped out - the humour, the dialogue, the surprises - and one's characters reduced to stereotypes. What you are left with is a bare plot outline, without any of the detail that makes it worth reading. One is also obliged to reveal whodunit, and I can't believe it helps an agent to appreciate a book if she knows before she hits chapter one who the killer is.

I must try harder. I read somewhere that you should imagine you've just seen the film of your book, and you are telling a friend the plot in a pub afterwards. Maybe that would perk it up.

Shock horror at Authonomy

Yesterday evening I wrote a comment for a rather good book on Authonomy, What About the Boy?, and had trouble loading it. The site was s-l-o-w. Today I found out why.

A writer called Vineet Bhalla, username Klazart, a computer gamer, has got his friends to join and back his book. Lots of them. 697 and rising. His book is currently at 18 in the charts; his chums have now replaced all the people at the top of the talent-spotters chart - the chart that was brought in so that its algorithms would defeat people doing what Bhalla is doing. My own T-S rank has plummeted from 12 to 167.

He has demonstrated that the algorithm can only cope with people who load dozens of friends - the most one person has recruited hitherto is 150, from Facebook - it is powerless against a man who can rally the support of hundreds.

I wonder how many of the 697 have read Bhalla's book? Any of them?

Last summer, on this blog, I said that Harper Collins' encouraging people, in the F.A.Q., to get their family and friends to join Authonomy and back their book was a cheat's charter. That passage in the F.A.Q. is still there.

HC staff will come in on Monday and see what is happening to their site. I'm interested to know what their reaction will be.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

UPDATE: Harper Collins are happy with the way Bhalla has used the site, and their only concern is with the performance issues that occurred with so many extra people visiting Authonomy.

See their post here.

*

UPDATE 2: Harper Collins has changed the talent-spotter algorithm, to 'encourage the type of behaviour that most people here would like to see in future'.

See their post here.

Aagh, not the present tense...

Why do I get a feeling of lack of enthusiasm whenever I start to read a book written in the present tense? There seems to be more of it about these days.

I've struggled to work out its appeal for writers, and all I've come up with is that it gives a spurious significance to the mundane. So you get passages like:

She opens the steel-veneered cabinet door, and takes down the jar of instant coffee. Unscrewing the cap, she measures a spoonful of coffee granules into a mug. The kettle boils. Martha switches it off, and pours steaming water. She adds sugar and milk and stirs, wondering whether to give in to the temptation posed by the pristine packet of Hobnobs.

Gaah! Who cares? Why describe this boring stuff?

But apart from encouraging the sort of writing you might do as an exercise at a writers' class, there is, I think, another reason why my mind reels away from the present tense. The Janet and John series; frightfully dull books that children learned to read with in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

Once you'd cracked Janet and John, you got on to the good stuff; what my daughter called 'chapter books' when she was small. Books that you read for pleasure, that were exciting and unpredictable.

And written in the past tense, like grown-up books.

Semicolons; some thoughts...

In my occasional series on punctuation, I have reached the semicolon.

I love semicolons; I think they give a nice balance to a sentence, and use them all the time. I think I picked them up from Mary Renault, one of my favourite authors. Editors would take them out of her books, and she would put them back, firmly. Fay Weldon hated them, and that's another stroke in their favour as far as I'm concerned.

The great Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, says, 'The sub-text of a semicolon is, "Now this is a hint. The elements of this sentence, although grammatically distinct, are actually elements of a single notion. I can make it plainer for you - but hey! You're a reader! I don't need to draw you a map!"'

One of my favourite comments on Catch a Falling Star is the following:

Sorry Lexi,

But you don’t know how to use semi colons. And when I say ‘don’t know’ I don’t mean like you’re on the verge of understanding or you’re really close to some kind of epiphany in the field of punctuation. I mean, truly and seriously, you really really don’t know how to use semi colons.

Look at the semi colon you used after the word ‘sweatshirt’. That’s not just nasty, horrific or sickening, it’s unforgivable and almost without hope of redemption. I recently taught semi colons at a grammar school in Kent. The girls appreciated it and took much away from the lesson. You should have sat in on that lesson. You would benefit greatly from a lesson like that.

Believe in yourself (I do, in my weaker moments.)

S

PS: Put a full stop there. A full stop will make it right forever and for always.

PPS: Sorry Lexi. I think I’ve left red stains on those cream cushions.

Brackets, the new pariah

Any writer knows that punctuation is as class-ridden as Victorian society. Exclamation marks are pariahs, commas are frequently excluded, left-wing councils attempt to banish the apostrophe altogether.

But I've only recently noticed the animus against brackets. I use them myself to denote an aside, something away from the main thread of the discourse, and think them quite handy. After several people had advised me to remove them, I started a thread on the Authonomy forum asking why. The reasons given were:

• They look ugly


• There are better ways to punctuate a sentence


• They disrupt the flow of a sentence


• They show laziness

I'm not convinced. Challenged to nominate the prettiest punctuation, if brackets were the ugliest, someone suggested the tilde (pronounced tild-uh, for those as ignorant as me). It's this one: ~ I made up a rhyme about it as follows:

There once was a writer called Hilda,
Who favoured a dash called a tilde,
She maintained that a bracket,
Could simply not hack it,
So the brackets surrounded (and killed) her.

This you will love...

If you want to roar with laughter, read my friend Alan's post here.

It's a selection of blurbs, with his comments.

Terrific.

One space or two after a full stop?

Many years ago, while I was studying A levels, I did an evening class in typing (I did another in shorthand, but that didn't stick at all). We had a good teacher, and by the end of the year I could touch type, and even had a certificate for the lowliest possible level of proficiency.

I was taught to put two spaces after a full stop, and I've done it ever since. Until last week, when the subject came up on the Authonomy forum. What changed my mind was this comment from Cameron Chapman:

I'm a copyeditor and I would beg everyone to use ONE space after a period. If you check newer style manuals, particularly the Chicago Manual of Style (for the U.S.), they specify one. The primary reason that two spaces used to be standard was because of monospace fonts (courier) on typewriters. It supposedly made it easier to read if there were two spaces between sentences since everything else was spaced exactly the same. It created a sort of "mental break".

Since copyeditors have to take out all those double-spaces before manuscripts go to the printer and we generally have to turn on the "track changes" feature in Word, even auto-replacing all those double-spaces with single-spaces creates a ton of extra work on both the copyeditor's end and the author's/editor's end. All those tracked changes come up with a comment and are marked in red in the manuscript. You can see how that would just create a practically unmanageable amount of clutter on the page.

She convinced me. I've changed the spacing in my three novels' typescripts, and am training myself to use one space as I type henceforth.

(The way to do it in Word is to click Edit, Find, Replace, and put two spaces on Find, one on Replace. Easy.)

Along the wire the electric message came...

...it is no better, it is much the same (with apologies to Alfred Austin).

Here are two quotes from people kind enough to read and comment on Catch a Falling Star on Authonomy:

'Hi Lexi, I saw this was doing well and thought I'd come back to have another look, and... you have improved this so much - I struggled mightily with the plausibility last time, particularly in her reactions to Joe, no such problems this time though - I think in places you still 'tell' the reader too much, in her explaining para's I would try getting rid of the last sentence each time (as it added nothing but repeated previous). But this is now a great read and I can understand why so many have backed it - finally, SHELVED. Good luck.'

'Lexi,came back for another read. You've obviously worked on this and I can see a big improvement, it's tighter, smoother and flows well. Nice one. Its a process this isn't it?Anyway, I'm backing this now - good luck with it.'

The point is, I haven't changed more than a dozen or so words in the first chapters of Catch a Falling Star. The 'improvement' the two readers perceived was entirely imaginary. And I can only conclude they think the book is better because it's currently sitting in the top five of the Authonomy book chart.

Or maybe it's the new cover...

'Describe the iPod'

I had a review on Youwriteon recently of Catch a Falling Star. Among other advice was the terse instruction, 'Describe the iPod.'

Presumably my critic wanted me to say something like, 'He fished the tiny audio device, not much larger than a Christmas postage stamp, from his pocket, admiring its sleek silver lines, and fitted the white earphones into his ears'. But it seemed to me that if a reader hadn't come across something as ubiquitous and universal as an iPod, then frankly he should not waste his time reading further, as he would not be getting any of the cultural references in the book and would find the whole thing mystifying.

I have to admit, though, that it's one of the trickiest things in writing; what to put in and what to leave out. I'm still working on that one.

A stiff upper lip and bladder control, please

I can't be certain who started it, but my money is on Graham Greene in The Comedians in 1966. In that novel, it's an effective means of conveying just how terrifying Papa Doc's secret police, the Tonton Macoute were.

I'm talking about the hero of a novel wetting his pants under extreme stress and fear.

The same unfortunate accident happens to Tom in the excellent book Mortal Engines, when Shrike appears. But now it seems to be a routine occurrence in every other unpublished thriller that I read on Authonomy (and I've read the start of at least one novel each day since May 2008). I can't believe it's written from personal experience. I think writers are seeing it in other people's books, and thinking, ooh, that's a gritty way of demonstrating the fix my hero is in. It's become a bit of a cliché.

So the point of this post is to urge all modern heroes to pull themselves together, get a grip, and stop being big girls' blouses. It's not attractive to have a hero behave like a toddler.

You wouldn't catch Bulldog Drummond damp around the trousers.

No good being right if everyone thinks you're wrong...

...in fiction at any rate.

At the start of Catch a Falling Star Caz, faced with a stranger on her roof, wishes she was a black belt in Jitsu. Several readers on Authonomy have tried to correct me - surely I mean Ju Jitsu? Haven't I got it wrong?

Actually, no; and I know a bit about it as my daughter is a green belt in Jitsu. It's one of the more usefully aggressive martial arts. When you reach a certain level, being pounced on by three muggers with knives holds no terrors for you, because you can deal with them. But I have wondered whether I should give in to general ignorance and change it.

My friend Cat had something similar in her book Echoes of the Sword's Song. Anna, her heroine, fleeing from an invading force led by Slayer Redblood (my favourite character, who thinks of his achievements, 'Not bad for the son of a whore') rushes to saddle her horse, but pauses to brush dust off his back first. I said, did it matter at such a time if he was a bit dusty?

And the answer is yes. If dust and debris is left between a horse's back and his saddle, it will make his back sore.

This sort of thing, where the writer knows more than the reader, crops up all the time on the writers' sites I frequent. And I still don't know whether it's dumbing down to change little-known facts, or a necessary accommodation to the reader.

A letter from your character to you

I can't remember where I picked up this tip for getting to know a character in your novel.

It's once you've done the basic notes about his family, background, tastes, desires, fears, pets, past relationships, things he likes/dislikes about his looks etc., and it works surprisingly well. You write a letter to yourself from him/her.

Here is one I wrote for Emma Redfern, an ambitious singer;

Hi Lexi,

Well, you wrote me so you know I’m gorgeous to look at. Blonde hair, shoulder length, and the sort of childish features that made Marilyn Monroe so sexy. I’ve never had any trouble attracting guys’ attention, and I don’t mind admitting I use it. Why not? I’m determined to get where I want to go, and I don’t let anything get in my way. What do you mean? Of course I’m a nice person. I don’t go around beating up old ladies or robbing banks or anything. Some women don’t like me, it’s true, especially when their boyfriends can’t take their eyes off me. That’s their problem…

Phil fell for me the minute I walked in the room. You can always tell. He’s not the type I normally go for, but he’s quite sweet. A bit old for me. And married – I didn’t think that mattered at first, but it turned out to be a major drag. He’d never take me anywhere in case we met someone he knew. We went to Paris once for a romantic weekend. There was some friend of Paula’s on the plane, a middle-aged woman who rushed up to him, and he was totally spooked. He didn’t relax until we were back home. I’d thought he’d be more help getting me established than he was, to be honest. Thing is, he cared more about me than about my career. In the end I thought I could do better.

Bryan had put his number in my mobile the week I was ‘temping’ for Phil – I can’t type with more than two fingers – and I called it. He took me to the Connaught on our first date, and on to Annabel’s. We were photographed on the way out for the first time. Within a month we were in Hello magazine. ‘Love in the city for Bryan Orr and his new girlfriend – Voices’ bass guitarist Bryan Orr hangs out with the platinum-haired beauty in London’s West End. The pair have been inseparable since they started dating last month. Emma Redfern is talented as well as beautiful; the Croydon-born songstress is at the start of a promising career in the world of music.’

Bryan was going to write a song for me that would launch my career and get me a recording contract. He’d do anything for me, Bryan. Anything at all. It’s funny, but if a man’s too keen, you don’t feel so keen yourself. Though of course I liked him, he was very sweet-natured.

Ric Kealey? He was always a bit off-hand with me, as though he thought I shouldn’t be there or something. And I told Bryan that Ric was taking advantage of him, and he shouldn’t stand for it. I don’t suppose that made Ric like me any better. Bryan took notice of what Ric said, and Ric didn’t like it when he stopped. He fancied me though, whatever he said. Yes, I did fancy him – most women do – there was a danger to him; you felt he didn’t care, he’d do anything he wanted...

(I've cut the rest, as I realized it was a spoiler...)

Emma

Bravery and trust - good things, surely?

At the start of my novel, Catch a Falling Star, my heroine, Caz, takes her breakfast on to her roof terrace. She is startled to see a man asleep, with a scruffy dog beside him. After a brief exchange, she allows him into her flat to use her bathroom, because she thinks he looks normal, not dangerous.

Most of my readers, on YouWriteOn and Authonomy, are okay with this. But a few people are shocked and incredulous. They see Caz's behaviour as too reckless to believe. I was puzzled by this, not least because in my twenties I did similar 'reckless' things, that involved reliance on my judgment of another human being. (Still do, come to think of it.) And I've never had a problem. Didn't they ever take that sort of chance? I don't regard myself as particularly rash, brave or trusting.

But then, while reading the umpteenth unpublished novel that involves females being raped, sliced up or having their heads cut off by males, I was struck by a revelation: evil psychopaths may be extremely rare in real life, but my goodness there aren't half a lot of them in fiction. And I think this informs a minority of readers' outlooks.

Or maybe they're just timid and suspicious. Poor souls...

Slightly Published

Great Short Stories by YouWriteOn.com Writers is now available to buy! And in it is my story, Comforted by Darkness. Which means that I am, in a very small way, a published author.

See it (and buy, should you wish) on Amazon.

Is there an echo in here?

Word echoes, how I hate them.

When I started writing, I had no idea I had a problem with inadvertently repeating words, until it was gently pointed out to me by my peers on Youwriteon. I was appalled when I realized just how bad I was - entirely capable of using the same word three times in the space of ten lines. There's also the common variant of starting successive sentences with 'He' or 'She' - one YWOer started thirteen sentences this way, in one paragraph.

I an still prey to word echoes, but constantly check and re-check in order to remove them.

Indeed, I'm now so aware of it that I notice repeats in published books - John Le Carré writing 'it occurred to her' in successive paragraphs in The Little Drummer Girl, for instance. So I reckoned I'd got it licked, until I read this excellent article, The Ten Mistakes. Oh my God, 'There was'...I'd got 61 of them in 51,000 words, including 'There was a pause' and 'There was a silence' really close together.

It never ends.

Wrong season, darn it...

I started writing Catch a Falling Star in June, and set it then - though I don't specify the date anywhere, I'm using a 2008 calendar. The events of the book cover five or six weeks in the lives of the characters.

The scene I'm currently on has my heroine, Caz, at 3am on July 19th, searching for Ric who is breaking into a lavish country house. And the point I'm making is this: I'd find it a lot easier to get the atmosphere if London wasn't so wintry, cold, and dark by teatime. Or if Caz was circling the house on an icy night. I could get right into her numb fingers, her visible breath, how the cold claims her as she crouches in the herbaceous border to watch the people in the house.

Instead of which, the hood she wears for concealment makes her hot, and the balmy night air is fragrant with summer flowers.

The old imagination is creaking under the strain.

Online Novels is back!

Online Novels, the site which provides links to novels available to read on the internet, is back.

Its owner took it down briefly in response to vituperation from some authors who feared they would lose first publication rights - improbable, since Harper Collins lets writers load entire novels, and gave permission for the links to the site - or that their novels, for which they have not found a publisher, would be stolen and passed off as someone else's work.

Carlie Lee and I once joked about novel theft on the Authonomy blog:


Carlie said...

What if a huge publishing conglomerate had a stable full of super-star writers, who (due to excess engendered by disproportionate earnings) lost all of their plots, and they were forced to prey on fiercesomely intelligent but sweetly naive unpublished authors such as ourselves and steal all of our ideas. Really, it is all quite concerning...

Lexi said...

Interesting thought, Carlie...

Hey, it would make a great plot for a novel!

The heroine, sweetly naive, poor, yet feisty, is determined to confront the handsome, dissolute author who has stolen her book. She borrows a dress and gatecrashes the book launch.

Their eyes lock across the crowded room; for both of them it is true love; but the novel, stolen by the unscrupulous publishing conglomerate, stands between them.

Will he be able to give up his drink and drugs-fueled lifestyle and write once more? Can she ever forgive his plagiarism? Will the huge publishing conglomerate get what's coming to it?

Rack: thoughts of a pedant

One of the most frequent typos I come across while reading unpublished writing is wrack when it should be rack. I've come across it three or four times in the past month alone, in expressions such as:

nerve-racking

racked with sobs/coughing

to rack one's brains

I think it happens when writers reach for a word or expression without fully imagining what they are describing, because of course the reference is to the torture rack; a horrific device for extracting a confession by subjecting the victim to graduated pain and destruction. Just looking it up to find an illustration for this post made me feel sick.

And I had an additional thought; why is torture viewed as entertainment, if it happened long enough ago? Surely no one would regard IRA knee-capping or the torture of American soldiers at the hands of the Vietnamese as ghoulishly fascinating? But otherwise normal parents take their children to the London Dungeon, or the basement of Madame Tussaud's, for a merry outing learning about the ingeniously cruel tortures humans devised a few hundred years ago. Very odd.

(N.B. An interesting case is rack and ruin, where the reference is not to torture, but to wrack, an old spelling of wreck. But it's still spelled rack.)

When God made time, He made plenty of it...

...it just doesn't seem like that right now.

I'm up to 46,000 words of Catch a Falling Star. I'm aiming for 80,000 words. I can't spend as much time on it as I would like, because apart from my day job, Authonomy is keeping me busy.

Catch a Falling Star is currently at number 14 in the Editor's desk chart, and like a shark that has to keep moving or die, the book has to keep attracting new voters just to stay in the same place. To move up you need (roughly speaking, because the value of votes varies according to the rank of the reader) more than one a day. The best way to entice people to read your book is to read theirs, and comment. I enjoy doing this, but it's terribly time-consuming.

Why bother, I hear you ask, when Harper Collins has not yet (as far as we know) made an offer on a single book on Authonomy?

Well, the best thing about Authonomy, for me, is the huge quantity of enthusiastic comments that have been made about the book. People genuinely seem to enjoy reading it. This has given me real hope it will be publishable when finished.

They'd steal my book, but I'm too clever for them...

...is an idea you often come across in the unpublished writers' circles I frequent. Some people fear that, if they expose their novel on the internet, it will be stolen by unscrupulous agents, publishers, or another author. The next thing they know, it will be in print, with someone else getting the credit and the money.

It's no good telling them that if they can't persuade an agent to take their book on, it's unlikely anyone else will have better luck with it. Pointless saying they'll be lucky if anyone wants to read it, let alone steal it. Because they know better, and you are being naive.

So when a nicely-designed website called Online Novels appeared, giving lists of titles, authors, brief synopsis and a link to five hundred entire novels available to read online, what do you suppose happened?

Well, as soon as I found out my two novels (Torbrek... and Trav Zander) that I'd posted in full on Authonomy were on the site, I wrote to thank the website owner, and I put a link to it on my blog. Yippee, more exposure for my writing! And, given that they are about to be printed on Youwriteon via POD, I hoped I might sell the odd extra copy through the site.

But the news caused pandemonium on the Authonomy forum. There was talk of 'giving your novel away for free', of manuscripts being 'pilfered'. People rushed to take down some of their chapters on Authonomy so they were no longer complete. One chap said,

'What I actually just realized is that there's the damn archiving robots out there and now there is a slight chance a full copy of my book may be archived. '

Another said, 'God, that's scary! Glad I haven't put all of it online!'

Several of us argued that it was in fact excellent publicity; but others emailed so rudely to the nice woman who had set up the site that she decided to take it down.

Online Novels no longer exists.

And I'm rather fed up about it.

Men and women, sex and writing...

The other day I criticised a fellow unpublished writer for making his heroine think about her fiancé:

Sex with ***** was good - and it was frequent.

I told him women tend not to think about sex like this - it's a thought a man is much more likely to have. And it got me thinking about gender differences, and how they affect the way we write, particularly about sex.

Reading sex scenes written by the opposite sex is an education. As a crude generalization, men appear entranced by the mechanics (they'll tell you their hero is getting an erection) while women's interest is more romantic and diffuse. Women will go for quality rather than quantity, and hugs, hand holding, significant conversation and emotion are an important part of the picture.

In fact, considering the difference between an average seduction scene written by a man, and one written by a woman, it's a wonder the planet ever came to be so over-populated.

You can now Follow This Blog!

...but please don't feel you have to...

Just by clicking on the FOLLOW THIS BLOG in the right-hand sidebar you can, should you wish, follow this blog.

I think this means you get alerted to new posts, or something...why not try it, and stop me looking like Lexi No Mates?

A cheering review...

I am indulging myself by posting a comment I got on Catch a Falling Star, as I was so pleased by it. It is fantastic when a reader gets your writing. It may be the reason why one writes...

Kate Kasserman's own book, Independence, is doing very well on Authonomy.

This is what she wrote, in full:

Hi Lexi! Ariom Dahl sent me your way -- and as soon as I clicked on the link I realized that this was one of the books I've seen talked up all over the place. Well, and now I know why! So, there we go -- I gave you a vote, no question, and since I can see "frenchbob" right below me as I type, I'll just say that I agree that I don't understand why this hasn't been published already. I had to read all ten chapters, and I am grateful to you for not absorbing my evening by posting more...but you might *consider* posting more, and drop me a line if you do ;) ...

So, this is another one of those cases where I've got no criticisms to offer; I didn't even notice any typos. The writing is descriptive, fluid, and very polished, and I have a great feel for all your characters, and the mystery is both CLEARLY DEFINED and very interesting. MY, but Phil certainly seems to have involved himself in, shall we say, a NUMBER of interesting...coincidences. No question that he knows a lot more than he's saying. But somehow, in a book as carefully put together as this, I can't quite see Phil as the main villain; I am SURE you're misdirecting me!

Giving Ric Dog was a good choice. Caz never mentions it outright (relying on and referring only to her instincts), but it *does* make even a scruffy stranger seem more trustworthy when a goofy dog is attached to him. And that's an important thing (although a small one) to establish early on, because while as we go on through the story we see Caz's idealism and straight-shooter naivete, of course we don't know this AT FIRST, and Dog (back when he was just "a dog") helps bring it into the realm of plausibility that she'd give this random vagrant a little toast and a lift.The careful attention (it came across as well-researched and realistic to me, though I know DIDDLY about rocking horses) given to Caz's vocation both develops her as a character (the attention and love she pours into her work, and the fact that it's a vocation for which she's taken risks and made sacrifices) and adds some interesting detail to the necessary transitional parts of the story. HAHAHA, and that scene when Ric DELIBERATELY WITHHOLDS his admiration of her workspace until the very last moment, because he is THAT GOOD at reading people (and, er, manipulating them) was priceless!!

When Caz was talking about her business difficulties, I was yelling at her "RIC CAN SELL! GET THIS MAN ON SALES IMMEDIATELY! I DON'T CARE IF HE'S NEVER DONE IT BEFORE -- HE'LL BE GREAT!" Heh heh...and of course Ric was already two steps ahead of me, and then some...ALSO priceless! (I do psych evals of job applicants in my day-job, and I KNOW A SALESMAN when I see one!!)Anyway, fantastic work, and best of luck!

Getting ratty on forums...

I've been dropping in to the Authonomy forum, to find out what's going on, promote Catch a Falling Star and chat.

All human life is there; people who make you laugh out loud, people you really get to like and a few obnoxious people. And the point of this post is to say; why do people think they can change anyone else's opinion on a message board? It's a rare thing to change someone's mind at the best of times, but the speed with which antagonism builds up on a forum has to be seen to be believed.

It's a bit like the way drivers get extra aggressive when in their cars. And it's a mistake to get involved. I'm sure all my readers agree, the sensible course of action is to ignore and wander off. Don't feed the trolls.

POD on Youwriteon

Phewph. I have just finished the formatting of my first two novels to send to Legend for Youwriteon's POD deal. It took about two days, including covers with backs and spines.

Luckily I like formatting; I love fiddling about till the text looks its best, and I ADORE dropped caps at the start of chapters. I'd have illuminated capitals if I could, red, blue and gold, but plain dropped caps are pretty good.

To keep costs down, you don't get a proof copy, which means I will have a niggling worry at the back of my mind, until I see the books, that I've made some stupid mistake.

I do hope I haven't.

Cover for POD

Your opinion, please...

I'm hoping to POD my two fantasy novels with Youwriteon, and I've been considering a new cover for Trav Zander.

I'm not sure the old one is neat enough. But I'm not skilled with Adobe Photoshop to do the professional job I'd like on the new one.

Which do you prefer?

Harper Collins' editor's comments on 'Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation'

Here is the review I won on Authonomy by 'Torbrek...' getting to the top five at the end of August:

The manuscript here is a fun, solid foundation for an engaging youth adult fantasy.

It’s a well-written story following Tor, an appealing young woman who has been forced by political circumstance to pose as a man in order to join the army and use the master sword craft passed on by her grandfather. The reader meets her shortly after she achieves her aim, and as she faces her first initiation trial – to slay a dragon and rescue a princess.

Only, like Tor, the dragon, Xantilor, doesn’t turn out to be entirely predictable – and so begins a friendship that elevates Tor through the ranks to Dragon master and offers a beleaguering kingdom a chance of survival against a tyrannical neighbour.

It is a very appealing premise, and the sassy heroine and opinionated older dragon offer the reader an entertaining pairing of heroes, but at the moment it doesn’t quite live up to its promise. Primarily, the fantasy world needs more realisation; secondly, we'd feel closer to the characters if their motives were explored in greater depth.

For example, Tor’s own history is fascinating and has been carefully thought out. Skardroft’s destruction of Cramble, her grandfather’s legacy, and the weight of her disguise are all important and establish the wider political situation in the readers mind. But because the depiction of these details seems a little rushed, the picture as a whole is a little hazy. The tyrant’s ambitions could be revealed earlier in the story, as this and its connection to Skardroft’s hate of the Hundred Knights should be the framework into which everyone’s personal motives are woven. The core of the work is in place, but I wonder if there’s quite enough around it.

There are some really great characters and ideas in the story. I’d like more of them – and I’d like to be more afraid of them, too. The downfall of the dragons is certainly intriguing, and Corfe is brimming with wicked possibility. Overall, the manuscript is of good quality with an engaging voice and lightness of touch – but more work is certainly required to strike the right balance between a quickly paced story and a richly built world.

I think this is a perceptive and fair assessment of 'Torbrek...'; but it was my first novel, and I don't want to spend any more time on it. Catch a Falling Star, my third book, is what I am working on now.

More Authonomy...

Catch a Falling Star has gone up from 27 to 16 in the Editor's Desk chart on Authonomy.

I'm happy with the new chart. Though the sock puppet people retain most of the unfair advantage they gained, they have all dropped in the charts. It's unreasonable to expect Harper Collins to come up with a perfect ranking system in an imperfect world; this one is now pretty good, and it should be much harder for the next lot of cheats to make it to the top of the chart. So it will get better. And they can always tweak the algorithm.

Well done, Authonomy team, and thank you.

Latest hot news on Authonomy!

'The support of higher-ranked talent spotters counts for more than lower-ranked ones'

With these few words from the Authonomy team, hope revives in the honest members' hearts.

It's going to happen next week - and it'll be retroactive.

Will the sock puppet/friends-and-relatives-backed books go down? They will. And in what direction will my books go? Will I be overtaken by books backed by highly-ranked talent-spotters? No idea. Interesting, though. Watch this space.

Authonomy and the sock puppets

*N.B. Since I wrote this yesterday, Harper Collins has added a new layer to the system, involving voter ranking (see post above) which will, I hope, address the issues I outlined here*

In case this term is new to you, a sock puppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception within an Internet community.

When Authonomy launched its ranking system, I was hugely impressed. It was clever, subtle and entirely positive; it was not possible for ill-natured competitors to vote you down (and believe me, this happens on some sites). The newly unveiled top twenty was full of quirky, original, well proof-read books of all genres; and I'm not saying this just because my three books were in the top ten. I had the advantage of being on the site since day one, and there were only a few hundred books to choose from; but people voted for my novels because they read and liked them.

But a problem soon arose. In Authonomy's FAQ is a cheat's charter:

'Our really savvy members know that attracting external readership can really boost their visibility on the site. So if you already have champions from outside the authonomy community – whether that’s friends and family, or visitors to your blog, facebook profile or other website, you might also encourage them to join the site and give your book their support.'

How many friends, family and fans does an unpublished writer have, people who have actually read and liked his/her book? I've got five, and of those, only my daughter has joined Authonomy.

But some members appear to have many more. Dozens. Who join the site in batches of six or ten, back one book, and leave for good. One book in the top five has over eighty of these obliging 'friends and relations', all of whom joined in the last twelve days. It's difficult not to draw the conclusion that the author is backing his own book under multiple aliases.

(Ah, but the IP address would give him away, you say. No, not if he has a non-static IP address, which is different every time he signs in.)

As you'd expect, his is not the sort of book which will light up the eyes of a Harper Collins' editor, should it hit her desk at the end of the month.

And it's not just that one extreme example, either. A whole batch of lack-lustre novels (and the odd quite good one) has sprung to the top in very short order, while truly excellent books are pushed downwards in the chart.

Authonomy is aware there is an issue. They said;

'We are sorry to say that a handful of individuals are attempting to fraudulently manipulate the authonomy rankings. This is unfair to the vast majority of users to this site. We would like to make it absolutely clear that we will not tolerate cheating and will take appropriate action.'

But all they have done is quietly remove a few votes from some unlucky offenders, while others carry on.

This is discouraging, to say the least, for those of us on Authonomy who rely on votes from people who genuinely enjoy our writing. And if things go on this way, I can't see any agent being impressed by the top twenty - and if the books there are uninspiring, why would she look further down the rankings?

Will the problem disappear as thousands of people join the site, sweeping the cheats away? I'd love to think so, but it's so much easier to manufacture votes than earn them.

What would I do, if I ran Authonomy?

• Allow only three 'friends and family' per writer, who must declare themselves


• Rigorously check the backers of everyone in the top five


• At my total discretion, reduce cheats' scores to zero and make them start again

Jade Goody stole my title!

My whodunit, Catch a Falling Star, was briefly called Wild Regrets, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde:

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,

None knew so well as I:

For he who live more lives than one

More deaths than one must die.

Then I hit on the much better title, Catch a Falling Star; googled it anxiously - no one else had used it for a novel. Hurrah!

And now Jade Goody has snaffled it, for a ghosted autobiography to come out next month. Plih.

Virtual shopping

I have discovered a new, writer-related pleasure, and it's totally free!

Cyber shopping for one's characters.

The big stuff I've already done; my heroine, Caz, has a Hoxton workshop which is not my workshop; it's a bit further west, so she can see the Gherkin; I based it on a lutemaking friend's workshop, and built her a flat on top. It's in Fox Hollow Yard, a fictional place which is partly an amalgam of real places, partly made up.

It's the small stuff which is pure pleasure; which guitar would Ric own, what clothes would he buy, what motorbike would he choose? (A Harley Night Rod Special - not quite sure that's right). What cars would the characters drive? What would Emma buy when she's giving Caz tea under the misapprehension Caz is a journalist? What would Caz wear to catch the eye of Jeff Pike?

Read about it here in Catch a Falling Star.

Gold star on Authonomy!

Midnight last night saw the first five novels, chosen on Authonomy by members of the site, which will be read by Harper Collins editors. The top books were:


SPAMMER by Sylvia
Fiction, Crime, Thriller

TORBREK...and the Dragon Variation by Lexi Revellian
Fiction, fantasy

THE STONE FABLES by Toscka
Fiction, Historical Fiction

HAMELIN'S CHILD by DJ Bennett
Fiction, Crime, Thriller

BOOMERANG by Alan Hutcheson
Fiction, Comedy

These books are all quite different, quirky, and very well written; all, I would say (casting modesty aside) worthy of the editors' attention, and all voted for by readers who had read the first chapters, and believed them to be good.

(I do hope the links work, as Authonomy is still in beta)

Authonomy 3

AUTHONOMY, Harper Collins' new writers' website, is out of beta!

You can look at it (and join) here.

Update: apparently, I may be being premature (thanks, Alan). If you can't get access to the site, then I am. My apologies.

All I can say is, it's not the butler. Probably...

I'm writing a whodunit* at the moment, and I'm not sure I'm the best person to do this, because when I read mysteries and thrillers I'm easily confused. I'm also a bad guesser of who the villain will turn out to be. Credulous, and readily misled.

But the beauty of writing a novel is that, unlike a trapeze artist doing a triple somersault to the catcher, the author does not have to get it right first time. One can nip back and insert a telling yet subtle clue. One can move scenes around until they are in the most effective order. The characters get more complex and wilful as the story progresses, which helps.

I have made my heroine and first person narrator, Caz, bright, but a little naive; and like me, she does not spot the baddie until too late.

*I can't even decide whether there is one or two 'n's in 'whodunit'.

Authonomy chart is here!

Authonomy (Harper Collins' new website for tyro writers) is still in beta, but today, to huge excitement, the charts appeared on the site.

My first novel, Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation is at number one on the chart!

Now I know I had a big advantage by being one of the first members on the site, when we all rushed round reading each other's books, and I've also been active, which makes your books noticed. But I'm still as pleased as Punch and Judy.

(I'm also number one commenter - I was at two; it's a rolling chart - which means, I think, that I backed more successful books than anyone else. I don't yet fully understand the system).

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out...

Voltaire said that, and how right he is. Writing a novel is all about selection; once you've got an idea for characters and a plot, then crucial decisions about how you tell the story have to be made. And the decision that crops up the most is what to put in, and what to leave out.

I am paranoid about not boring my readers (even though, as my books are unpublished, there are so few of them. But one must plan ahead...) If I write a scene without zing, I will re-write it until it sparkles, or delete it. And I have to trust my judgment, because although I have had excellent and helpful advice on Youwriteon and Authonomy, I have also had contradictory advice, and advice that struck me as wrong.

I am the only person, in the end, who can decide what goes in my books.

My friend Alan Hutcheson wrote:

Why write a novel? Because reading really good ones is inspirational and we want to get deeper into that magic. The magic that leaves out the boring parts and takes us to a world where it is all exciting. Maybe scary, maybe funny, maybe disgusting and maybe frightfully rousing (read that however you like). But no boring parts.Great to read, even better to create.

That's why we write novels. It gives us a chance to leave out the boring stuff.

By the way, I hope I will be able to write exciting news shortly about Authonomy, Harper Collin's new website for unpublished authors.

And Catch a Falling Star is up to 24,120 words, and counting...

Three cheers for the internet!

I'm writing my third book, and it occurred to me how amazingly easy computers make this process. Not just Word, which I love in spite of its little ways, but how simple research has become.

Almost anything you need to know about is right there at your fingertips. No more trekking to the library to find, if it's open, that it doesn't have the book you require, or that another borrower has taken it out.

Things I have researched recently with a few clicks of the mouse:

• Penalties for being an accessory after the fact (actually obstructing justice and harbouring a fugitive)


• Rock star excess


• Brit Art


• The poste restante service, here and in France


• Hix Oyster and Chop House


• Rock star earnings


• 50 Best Guy Movies, and the female equivalent


• parking options in Notting Hill


• hic sunt dracones

...and that's just this week...

Bound

'With a tremendous bound Jack was free!'

When I started writing, I would sit down with an idea for a scene in my head, not knowing quite where to begin; so I used to start at a bit where I knew what to put, and go on from there. I quickly learned that I didn't need to go back and put in an establishing paragraph or two; that the place the action started was the place to begin. You don't need to show the couple walking into the tea shop, sitting down and ordering, when the important bit is what they say over tea.

Similarly, once the object of the scene is accomplished, cut it off right there. Holly Lisle offers good advice on this here.

Mary Renault, one of my favourite authors, discovered the technique for herself, and called it Bound. To quote from David Sweetman's flawed biography, 'she meant the use of the cinematic cut, the ability to jump ahead, to précis talk and action where necessary. [Before this] she had no one to explain such things to her and all she could do was plod on, watching the novel swell, unaware of how to remedy matters.'

Dogs in Fiction

My latest book is my first without dragons, but it has a dog, a mongrel called Dog. He looks like the dog in the photo on the left.

A reviewer on Youwriteon said he hoped Dog would be involved in the rest of the book, and that got me thinking about fictional dogs. Jilly Cooper said that if your novel was getting sluggish, kill off the dog. Could one bear to, though?

I made a non-comprehensive list of fictional dogs:

1. My favourite, Snowy, Tintin's dog. Beautifully drawn; Hergé could draw anything except horses. The scene where Snowy gets tipsy and is told off by Tintin is unforgettable.

2. In Mortal Engines, Katherine's pet wolf, also called Dog. I love wolves. The reader knows things are going very badly when poor Dog is shot dead towards the end of the book.

3. An unpublished (as yet) dog, The General in Alan Hutcheson's The Baer Boys. A lovable long-haired dachshund with lots of personality, The General is based on Alan's real-life dog, Odie.

4. Timmy the dog, George's dog in The Famous Five adventures. Loyal, brave and fond of ice-cream, he's the dog every child wants.

5. Most improbable dog; Nana, a prim Newfoundland dog, who was nanny to the children in JM Barrie's play, Peter Pan.

Have I missed any good dogs? I must have. Let me know.

Catch a Falling Star in at No. 1 on YWO!

I posted the first 9,000 words of my new novel, Catch a Falling Star, on Youwriteon on 3rd July 2008. Yesterday it received its fifth review, making it eligible for the charts. I was delighted to find today that it has gone straight in at number one!

Lorraine, herself no slouch at getting into the Top Ten (she's there as I write) concluded her review of my extract;

'I sometimes say I would read on, this is one of those rare moments when I’m really pissed that I can’t. Had this been a book instead of an extract I would now be curled up on the sofa, ignoring the world, because I want to find out what happens next. If the rest of the book is of the same standard I wouldn’t be able to put it down.'

The book is a mystery/thriller, told in the first person. Now I just have to write the rest of it...

How to write a novel..

...with the most efficiency?

I guess there are many different ways to write a novel. This is only my third that I'm currently working on, so I don't know whether I've hit on the best method for me, or not; but I have noticed a pattern emerging.

What I do is, work out what the main characters are like, in quite a bit of detail; I know their childhood pets, first boyfriend/girlfriend, if they drink tea or coffee for breakfast, which bits of their appearance they dislike etc., and also what the book is about; the themes and outline of the plot. I make pages of notes on the characters, and jot down random ideas. I know the end of the novel, and write the key scene that occurs at or near the end.

Then I start writing. I usually know two or three scenes that I will write, and by the time I've written them I've thought up the next few. Like a walk through a dark wood with a torch. I make up other characters as I go along, and let them play off against each other. It's scary, because how do I know I won't run out of ideas?

I've tried writing scene titles on cards, doing time lines, and attempting to map out the whole structure of the book before I begin, but for me these methods didn't work. If I have a scene in my head, I need to write it down quickly before it fades, not put it to one side because my outline isn't finished yet.

How do you do it?

Why a novel is a bit like a glove collection...

Writing a novel has something in common with my daughter's collection of single gloves.

She finds them lost in the street, brings them home, washes them and pins them on her notice board wherever they seem to fit in among the others.

And a writer, in the throes of a novel, does much the same while out and about; spots things that will add to his novel, pounces on them, brings them home and in they go.

(The sequinned shoe? No, I don't know what it's doing there. Inexplicable and unexpected. But then, it's not a bad thing for a novel to have something inexplicable and unexpected in it, either).

A book called...not sure yet

My third novel...

I wrote the first page of my third novel today, and no, I'm not going to tell you what it's about. I don't want to talk about it in detail until it's well under way, for fear of dissipating my creative energy.

I can say it's a different genre from Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation and Trav Zander. It will, I hope, benefit from all I have learned from writing those two novels.

Authonomy 2

The beta version of Authonomy is flourishing; nearly a thousand members, almost a quarter of whom have loaded books, or extracts of books. Some of the novels are very good indeed; so good I'm not sure why they're not in print already. Which got me thinking about how Harper Collins are going to use the site once it's fully up and running. Because there are two possibilities.

1. They can treat it like an online slush pile, with the better stuff conveniently shuffled to the top, and then use their normal methods of selection. Or,

2. They can use it as a way of finding slightly different novels from what they would otherwise choose; take a chance on books the site members love, but that an agent, with his specialized knowledge, would reject on various grounds.

I'd like them to go with 2, but think it unlikely. Which may turn out to be a missed opportunity. I read a fascinating article in the Bookseller by Alison Flood, Tops and Flops at the LBF. It's about how some of the books that got the most hyped London Book Fair deals have actually sold thus far. A few examples;

'The biggest début thriller deal of the year'; sales to date: 3,281 copies. Simon & Schuster secured the two books with a 'very high six-figure pre-emptive offer'.

Harper Collins paid seven figures for world English rights, excluding Canada, for a new novel set on a Canadian military base in the 1960s. Sales to date: 14,436

Orion bought Kate Mosse’s ‘Barbara Erskine-ish’ novel Labyrinth in a deal rumoured to total seven figures. Sales to date: 1,076,509

The point being that agents and publishers do not always get it right. One thinks of the first print run of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - 500.

Sometimes the public knows best. After all, it's the public who buy books. Or not.

Heroes and Villains

The characters in my fiction almost always come from within my mind; they represent disparate aspects of my personality, and I think this is quite normal for a writer. How else can you know how they think and feel?

My friend Alan Hutcheson agrees, and says even his cold ruthless killer Leslie in Boomerang has some Alan in him.

The result is that I like all of my characters, even the horrible ones; I know their redeeming features and why they are the way they are and do what they do. And I think this is what makes the reader engage with fictional people.

I dislike white and black characters. Superman - boringly virtuous. Voldemort - boringly evil. Bring on the rich and subtle shades of grey; Alan Breck Stewart - a fascinatingly flawed goodie. William Elliot - an intelligent and witty baddie. Give me heroes who trip over while rushing to the heroine's aid, and villains that impressionable teenage girls will secretly want to redeem.

Don't tell me what to think. Let me decide that Fanny Price, though the heroine, is a pain, and Henry Crawford is better off without her.

Much more fun.

Bathing in the Middle Ages

Yes, washing was popular then, and I bet London smelled better, too...

I remember Michael Palin remarking that they'd got it wrong when making Monty Python and the Holy Grail - they'd blacked out people's teeth, assuming that in the absence of dentists, teeth would rot and fall out. Of course, without sugar, medieval teeth were in better shape than our own, as can be seen in surviving skeletons of that period.

Another misconception is that no one washed in the Middle Ages. In fact, bath houses were popular, and some castles had running hot and cold water, and a full time bathman.

One of the most charming rooms in the twelfth century part of Leeds Castle is the Queen's Bathroom, with its draped barrel-shaped bathtub, with a tent-like canopy to keep off the draughts and afford a little privacy. Hot water, with herbs and flower petals, and a maid to hand you a towel - real luxury.

He uttered a vile oath...

...but should I tell the reader what it was?

Swearing comes from early forms of word magic - the entirely correct idea that words have power. How far should you go with swear words in a book teenagers may read?

There's a scene in Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation where Tor, out hunting on her own, finds a boy apparently unconscious in the forest. She runs to help, and is crouched over him when his eyes open and look past her. He is a decoy. 'Oh no!' she cries, spinning round to confront five men come to get her.

My daughter read this and said, 'She wouldn't say oh no.'

Minty is eighteen, the same age as Tor, and I take her opinion seriously. 'What would she say, then?'

'Shit.'

'Ah.' I left it for a couple of months, then there was an interesting discussion on the Youwriteon forum about swearing in historical and fantasy novels. I decided I should be more creative. What about, for general abuse and disparagement;

Go shag a dragon
He thinks he's the dragon's bollocks

Oh, pick the scales off a dragon!

...and from my friend Cat;

Skirt clinger

Go lay a dragon egg

He's the northern end of a south-bound donkey

You pile of dragon dung

His ladder doesn't reach the top

I have to say, I decided my daughter was right. For the moment at any rate, Tor's dismayed reaction is what Minty's would be.

Authonomy

I was lucky enough to be one of the first seven pre-beta testers of the new website for unpublished writers, Authonomy (the link won't let you into the site yet, as it's still beta).

You are able to load anything over 10,000 words of your book(s) - unlike most members, I've loaded all of mine, in case anyone gets carried away and wants to read the whole thing. You also load cover art, a pitch to make others want to read your book, and an image to represent you.

Each member has a virtual bookshelf he/she can load with up to five books from the site. I'm swapping mine around as I read new extracts. And you can leave a comment on other people's books.

It's all rather fun.

Titles...

Those of you who regularly scan my blog for the tiniest activity on my part (I hardly like to say it, but perhaps you should get out more) will have noticed that I have changed the name of the novel formerly known as Rising Fire. I've also tinkered with the covers.

I'm not saying that Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation will be the final title. But that's what it is for now. Thank you Norm, whose suggestion it was.

I'd write a little about titles, but am reluctant to quote the excellent examples I've come across of unpublished novels' titles, as I think that while one's novel is most unlikely to be stolen, an amazing title is actually quite likely to be pinched by the unscrupulous.

Raymond Chandler used to list any good titles that occurred to him in case they came in handy. Sensible man. Wish I'd done that.

No! No! It is NOT weird and wonderful!

Gripped by the dead hand of the cliché...

I am guilty of writing ‘she woke with a start’ in a first draft. ‘She melted into his arms’ really does say it all (this doesn't mean it's a good idea to use the phrase in a novel, though).

But what about clichés that are used with no thought at all? ‘Sea change’ frequently has me yelling at the radio, ‘the sea has nothing to do with it!’ The original Shakespearean metaphor in The Tempest has a point, as THE CHANGE HAPPENED UNDERWATER! But a political party changing a policy has nothing whatever to do with the sea!!!

And as for weird and wonderful, bright and breezy, chop and change, born and bred, each and every, first and foremost, fast and furious, facts and figures, fame and fortune, kith and kin (what's kith?) hale and hearty, part and parcel, prim and proper, rack and ruin, rules and regulations, safe and sound, tried and tested, trials and tribulations, vim and vigour...

All I can say is, AVOID.

Road Rage and Ramparts Rage

My fantasy novels are set in an alternative Middle Ages, so I research the actual period for background detail. I'm currently reading The Medieval Castle by Philip Warner, who has a lively writing style and a first-hand knowledge of battle, having fought all through WWII.

He describes the feeling of superiority engendered by looking down, from a castle or a horse, on the enemy. Castle defenders would jeer at and goad the besiegers. Emotions ran so high that when castles fell, the victors often 'massacred the garrison with ill-tempered thoroughness'.

Also, 'it has been said that this blend of arrogance, quick temper, risk-taking and irrationality is a thing of the past.'

I knew what he was going to say next. Here it is:

'Curiously enough, the automobile has created its own species of knights. Lulled into a false sense of security by the armour around him, flattered by the speed which he controls with a touch of the foot, arrogant towards those with inferior mounts or with no mounts at all, the modern motorist will display chivalry towards an attractive woman, pay grudging deference to the owner of a vehicle which is clearly superior, but otherwise behave with stupid over-competitive hostility to every other road-user.

The clearest conviction of the modern motorist is that every other driver is in the wrong; he is driving too fast, too slowly, too timidly or too aggressively. Even the carnage of the multiple accident leaves him relatively unmoved; the massacre of a few peasants had much the same effect on a feudal baron's emotions.'

*

(Courtesy of Norm, here is a link to Monty Python's French Taunting on the Battlements)

Pedants' Corner

To lay and to lie...

A lot of people have problems with when to use lay and when to use lie. I know that lay is transitive, i.e. you lay something, an egg or a table, but lie is intransitive, i.e. you lie on the bed.

But I blush to confess, I only realized recently they are two entirely different verbs, that happen to share 'lay' as the present tense of to lay, and the past tense of to lie. For more details, see here.

It's left me wondering what else I don't know...

Literary agents' websites

I've been trawling through the lists of agents in Writers' & Artists' Yearbook, crossing off all those who do not look at fantasy or consider Young Adult fiction. Then I went to look up the websites of agents on my shortlist.

But quite a few did not have a website. How is this possible in 2008? To make a relevant submission, and to find the right person to send it to, one really needs to know more than the brief facts listed in W & A Y. I do not wish to waste their time or mine.

When I looked at the websites of those agents who did have them, on the whole they were not inspiring. If I was a published author, I would want my agent to have an exciting website, where there would be a section on me, showing pictures of my book covers, with a link to where you could buy the book, plus a link to my website. Hardly any of the agents I looked at had this.

As unpublished authors, we are told we need to be extremely professional for our work to be considered at all by a literary agent. I am happy to do this. But is it such a buyers' market that the agents don't need to bother to be the best they can be?

.

Final thought: maybe, right now, the next soon-to-be-hugely-successful author is comparing agents' websites, deciding who to send three chapters to...

Amazon, how could you?

Don't buy your books from Amazon while they behave like this!

Try the Book Depository instead - it's good, with free postage.

Amazon has said that all Print-On-Demand (POD) books in America will now have to be printed through Amazon's printing company BookSurge, or be discriminated against by losing the buy now button. Amazon's share of the profits will rise from 25% to 55%.

Amazon is also going to penalize mainstream publishers who sell their books direct at a discount on their publisher's websites. Amazon is taking that discounted price as the book's "cover price" and then applying their own discounts accordingly.

These are bully-boy tactics from a huge business, which will not benefit either writers or readers. Read more about it on Youwriteon.

Yesterday I ordered Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds from Amazon. It will be the last book I shall buy from them until they change their minds.

Chapter headings

Why don't most authors write chapter headings?

Some do, like Jasper Fforde, and JK Rowling; in fact, these days you're most likely to come across them in Y.A. novels. Readers often don't notice them, but they add that extra something and are a lot of fun to write; you can tease and intrigue the reader, and even lead him in the wrong direction.

I've just written them for Rising Fire and Trav Zander. My favourites:

Socks and a revelation

Journey to the edge of the map

A wolf by the ears

Girls and spies

On the run - with canary

Revising Rising Fire (again) and wax modelling...

I've just finished making the goblet on the left for British Silver Week, and while I wax modelled the snakes it occurred to me that this has a lot in common with revising a novel.

You get the outline right, then change some major bits - for instance the snake necks where they meet the foot of the goblet, so as not to show the internal rod. Then there's a lot of smoothing, texturing, measuring and checking it looks good from all angles. Really very like revising Rising Fire.

I have no idea how long it will take in either case. I just go on until it’s done. Which can take ages.

There's another connexion too. I got the idea for the goblet from the design of Tor's dagger, that you can see on the book cover above.

(By the way, I do know the author does not design the book jacket - I did it for Youwriteon, where you can display a cover image).

Show don’t tell…

I read an excellent screenplay, Nightshift, by Oliver L. Jeffery (read it here) which got me thinking about the way writers tell their stories, and the advice one is often given, 'show, don't tell'.

The novel is in a direct line from the storyteller beside the fire, with his listeners gathered around him, who would naturally be doing more 'tell' than 'show'. 'Once upon a time there was...' is pure 'tell'.

Films and television, on the other hand, are relatives of the stage. They deal only in 'show'. With their universal availability the public have got used to pure 'show', and this has infiltrated our attitude to novels.

A hundred years ago Bram Stoker wrote, ‘The Count…was very courteous and very cheery in his manner’ – today you’d be told to show his courtesy and cheeriness by his speech and actions. And indeed, it's often better to do that. But have we gone too far in this direction? I think perhaps we have. A novel is not a film. Actors will not be fleshing out the written words.

Novelists have to make it happen in the minds of our readers, and 'tell' is a useful weapon in our armoury, along with everything else.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves Quiz

This you must try. Lovely graphics. Fun.

.,;:!:;,.

PUNCTUATION GAME

Dragons and bikes

In Rising Fire, I describe the first time the dragon, Xantilor, takes Tor for a flight. I've never flown on a dragon myself, so imagination was called for. I wished I hadn't passed on the opportunity to take a microlight flight a couple of years ago (unlike Tor, I am not good with heights).

I looked up aerial photographs of castles and countryside for Tor's view. Thinking about birds, I realized you'd go up and down with each beat of the huge wings.

Then it occurred to me that riding a bike has something in common with riding a dragon. You're experiencing the sun or rain, the rushing wind, the speed, and in London enough danger to make it exhilarating.*

Though not, thank goodness, the dizzying distance from the ground.

.

*Sometimes I wish my bike had a fire-breathing feature...

If in doubt, go with your gut feeling...

It's your book - write it your way, you're the only one who can

A few years ago I invested 25p at a school fete buying a paperback called, rather clunkily, Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead...But Gutsy Girls Do, by Kate White. It turned out to be one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking books I've ever read.

Its main argument is that girls are brought up to be pleasers, to play by the rules, and while this works just fine at home and school, take this attitude to the workplace and you will never be a high achiever or fulfill your potential.

But it also discusses the importance of trusting your gut feeling. When Kate was editor-in-chief at McCall's, one of her jobs was to select the cover photo, knowing that her choice could make newsstand sales fluctuate by several hundred thousand copies. Deliberating her first cover for September, she saw a paparazzi shot of Demi Moore; 'it practically took my breath away and I decided in that instant, "This is the cover".'

As she showed the touched-up photo round the office, people voiced concerns. Demi did not have the usual 'buy-me' smile; the background was black; a pregnant Demi was about to appear nearly naked on the cover of August's Vanity Fair. Kate began to have doubts.

Then she remembered her initial 'oooooh' reaction. She decided to go ahead.

The issue sold 300,000 more copies than the September issue of the year before. She said she learned how easy it is to get talked out of going with your gut when the pressure is on.

The moral of this post? Listen to the advice of others, but go with your gut feeling. Don't let people talk you out of your own certainty.

By my faith, but you're a bold rascal!

This is Sir Tristram speaking in that great book, Le Morte d’Arthur, finished in 1469 by Sir Thomas Malory:

‘And fair knight, and well proved knight, thou shalt well wit I may not forsake thee in this quarrel, for I am for thy sake made and gotten upon a queen; and such promise I have made at my uncle’s request and mine own seeking that I shall fight with thee unto the uttermost, and deliver Cornwall from the old truage.’

Beautiful; but would a book set in the Middle Ages (or an alternative Middle Ages, as mine are) get away with its characters talking like this? I think the reader would find it hard going. I took the decision to have my characters speak in contemporary language, and sometimes get told off for it. Some readers want what they are used to from films and historical romances; a sort of pastiche, which bears little resemblance to the language used by Malory or Chaucer, but which they feel comfortable with. It's no more authentic than modern speech, of course.

I had a go at writing a bit:

‘Prithee, fair maid…’

‘Unhand me, my lord! Fie, for shame, I am promised to another, as well you know!’

‘Nay, lady, be not so intemperate. What lies, I wonder, beneath that haughty mien? Perchance you are not as cold as you seem…’

‘Sir, if this be jest tis an unseemly one! Take care; my brother rides hither apace, and will wreak vengeance for any affront.’

Hey, that was easy – I wonder if there’s a market for a medieval bodice-ripper?

N.B. I'm sure you all recognized the title as a quote from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood of 1938.

Youwriteon Book of the Year

Not Rising Fire alas, but some good news...

Go here to see who won YWO Book of the Year 2008. I've read most of these extracts, and they are of a high standard, worthy winners, and all very different.

The excellent news for me is that Youwriteon is publishing an anthology of all the short stories in the Best Seller Chart, and I have two in there; Showing Them, about an unpublished writer, and Comforted by Darkness, about a woman's encounter with an enigmatic stranger.

So guess what everyone I know will be getting from me, signed, for Christmas?

Are you all right? You're looking a bit pale...

Cough in real life, and your friends' only reaction will be to back away from your germs. Cough in a novel or on screen, and it's both good and bad news; your friends will notice and show concern, but unfortunately it means you are going down with something serious, maybe fatal.

If you are going to be ill, my advice is to see if you can get one of those fictional illnesses; they're so much better than real life ones. They come in various forms;

1. TERMINAL ILLNESS Now here, fiction is way ahead. No physical decline, or feeling wretched, or looking terrible. No, you will be gorgeous till the end. If you look a tad frail it won't stop you doing interesting stuff like making love with the hero. Coughing delicately into a handkerchief is about the only symptom that will trouble you.

A final plus; a fictional doctor will be able to predict, to the day, when you will conk out. In the film The First of the Few, the doctor told Leslie Howard that if he rested completely he'd be right as rain; if he carried on overworking, he'd be dead in six months. Now that's the sort of certainty a patient needs.

2. INSANITY This is only ever bad news if you are a baddie; if you are a sympathetic character, you can go on much as normal with everyone smiling indulgently at your foibles. See Mr Dick in David Copperfield.

3. SMALLPOX Not a disease to tangle with; but Esther Summerson in Bleak House had a nasty bout of it, and when she recovered her face was pock-marked badly enough to scare off a tiresome suitor. But a year or two later, bingo! She's as beautiful as before.

4. LOSS OF THE USE OF YOUR LEGS Surprisingly common in novels, this. Both Pollyanna and Katie in What Katie Did suffered from it. But, and here's the good news for a heroine, it's ten pounds to a penny that with a little research, a specialist, experimental doctor can be found who will make you as good as new! Beat that, real life.

(And for the odd character who fails to track down a leg expert, like Madame Neroni in Barchester Towers, there is the comfort of being as beautiful and charming as you ever were, possibly more).

Real life versus fiction? No contest.

Take the comma quiz

Can you handle a comma?

I have a slight problem with that tricky little punctuation mark, the comma; I'm sometimes uncertain whether I need one or not. I'm not going to discuss them, as Lynne Truss has done it much better than I could in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. But it's high time I directed my loyal readers to a quiz, so here is one to test your comma usage:

The Comma Test

It gives you handy advice and comments at the top; they are easy to miss.

(Oh, um, I got 76%. Dear me).

The Green Eye Rule

Most rules are made to be broken...

...though not, of course, rules about apostrophes, or spelling, where if you do not get it right, you are getting it WRONG, and there are no excuses.

No, I'm referring to the rules you will learn at a writing class, which you can see an excellent summary of at my friend Norm's blog. Don't misunderstand me, these are all useful points to bear in mind when writing, but like The Pirates' Code, they are really more what you'd call 'guidelines'.

There is one rule, however, that I've been fretting over lately. It was made up by another friend, Alan Hutcheson, and is called The Green Eye Rule. It goes:

'Thou shalt not give thy characters green eyes to make them seem special, intriguing, sexy, mysterious or otherwise memorable. If all the fictional characters with green eyes were stacked together they would reach halfway to Mars. Placed feet to shoulders the monolith would extend well past Uranus. Either arrangement would interfere with weather satellites and likely raise an objection from fringe human rights groups'.

Now before I knew Alan, I wrote Trav Zander, and the heroine, Isolda, is a bewitching blonde with green eyes. I did some low-level worrying about this, then when I went in for ABNA, I became aware that green-eyed heroines were not just two a penny in unpublished fantasy, they appeared to be mandatory.

So, teeth gritted, I went through the novel and changed Isolda's eyes to a smokey grey. I was not happy about this; I see her with green eyes. And she has a matching emerald necklace - emeralds, said to be unlucky - which played a minor part in the story. Star sapphires just don't work so well.

In the end, I changed her eyes back to green.

But not before I'd sent the typescript out to an agent, with, I realized too late, passages where the match between her grey eyes and her emerald necklace were remarked on.

Rats.

Commit to the move!

From the age of nine, my daughter studied static trapeze and flying trapeze. She also learned cloud swing, where you balance on a loop of rope swinging in a huge arc, using its momentum to do tricks. One move guaranteed to make the audience gasp involves winding the rope round your ankles, then at the high point of the swing letting go with your hands, rotating and catching the rope the other side. You can see it on the video of Fabio Dorea. (Click the middle arrow then bottom left arrow).

I used to watch Minty being trained for this. And it's not something you can learn to do slowly, then build up speed. No, you have to commit to the move. If you don't leap out at the top of the swing, it won't work and you'll be left dangling. I marvelled at her courage.

As writers we don't need those sort of guts, but there are occasions when we too need to commit to the move.

The moment comes when a novel is finished: one has done one's best, had all one's second thoughts, got trusted advice and acted on it, revised and revised again till it's the best one can make it.

Time to send it out to find its fortune. Commit to the move.

Youwriteon update

The ups and downs of an unpublished author, Part Two...

Yesterday I came in to find an email from Guy Saville, author of The Africa Reich, which is so kind I'm going to quote it in full;

Dear Lexi
Just seen the YWO longlist and had to email you straight away to say: CONGRATULATIONS!!! I am so pleased for you. I'll keep my fingers crossed you make it to the shortlist... and then all the way. I think RISING FIRE has a really good chance of winning. I'll watch with bated breath.
Well done again, this should be a real boost to your confidence as a writer.
Warmest wishes
Guy x

Which was a nice way to discover I'd made the Youwriteon longlist for Book of the Year.

Quills, typewriters and Word

I had a brilliant idea while mulling over how to get more depth and layers into Rising Fire. I would draw a map! Several maps of the main cities, maybe one showing the three kingdoms! And not just boring old modern maps, I would make them look like something from the 11th century, with quaint thumbnails of dragons and palaces and swineherds. And I would write in medieval-style script.

I could post it on my website.

So I went on the internet and looked up medieval maps, illustrated manuscripts, and calligraphy.

Luckily I had some goose and swan quill feathers to make a pen. (Since you ask, they are used for laying down ground enamels before firing). I trimmed one with a scalpel, tracked down a bottle of ink that had been minding its own business quietly in a drawer for fifteen years, and got started. Several hours later I stopped.

Now I'm not saying I couldn't make a beautiful map if I tried. I'm pretty sure I could. I just can't spare the weeks it would take to get it right; learning along the way calligraphy and the application of gold leaf. I'll do it if I ever get rich enough to take time off.

But it got me thinking about the production of books. Scribes, writing with a coal fire below their desks to dry the ink as they worked; using feathers from the left wing of the bird, as they curved conveniently for a right-hander; devastated by any mistake, which could not be corrected, but only marked in red to indicate an error.

Then the invention of the printing press; but an author still had to write the manuscript by hand. The typewriter was a huge advance, but the enormous labour of producing a neatly-typed, revised novel meant that anyone who accomplished this was serious about it, and likely to be read by a publisher, and receive a two page letter explaining a rejection.

You know what I'm going to say next. These days, with the advent of personal computers and Word, it is child's play for anyone to produce something that resembles a book.

And an awful lot of people do.

I have great sympathy for the literary agents struggling with stacks of bad novels endlessly doing the rounds ('you've got to be persistent, look at JK Rowling') and even more sympathy with the unpublished good writers, unable to be heard above the cacophony.

Alas, Oneword is no more

It was great, and now it's gone...

As a jeweller, I do a lot of work which uses only a part of my mind. The spare bit of mind gets bored easily, but it's quite specific in its requirements. It hasn't the capacity, for instance, to work on plots or characters in my writing; that would detract from the wax modelling or polishing. No, what it wants is something absorbing to listen to on the radio.

Radio 4 is not as good as it once was; BBC7 devotes all afternoon to children's broadcasting, with its strangely manic children's presenters (what are they on, one wonders?) Then I discovered Oneword.

Oneword serialized a variety of books, had lively film reviews and best of all, Paul Blezard's author interview programme, Between the Lines. Paul Blezard (see the photo) is a man of great charm and enthusiasm, who had always read the book he was talking about. He appears in my short story, Showing Them. I wasn't able to ask his permission, but am sure he is too nice to mind.

Another good thing about Oneword; there were virtually no distracting adverts.

And that, I suppose, is the reason Channel 4 returned for £1 the 51% stake it acquired in the station for £1 million in 2005.

If I go now to my Oneword preset, the station is broadcasting a recording of the dawn chorus.

I do miss it.

Gender

Thinking about my heroine, Tor, passing as a man...

A man dressed as a woman is comic, which is why we have the tradition of pantomime dames and Dame Edna Everage. Few males over the age of sixteen can wear female clothes without appearing risible. One's heart bleeds for transsexuals, so many of whom are never going to convince anyone they are even a very plain woman. This in spite of going the whole hog with hair, makeup, nails, tights and handbags in a way most women simply don't bother about.

But a girl cross-dressing; different kettle of fish. Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Annie Lennox were all wildly attractive in drag. Plus there's the fact that right up till recent times in the West, men had the power. Dressing like a man borrowed some of that power.

And in fiction... First there are the tomboys, every girl's favourite character in the book (what girl in her right mind wants to be Meg or Wendy?) Jo in Little Women, chopping off her hair and never able to be 'ladylike'; George in The Famous Five, always pleased to be mistaken for a boy, and rowing her dinghy better than Julian or Dick. Or Viola in Twelfth Night, falling in love while inconveniently disguised as a man, and finding Olivia is attracted to her. Shakespeare made full use of the gender ambiguities in the situation, which brings me on to...

Blackadder. The episode where Edmund Blackadder falls for 'Bob', a girl lightly disguised in doublet and hose, working as his servant. He is somewhat disconcerted by this, so goes to see the doctor:

Doctor: Now then, what seems to be the trouble?

Edmund: Well, it's my manservant.

Doctor: I see. Well don't be embarrassed if you've got the pox. Just pop your manservant on the table and we'll take a look at him.

Edmund: No, I mean, it is my real manservant.

Doctor: Ah, ah. And what is wrong with him?

Edmund: There is nothing wrong with him. That is the problem. He's perfect, and last night I almost kissed him.

Doctor: I see. So you've started fancying boys then, have you?

Edmund: Not boys. A boy.

Doctor: Yes, well let's not split hairs. It is all rather disgusting and naturally you're worried.

Edmund: Of course I'm worried.

Doctor: Well, of course you are. It isn't every day a man wakes up to discover he's a screaming bender with no more right to live on God's clean earth than a weasel. Ashamed of yourself?

Edmund: Not really, no.

Doctor: Bloody hell! I would be. But still, why should I complain? Just leaves more rampant totty for us real men, eh?

Edmund: Look, am I paying for this personal abuse or is it extra?

* * *

Blackadder scripts written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton.

ABNA update

The ups and downs of an upublished author...

This morning I came in to find an email from April Hamilton, a fellow entrant on ABNA, which is so kind I'm going to quote it in full;

'I'm disappointed to find Trav Zander didn't make the semis. I read some of it and thought it was eminently worthy of advancement. As you yourself said in your Amazon blog, sometimes it just comes down to a poor pairing between the manuscript and the reviewer. In any event, this is just one small pothole in a long road, and you're already a seasoned traveller, already making your way in other venues and competitions. Don't let it get you down, and remember, in the end all but one of us ABNA'ers are destined to lose this contest. Take a day off to feel bad if you must, but then, it's right back to the keyboard with you!- April'

Which was a nice way to discover I didn't make the semi-finals.

By the way, I've just read April's entry and it's excellent and made me laugh - do read it here and write her a review.

Rising Fire's professional critique on Youwriteon

I'm pleased as Punch and Judy...

Today Rising Fire got its free literary critique on Youwriteon, that I won for being in the top five at the end of November. It was written by Gillian Stern, who works as an editor at Bloomsbury and Curtis Brown. I'm quoting two extracts, the first praise, the second some of her suggestions.

'In my job personal taste is irrelevant, but I can tell you that fantasy is not my favourite genre. However, happily for me, the extract of your novel is totally accessible and appealing and I found myself hooked and really enjoying the experience of reading it. I like the way in which you write and I like the voices and the characterisation and nothing about the writing or the story is complicated or inaccessible or difficult to take in. In fact once I got into the narrative, I was absolutely swept along – something I really did not expect.'

'My main criticism is that while all these good things are good, I felt that your writing is a little simplistic – not the style, but the layering within the writing. By this I mean that as a reader, I constantly wanted to know more – more about the time and place, more about the cultural, social and political context of the time and more, much more of Tor’s internal dialogue. The fantasy market is crowded and readers are used to complex plots, ideas and imaginings and in order to be satisfied, they need something satisfying and new. And I feel that, apart from your accessible style and the relationship you set up between Tor and Xantilor and of course your plot turns, there is not all that much that is earth shatteringly new here, little that would make an editor sit up and see this above all the other proposed novels on their desk.'

Gillain Stern's advice will be extremely helpful in my next revision. I've just finished one revision, but knew it needed more work, and I could do better. Onwards and upwards.

(If you'd like to read the whole review, it's on my website).

THE AFRICA REICH

Guy Saville's soon-to-be-published thriller

My fellow Youwriteon-er, Guy Saville, had his exciting novel, The Africa Reich, chosen as Youwriteon Book of the Year in 2007, a huge achievement. I've only read the first few chapters, and can't wait till it is published this year so I can read the rest.

You can read about it at his website The Africa Reich.

Diaries – write now, enjoy in the years to come...

I urge you all to write a diary. A proper one, with pen and ink, not a blog. It is unwise to be frank and indiscreet in a blog, but essential in a diary. Years on, it will remind you of entertaining details you have long forgotten. And it’s excellent practice in observation and use of English.

Here are two extracts which may encourage you. Not from my own diary, because of the frank and indiscreet thing. They were both written by my daughter when she was seven. She loved her school. It was a friendly place where more socializing, arts and crafts went on than science, history or geography. Mogg was the headmistress.

'18.9.96

Today in the afternoon it was a desrster in the lavchry.

All because of Luc and Luke. Luc started it because he said “hay it would be funny if oun of us throed a looroll over the prtishon and then Luke said what like this and throed a looroll over prtishon. Then Amelia came upstairs with a lode of driping paint brushes. So now the lavchry is patey AND loorolley.

Do you thing that is afall? Mog did eney way.

Thursday 24/10

I whent to a Halween party. It achly terned out a dsrster. Evrey one amyrerd my coshoom (except horied Veictoryer). Luke was in a bad mood and the fier warks were to loud. After all that was over it straed raing (the ending to evrey outdoor party in my pont of veiw). My mumy made a costuem for Spot.'

[Spot was, and is, Minty’s much-loved soft toy dog. See photo.]

I don't believe a word of it! (And you can't make me).

Five unbelievable characters in fiction

1. The eponymous hero in Little Lord Fauntleroy, which is one of those books people feel they have read when they haven’t. It’s actually rather a good read, but the Little Lord himself is like no real boy has ever been; so cherishing of his mother, and slow to pick up on what everyone thinks of his bullying old grandpa.

It's his cissy clothes, which started a trend in America at the time (see photo) that everyone thinks of in connexion with him. I found a frankly worrying picture of LLF, with excessive ringlets, velvet and lace, astride another boy, that I have spared you.

2. Lyra, in The Praise Singer by Mary Renault. Lyra is a totally bogus depiction of a high class whore. This is not my area of expertise, but whatever hetairai were like, I am convinced they weren’t like this. And I’m one of Mary Renault’s biggest fans.

3. Esther Summerson in Bleak House. Beguilingly written, indeed one of my favourite characters in the book, but again, fake. Prepared to marry one man out of duty and gratitude, when she is in love with another... So good, loving, and modest. A fictional construct.

4. Harry Potter. Unloved since he was a baby, brought up by the ghastly Dursleys, yet he turns out well-adjusted and nice. Improbable.

5. Leonard Bast in Howard’s End. Carrying a weight of symbolism on his frail shoulders, he is E.M.Forster's lone unsuccessful forray into the lower classes. Better in the Merchant Ivory film, as fleshed out by the actor Samuel West.

Who would you nominate?

Amazing goings-on at Amazon

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards extract sightings

Yesterday I was emailed by an ABNA cyber friend, Dwight Okita, to tell me that some of The Chosen One Thousand had been loaded on to the site, nineteen days before they would be officially available. To see them, you just had to go to Books and type ABNA into the search box.

Huge excitement - Trav Zander was not there, alas, but so far only about a hundred were. And you could download them for free and read them!

Or you could, if you lived in America.

Anywhere else, and you couldn't.

Then Josie added the White House as her billing address, and was able to download! I followed her example, using Amazon's Head Office address in Seattle as my cyber piede-a-terre. You can see it in the picture. (I'm right at the top, the middle window. Stunning view). Result!

But will anyone in England be prepared to do this to vote for me? Something tells me the shortlist will be exclusively American...

UPDATE 28/12/07 Amazon noticed that we'd noticed the list, and removed it and the extracts we'd downloaded. They haven't removed my virtual address in America as yet...

Christmas in novels

A seasonal selection...

A Christmas Carol – written to pay off a debt, it sold 6,000 copies in the first week, and was hugely influential. Dickens is to blame for it all, the whole lot, turkey, relatives, spending more than you can afford on presents, it’s all his fault. Bah! Humbug! N.B. The Ghost of Christmas Present, who much resembles Father Christmas, wears green, and favours a bare chest. Chilly.

Emma - the terrific scene where she is confined in a coach on a snowy Christmas Eve with Mr Elton. Mistakenly thinking her in love with him, he proposes; then gets huffy when refused, and never forgives her. He and the vulgar new wife he petulantly acquires are Emma's enemies thenceforth.

Little Women – those pesky small females again – ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents’. 'It's so dreadful to be poor,' (how true). But they discovered they could still be happy! And Jo made money from her stories… Those were the days.

Harry Potter - Harry getting dreadful Dursley presents – a single tissue – and a jumper from Ron’s mum, and having a great time with Ron and Hermione.

The Bachelor – Stella Gibbons wrote half a dozen novels as good as Cold Comfort Farm, the only one in print today. There's a lovely description of a wartime Christmas, capturing all the undercurrents of the characters' hopes and desires. 'Kenneth began to give out the presents and cries of "Just what I wanted!" began to sound in all their falseness upon the festal air.'

Courtesy of Lorraine: a Christmas song.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Calling Names

Names are REALLY important...

I bet everyone with a computer has, at some time, idly googled his own name. It's only when you hope to become well known that you realize being called Mary Jones or John Smith is not good. Not good at all. Though you can get away with it if you excel in your field - John Smith, briefly leader of the Labour Party, at the time transcended his bog-standard name.

I chose my writing name with this in mind. Google Lexi Revellian and it's all ME. Mwah-ha-ha-ha! (Though they do ask if you mean 'rebellion').

There is a magic in names. Yahweh was God's name in the Old Testament, so powerful that his worshippers were forbidden to say it. In an unacknowledged rite of passage, teenagers today often change their name when leaving home. Tessa becomes Tess, Elizabeth Liza, Mark Marc.

Back to writing; a critic once said that you could often guess the quality of a novel by the aptness and credibility of the characters' names. Bad names most likely meant a bad novel. This is especially true in fantasy, where writers have total freedom, and frequently abuse it. A hero called L'tru? Rramis? Gwaal?

Or children's fiction. Bobby Redbreast the Robin, Squawky the Crow, Mr and Mrs Blue-tit, Beady Eye the Hawk, Bobtail the rabbit, Ollie the Owl - the poverty of imagination makes you want to weep. (I did not make these up, by the way).

I've just read The Princess Bride, an eccentric but good read. Some of the names are excellent; Inigo Montoya, Vizzini, Fezzik. But others give you the impression William Goldman put down the first names that came into his head, then forgot to go back and change them. Buttercup, Westley, Humperdinck. Dear oh dear.

My new writing website

Fun to do, after the first few hours of teeth gnashing

I've just set up a writing website. I've had this writing blog since June 2007. I am a huge fan of Blogger - it's elegant, easy to use apart from a few line spacing issues, and free!

But I wanted a site for more permanent information. I'd made a note of Squarespace ages ago, as their site looks so cool. Contrast it with Godaddy. And you get 30 days free trial. I assumed, having had the experience of setting up my jewellery website with Freestart, I would find the process easy.

Wrong!

I spent hours getting cross, and not very far. In a temper with Squarespace, I signed up for a free trial with Moonfruit, only to find it much less easy to use, and less flexible. Every time I viewed my fledgling site, they nagged me to sign up. You can't load a whole short story. Also I kept calling it Moonboot, or Fruitsuit...

I went back to Squarespace, persevered, and am really pleased with the result.

Have a look at it here.

AND it's got a message board! Now this may not seem immediately useful, but I have a vivid imagination. Just suppose I started to become slightly known - through ABNA possibly - a fan could leave me a message! I could answer him!

As my fame spread, fans could chat on my message board about how great I am, and I could delight them by the rare personal appearance there, becoming ever more elusive the richer and more famous I became...

A girl can dream.

Inspiration

Now where did that come from?

As a child, I loved Enid Blyton, particularly The Famous Five, but it was a thwarted love that dared not speak its name. Parents, teachers and librarians were united in their disapproval of her works, and conspired to make them unavailable to middle-class children like me.

I managed to read only three or four Famous Fives; I can’t remember how I got my hands on them. Possibly borrowed them from other children, or gulped them down in visits to friends' houses (what an unsatisfactory guest I must have been).

When my daughter started to read, I bought her the lot. She devoured them. When she was older and we were having a clear-out, she began to read… They ended up back on the shelf.

For me, the moment has passed, the magic is gone. I am, alas, too old and cynical to enjoy the books now.

But I there’s one I remember as being especially riveting. I looked it up; it’s Five Fall into Adventure. The Five meet a plucky ragamuffin girl, Jo, whom they mistake for a boy. She’s the baddie’s daughter, but helps the boys rescue George. Chatting on the Youwriteon forum about early loved books, I had a revelation about Jo:

Good God, that’s where Tor came from!

Tor, my heroine in Rising Fire. Five Fall into Adventure went deep into my imagination when I was a child, to emerge all these years later…

RISING FIRE number 1 in YWO December Bestsellers!

Rising Fire wins professional literary critique on Youwriteon

A certain amount of dancing round the room is going on here. Yes! I can't wait to read my critique from a professional in publishing.

Not because I think it's likely to be ecstatic - I don't, I'm expecting it to be fairly harsh since I am aware there are still a lot of things that could be improved in the start of Rising Fire. It's not as well-written as Trav Zander. And not because I think there's any chance the critiquer will be so impressed he/she will sign me up! That is the stuff of fantasy, and has happened to fewer than 1% of those authors who've been critiqued.

No, I am interested to know if there might be a market for my books, and if I have any chance at all of getting published...

Final gloat (sorry): all four of my pieces (two novels, two short stories) on Youwriteon are now in the Bestseller Chart.

*

I need a new Achievable Goal!