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.