Category Archive for ‘process’ rss

Just How Bad Was Your First Draft?

May 21st, 2013 • 11 Comments

The Inquisition should be uprooting treasons and bringing dangerous criminals to book, but they just won’t leave me alone, and it seems they’re fixated on the process of writing, or at least what passes for it in my case.  Today a question via email from Practical George Allen, who describes himself as, “a cringing, neurotic, self-deprecating aspiring novelist.”  Don’t talk yourself up, George.  His question:

“Just how bad was your first draft of The Blade Itself? Not the original attempt, however many years ago, I mean the first draft of the book that actually got published, and went on to conquer the hearts of millions.  Of course a lot of professional writers will tell the ever-hungry mob that they had to draft and re-write and revise endlessly, polishing to perfection. But I haven’t read any statements to the effect of just how big a steaming pile of incoherent crap the original attempt was.

Was it crap? Did you look at it and think ‘Now it’s done, how the frak am I going to make it publishable?’ 

Or was it actually pretty darn sweet?”

As with most questions, there’s a short answer and a long one.  The short answer?  Yeah, it was actually pretty darn sweet.  The long answer?  Ah, well . . .

As George points out, I’d actually had a lot of the ideas for the First Law for a very long time.  Some of the characters and settings go back well into my childhood.  I first tried to make some actual prose writing out of all that mass of stuff shortly after leaving university in … er … 1994, would you believe, mostly as an exercise to practice my touch typing (employable skills, and all that).  It was mannered, it was adolescent, it was cheesy, it took itself way too seriously, it was not very good.  And there was no Glokta in it, either.  After writing three or four chapters, I gave up, though the ideas still kept bubbling away in there.

Fast forward some seven years or so, and I’d grown up (a bit) and had some experience of life (a bit), and read a lot of stuff outside of fantasy (I always had) and also read Game of Thrones (as it goes), and I was working as a freelance TV editor, mostly of live music and documentaries, and found myself with significant blocks of time off in between jobs, and thought I needed a worthwhile project to undertake rather than JUST playing video games all day.  So I thought I’d have another go at the old fantasy epic.

And, you know what, straight away I was intrigued by what started to come out.  I mean, no doubt I would cringe at some of it now – I cringe at plenty of my published stuff now – but I felt there was something there, in the wit, in the world-weary way of looking at things, in the personalities, in the honesty of the voices that emerged, that was original.  That I was fascinated to explore and develop.

But I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing.  So I spent an awful lot of time in those early days revising, refining, reading over, experimenting with what worked and what didn’t, developing a style.  Or perhaps different styles with the different points of view.  So whenever I wrote a line, I’d look at it, re-write it, think about it.  Whenever I finished a paragraph I’d revise it.  Whenever I finished a scene I’d look over it again, add, take away, reorganise.  Every time I sat down to write I’d start by reading what I wrote the last time.  So working out what needed to be described and when, how to pace a scene, how to use dialogue, mostly working on instinct and trial and error.  That was very important to do, I think, not just in achieving a good result, but in working out how to achieve a good result.  After a few months of this I maybe had seven or eight chapters, and I plucked up the courage to show them to my family, who are very literate (not to mention ruthlessly honest) people, and discussing it with them gave me a whole new set of things to consider and ways to improve.  I started taking it more seriously, planning it more carefully, probably starting to write faster and more confidently but still revising an awful lot as I went.  Eventually I got to the end of the first book, and I’m sure went through many rounds of revision, shortening, self-editing at that point, taking on a lot of comments from my family.  I’m pretty sure my Mum, who’d been an editor of educational books, did a full mark-up edit on it as well.  At that point I took a deep breath and started sending samples to agents.  It was about as good as I was going to make it at that time, though whether they were going to consider it publishable, I had no idea, and indeed a lot of them clearly didn’t.

That draft, I’d say, wasn’t too bad, and probably not massively different on a word by word basis from the book that was published as The Blade Itself.  But when it found a home at Gollancz, there was still a lot of work to do with my editor Gillian.  She got me to write a new start, I turned the Dogman chapters from 1st person to 3rd, and there was a whole mass of revisions and tightenings to be done.

So how bad the first draft was I guess would depend on what you define as the first draft.  I don’t think I really thought about it in those terms at that time, from the start it was a constant process of refinement and revision.  Maybe that comes partly from my experience as a TV editor, where you’ll go over and over a sequence steadily tightening and improving, but it always seemed the right way to work, and though I’ve got a lot better at achieving a reasonable result much more quickly, I still go through a lot of rounds of revision on every book.  My own feeling is that the sense of effortlessness you strive for as a writer actually derives from an awful lot of effort.  But having said that, there was some spark in the book that became The Blade Itself right from my first efforts that I at least found fascinating.  Without that, I’m not sure I’d have got past the first page.

And crap?  Was it ever CRAP?

This will not stand, sir!

Also, for a laugh, you can see fellow purveyor of gritty fantasy Mark Lawrence grappling with the concept of Grimdark over on his blog…

Why the Third Person?

April 29th, 2013 • 26 Comments

Inquisitor Joseph asks, presumably while fingering his glittering instruments in as menacing a manner as possible:

When writing, what made you decide to use third person? Because its easier? Would you recommend writing in third person, or do you think it’s more of a personalised choice? Also, when describing things, do you think it is better to write to much or too little?

An interesting set of nested questions indeed.  The method I tend to use is what’s sometimes called the Third Person Limited, or tight point of view, so it’s third person ‘he said, she said,’ rather than the first person, ‘I said’, but everything is told from the point of view of a single character – relating their thoughts and experiences, trying to give a vivid sense of what it’s like to be that person – although you might move between several different point of view characters at different times.  This is very different from Third Person Omniscient, in which the authorial voice is much more general, describing the action as a whole, relating the thoughts and opinions of different characters as it suits.  You might say in third person omniscient the author tells the story, in first person the character tells the story, while third person limited is somewhere between the two.

So George RR Martin very successfully uses third person limited in Song of Ice and Fire, titling each chapter with the character whose point of view it’s written from.  James Ellroy is another writer whose use of that approach was very influential on me.  Third person limited doesn’t have quite the level of intimacy first person can provide, but it can still be very visceral and involving, while giving you much more flexibility to shift between characters, and perhaps to vary the degree of focus on the point of view character if you want – you can stick very close to their own thought process and experience or take up a slightly more detached position should you so desire.  Being able to shift between characters also allows you to clue the reader into things the individuals might not independently know, or to contrast the way characters see themselves with how others see them to great effect.  I also try and vary my style as widely as possible depending on the point of view – so a Logen chapter instantly has a different voice, a different vocabulary, a different rhythm and feel from a Glokta one, and the style hopefully communicates something about the nature of that character right away.

As far as recommending a certain approach, well, my advice, such as it is, would be to read widely and get a sense of what you like, then experiment a lot and get a sense of what works for you and the story you’re telling, so you can develop your own style.  I don’t know that it’s easier than any other approach, exactly, but I find third person limited to be highly flexible.  Third person omniscient allows you a very free hand but it can be a little uninvolving, perhaps seeming somewhat archaic to the modern reader.  First person can be very powerful but needs to be used with care.  Funnily enough, when I first wrote the First Law the Dogman’s chapters were written in the first person.  And they were great (or I thought they were, at least).  But my editors felt that they unbalanced everything else, giving a sense that this character was somehow THE central one of the series.  In moving to third person limited those chapters lost perhaps a little immediacy, but they sat much more harmoniously with everything else.

On description, everyone’s going to have a different take on what is too much or too little, and it all depends on the style and atmosphere you’re going for, not to mention the particular circumstances.  If you’re writing in third person limited, the description needs to be rooted in the experience of the point of view character.  So in a combat scene you wouldn’t necessarily pause to talk about costume but details and thought about the weapons might be a pressing concern for the people involved.  You probably wouldn’t want to interrupt an impassioned conversation to blather on about the furniture and what it said about its owners, but a scene in which an investigator looks at a crime site could reasonably involve a lot of considered forensic detail.  My own taste is for a relatively light hand on description, especially when a character is in familiar surroundings.  Exhaustive description of the bedroom a character sleeps in every night does not get across the experience of routinely waking up in it.  Perhaps when a point of view character encounters a person or place that’s new and particularly exceptional to them is the time to do some more in-depth description.  Personally I find description one of the least important elements – usually the thing I do last once the dialogue and action is in place.  But where possible I try to bear in mind a character’s emotional reaction, rather than just to literally describe – so that even description becomes about character to some extent.  Better to communicate a few telling details than to bury the reader under unnecessary blandness they can easily supply themselves.  Is hair and eye-colour important, or is it better to use that space to get across something unique about a person that will really stick in the reader’s head and truly says something about their personality?  Also description doesn’t have to be three stodgy paragraphs about a room before breaking into dialogue, there are ways to much more artfully drip things through as they become appropriate.  Better to involve the reader then allow them to update their impressions with new details.  So rather than lovingly describe a bottle along with a room at the start of a scene, describe the room briefly, then have a character interact with that bottle in a way that maybe advances our understanding of that character, their relationship with another, and so on, hence killing two birds with one stone and preventing the description seeming info-dumpy.  Dialogue can be a superb way to get across the nature of a character while still moving other things forward, and in general the more work you can do with dialogue the better.  Elmore Leonard is a master at this – he can set up a compelling character with an off-hand line and a sentence of description.  One good exercise is always to ask yourself with every sentence – is this really needed?  If not, cut, and see how things feel.  Often a stripped down scene which asks the reader to fill in the detail is much more compelling and involving than a hugely detailed one that does all the work.

Do You Read Lots of Fantasy?

April 19th, 2013 • 67 Comments

Back to the Inquisition, and I get the feeling I’m going to be in the chair for some time.  Matt asks:

Do you read pretty much every new fantasy book that comes out and are their any current sf/f authors you regard as rivals of yours?

Ah, other writers, other books.  This one may land me in a little bit of trouble, but TROUBLE is my middle name.  Actually it’s Edward, but trouble would be cooler.

Do I read every new fantasy book?  I think it’s safe to say that I read very few, shading towards none.  I don’t actually read that much at all any more.  Partly that’s because a lot of my reading was done on the tube, commuting to work in London, and these days my commute takes me from my kitchen all the way into my office.  Partly it’s because after spending all day writing and reading your own work the last thing you want to do is read.  Partly it’s because what I do read is often more or less research for what I’m writing or planning to write at the time, and most of that research is history, and a lot of the rest is novels outside of the fantasy arena.  So for The Heroes, I read a lot of non-fiction about war, and some fiction based in the american civil war, the napoleonic wars, the vietnam war, etc. etc.  For Red Country I read westerns.

I read a whole lot of fantasy in my youth, but I’ve always read a lot of other stuff, and I think that’s probably important for a writer to do.  My own feeling has tended to be that original ideas and approaches are more likely to be found outside the genre you’re working in, than by exhaustively reading within it.  Sometimes I hear people express an attitude of – ‘if you aren’t totally aware of the field in infinitesimal detail, how can you write something original?’ which seems to me so arse about tit I hardly know where to begin with it.  For me, originality is in the authorial voice, the authorial attitude, the take on the material, rather than in the magic system or the shape of the continents or the arrangement of blobs of narrative.  Originality comes from an honest look inside, and a pulling together of disparate influences from all kinds of sources, rather than an exhaustive look outside.

In general, when it comes to other writers, as a venomously ambitious sociopath without the emotions of shame or guilt, I like to live by Gore Vidal’s maxim, ‘every time a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies.’  I therefore regard any and all writers as rivals to be destroyed.  But seriously *ahem*, I actually feel very lucky to be – however little it may have been planned – part of a wave, or a group, or a phalanx, or perhaps a fellowship, of writers of epic(ish) fantasy who appeared around the same time.  Rivals in a sense, I guess, but a little healthy competition is definitely a good thing, and I’d say that we’ve all benefitted a little from the presence of each other, and a general sense of excitement and development in the sub-genre that’s brought everyone some extra attention.  Also excellent people to get drunk with at a convention, on the whole.  So Tom Lloyd and Scott Lynch’s first books were published within a couple of months of The Blade Itself by Gollancz in 2006.  Pat Rothfuss, Brent Weeks and Peter Brett followed maybe the next year.  Richard Morgan began to pollute fantasy with the dangerous filth he had been polluting sf with shortly after.  Mark Lawrence, Doug Hulick, Brad Beaulieu after that.  There have even been many and varied contributions from *gasp* not white guys like NK Jemisin, Kameron Hurley, Elspeth Cooper, Saladin Ahmed, and David Anthony Durham over the last few years.  The time since I’ve been published has also seen GRRM go from very successful genre writer to spectacularly successful writer full stop with a massive TV series, and I’m sure that’s had, and will continue to have, a hugely beneficial effect for the rest of us.  Of course there are many, many other writers of all kinds newly appearing and long established writing an ever-expanding range of varieties of fantasy, these are just the first names that pop into my head as being rough contemporaries in terms of publication and in a similar arena to me.  My apologies to anyone I’ve missed out.  I guess my point would be, if I have one, that it seems to me a fine time to be a reader, or for that matter a writer, of fantasy.

You lucky bastards.

Maybe I should even be reading some of it myself…

Why no repeat Points of View?

April 3rd, 2013 • 38 Comments

Back to the Inquisition, and there are going to be some serious spoilers on this one right from the question, so if you haven’t read all my books, I would STRONGLY suggest you look away, right about NOW, and buy them all.

Still here?  OK, then.  Tolmie Wright asks:

“Read through Red Country, fantastic novel,”

Well, DUH, but thanks for saying so…

“and couldn’t help but wonder why you chose to not include Logen Ninefingers’ point of view?  I’ve been missing the sections where the Bloody Nine comes to fruition and reading the thoughts of the Great Leveler where always my favourite parts of the original trilogy.”

I think the simple answer is – cause I did that already.  I like working in the same world, coming back to characters some years on. It gives me some instant well-developed characters to reach for, and I think it gives readers a deeper resonance, a sense of a broad and developing world, some feeling of continuity.  Generally, if I’ve got a need for a certain type of character somewhere in a book and I’ve a suitable candidate we’ve met before, I’ll use them again.  But for those that have been primary points of view, I’ll probably put them more in the background, and won’t use their point of view again.  Partly it’s because I think there’s a value in seeing these characters now from the outside, what the reader knows about them perhaps standing at odds with what the new points of view may think about them.  Partly it’s because I want to do something a little bit new and different with each book I write, because if you’re not challenging yourself at least to some degree you’re probably stagnating, and that means new and varied points of view, if possible.  Partly it’s because you use up ideas and treading the same ground often leads to diminishing returns, and offering more of the same can dilute and diminish what you’ve done already.

People generally want more of something right up until the point they don’t want it any more.  And the art is in never reaching that point.  And just as important, if not more important, as keeping the audience fresh and excited, is keeping ME fresh and excited.  Yes, it is possible. A reader might get through the First Law in a month or two, and be desperate for more of those characters. I spent several years with them, and was good and ready to move on. And if you’re bored of something, feel like you’ve exhausted it, said all you need to say on a subject, but continue to flog the dead horse because you somehow feel you have to, it’s going to show. You can’t somehow expect that readers will be fascinated by things you yourself are finding laborious.

That said, the general principle must always bow to the specific case.  In Red Country, Lamb was always going to be a very important character. A much more central re-use of a major character than I’d tried before.  Logen just fit the role too well not to use, but I thought Lamb would be most effective if seen through Shy’s eyes, if people did not know his thoughts and therefore exactly what his past might have been or what he was capable of. If, for those who did recognise and know him, there was an element of not being sure what he was thinking now or how he might have changed. I was also interested to see how he might come across shorn of the softening effect of his internal monologue. I wanted him to be quite terrifying, potentially, and this seemed the best approach. I wanted to maintain some mystery around him.  I toyed with using the Bloody-Nine’s voice for a couple of short sections, but on reflection I wasn’t sure I could add much to it, and thought it was better not to dilute and re-use what I’d done with that in the First Law.

So there you go. Maybe the time comes when I’ll look back at a Point of View I’ve used before and think, ‘you know what, I think there’s something new I can do with this now.’  But that’ll depend on the individual case.  It may well never happen…

When is it Good Enough?

March 15th, 2013 • 18 Comments

Judging from the response to the job advertisement for his Majesty’s Inquisition, there is some interest in putting me to the question, and I see several inquiries that already have my brain a-stewing.  Probably it’ll take me some time to get to them, but before I do, let us begin this interrogation with the question that started it…

Laura asks:

When did you know an idea was good enough to pursue and when you started writing, at what point did you realize your novel was good enough to go public?

Good enough, good enough, when is it good enough?  I think the quick answer to this is that every writer worth their salt always thinks their writing is the best thing evah.  And that every writer worth their salt always thinks their writing is worthless shit.

The task of writing a novel is huge, complex and challenging far beyond any writing that most people will ever take on.  When I sat down to write The First Law the longest thing I’d written before was my undergraduate dissertation.  The First Law is some 50 times longer.  There’s a certain arrogance required to think, ‘yeah, I’m going to have a go at that.’  There’s also a certain arrogance required to expect you can grip the attention of a fickle reader through the awesome power of you words alone, and to keep them entertained for hours, days, weeks at a stretch, to make them want to expend their valuable free time listening to you rather than watching X-Factor, or playing with their kids or, I don’t know, moaning about the ending of Mass Effect on the internet.  You’ve got to think you’re one pretty goddamn entertaining motherfucker to pull that off, right?  If you didn’t feel pretty damn clever about what you were doing you’d never get past page 1.  You’d never deserve to get past page 1.  If you don’t love your work, how can you expect anyone else to be even mildly entertained by it?

A writer has to have confidence.  So that when someone says, ‘I didn’t like this book much,’ you can push past the agonising pain in your heart that you think will make you die and say, ‘I don’t care.  Other people will love it.  And they’ll love my next thing even more.  Because I’m great.’  Confidence gives you the drive to continue, throw time and energy down a well, even though the task is huge and the odds of any level of success rather tiny.

But confidence alone is not enough.  Indeed confidence alone is fatal.  You have to have doubt as well.  You need a little voice inside your head always asking, is it possible that this incredibly elaborate, pompous and overblown scene you just wrote is not actually the best scene evah written by humanity, but could it, in fact, actually be quite bad?

You need doubt so that when someone says, ‘I didn’t like this book much,’ you can push past the agonising pain in your heart that you think will make you die and ask yourself, ‘have they got a point?  what can I learn from this?’  Because doubts lead to questions, and self-analysis, and fine-tuning, and it is the long pressure of refinement and reviewing and consideration and re-writing that crushes the crap down into diamonds.  Even the most apparently fluid and effortless writers achieve that sense of effortlessness through a vast amount of effort.  A lot of time and energy spent honing the craft in general, a lot of time and energy spent reviewing individual pieces of writing.

Confidence and doubt, therefore, are the bipolar yin and yang of the writerly life.  The simultaneous presence of these two powerful forces in great abundance may be what makes some writers, AHEM, kind of difficult to be around on occasion.  And an imbalance in the force?  BIG problem.  Too much confidence?  Self-important dreck.  Too much doubt?  Zero progress.

Vital in keeping these twin extremes of towering self-confidence and cringing self-hatred in some kind of productive balance, therefore, are the opinions of people outside your own head.  Yes, they do exist, and time spent in their company is a positive thing for a writer.  Do you have people you can trust?  And I don’t mean trust to hug you and tell you how great you are and plump up another cushion, though that’s all well and good in its place.  I mean someone you can trust to kick you in the face when you need it.  Right in the face.  However clever you are, you won’t have thought of everything.  You won’t believe the things you haven’t thought of until they’re pointed out to you.  Struggling with the details, it’s easy to get way too close to what you’re doing, and miss the forest for the trees.  Taking on someone else’s viewpoint only broadens your own.  The opinions of trusted readers, or indeed a professional editor, are worth their weight in gold to a writer.  Although opinions don’t weigh anything.  Exactly the sort of sloppy metaphor a good reader would kick you in the face for using.

To haul the runaway train of my pontificating back to the question – I’m not a huge believer in ideas alone.  Ideas are like assholes, everyone’s got at least one, and I personally like well-used, tried and tested second-hand ideas with a nice patina of age and love.  It’s the execution that makes a great book, the insanely complex interaction of voice, style, plot, pacing, characters, dialogue, and everything else.  So I don’t know that an idea alone is ever worth pursuing.  When did I feel writing in a more general sense was worth pursuing, then?  Pretty much from the first few paragraphs I wrote, the second time I tried in my mid-twenties (I’d tried just after leaving university and it hadn’t really come to much).  Logen’s personality and manner of expression, his world-weary catchphrases, the nature of Glokta’s internal monologue, appeared straight away.  There was just something about the voices that emerged.  I started to become fascinated by how I could structure and pace a scene or a paragraph, exploring my own instincts for what worked and what didn’t.  I just enjoyed writing  and going over, editing, fine-tuning the writing right from the start.

But writing something you like and believing anyone else will like it are two very different things.  So when I had maybe 30,000 words I finally plucked up the nerve to show it to my family.  They are people to plump a cushion when it’s needed, for sure, but they can also swing a boot when it’s required, and between them they know a lot about writing in one way or another.  I was literally crapping my pants while they read it.  But when my mother turned to me and said, ‘you know, this isn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting,’ I knew I was onto something, and I started to get more methodical and planned the entire series out much more seriously.

When did I know it was good enough to go public?  I think right from around this time I knew writing was something I was going to continue to do as a serious hobby, if you like, hoping to perhaps get published at some point.  I had dreams of international mega-stardom, of course, but trying to be realistic (heh) I was really hoping just for enough supplementary income to make it worthwhile.  I certainly thought I was going to finish the first book and make some effort to get it published, see what happened.  So after two or three years of part-time work I finished the first book, took on a lot of comments and criticism from my family, made a lot of changes, and reached a point where I didn’t see immediate ways to improve it.

I don’t know that I necessarily felt it was ready, no book is ever perfect, or anywhere near, but I made a decision that it was about as good as I was going to make it at that point, further reviews were yielding rapidly diminishing returns, and it was time to see whether I could get any interest from a publisher before committing another three or four years of my life to this particular project at this particular time.  So I prepared an approach and started trying to find an agent, and picked up maybe half a dozen rejections over six months.  Which are crushing, of course, especially since you don’t necessarily get any feedback, just an anonymous no.  So immediately you begin to doubt.  Is it extremely uncommercial?  Is it too violent?  Too profane?  Too ambitious?  Too weird?  Does it start too slow?  Too fast?  Is there an uncertain tone teetering between humour and cynicism?  Is it just, not very good?  I think I’d maybe got a third of the way through a draft of Before They are Hanged and decided to try something simpler and tighter, wrote the first few chapters of something else, some of the ideas for which would later be absorbed into Best Served Cold.  Then I got the offer from Gollancz, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Well, actually, the rest was a year and a half of hard work on the manuscript before the book was even published, taking it apart and putting it back together with a new start in reaction to comments from my editor and others, but that’s another story…

Taking the question from the point of view of where I am now, a seasoned and consummate professional (ha) – how do you know a book’s finished, as it were?  Again, no book is ever the best it can be.  There are always big and small improvements that can be made, opinions that can be listened to and acted on, tinkerings, cuts and fine-tunings.  Clearly I’m a lot more experienced than I was (no, really) and I achieve a better result much more quickly (no, really), am much more economical and structured with my revision.  So when I finish a first draft there’s usually a lot of work to do to the start of the book, much less to the end, and I go through making the larger changes, re-writes, additions, and end up with a second draft that is pretty much complete and consistent.  Then there are a few rounds of revision focusing on different areas – characters, setting, voice, detail of language, and so on (click on the process tab in the categories bar and you’ll find a lot more discussion of exactly how I go about some of this stuff).  Revising a book is a bit like pouring cement.  When you first do it it’s all runny and you can mash it about with ease into new shapes.  Introduce a race of brain-eating aliens?  Bah, why not?  But with each round of review it stiffens and hardens a little bit more and becomes tougher to alter, until you need a rock drill to change one ‘this’ to a ‘that’.  In a sense the book is ready when I reach a point of bafflement and exhaustion with it, making the smallest changes seems like a vast and frightening effort, and I can no longer really tell whether I’m improving it or not.  I hate it – it’s ready!  Of course by then you’ve hopefully made massive strides since the first draft and, in any case, if you’ve timed it right production are kicking your door down for a manuscript, so however good it is is going to have to be good enough.

So, in summary – when is it good enough?  It’s always been the best there is.  And it’s never good enough…

Incidentally, let’s try and keep the comments here to the topic here.  Questions that arise from this directly, go ahead.  Any further general inquiries, report to the House of Questions…

On a Break

January 22nd, 2013 • 52 Comments

So, Red Country has been well and truly out for three months, the touring well and truly over, the reviews chewed through, the sales examined, the dust settled.

I find myself now in a slightly unusual position as I watch the snow drift down past my study window and render the pavements of Bath totally impassible for picking up kids from school.  In the past, when a book was published, I was usually well underway with the next one.  Indeed when The Blade Itself came out in 2006, I’d already finished a decent draft of Before They are Hanged and was well underway with Last Argument of Kings.  Not long after that I was starting to think about what would come when the trilogy was finished, and cooked up the rough ideas for Best Served Cold, The Heroes, and Red Country.  I’ve been steadily executing that plan, writing in the same world and in loose continuation, ever since, although my head start on each book when the previous one was published has got less and less.

I’ve got a contract for three more books in the First Law world, and those will be a trilogy, and I have some rough ideas about what the content and characters might be.  Very rough.  But this time around, I’ve scarcely started even on the planning.  With every book I’ve finished I’ve told myself (not to mention promised close family members) that I’d take a break, and each time after about an hour off I’ve started getting twitchy about the next thing and cracked straight on.

But Red Country was pretty draining.  Not that I’m not totally delighted with the results because, you know, brilliant book and all that, but I found it hard work.  Felt burned out at times.  Felt like I was having to reach a long way for new ideas, new ways of doing things.  It was not, at all times, a joyous process.  So now seems a good time to take a break, do some reading, do some thinking, recharge the creative batteries.  Obviously a break is relative, there are still a load of administrative things that require my attention plus a few little projects I’m steadily working at and may have announcements related to in due course, but for the next couple of months, no full-length First Law stuff on the go.

Now, since it’s a trilogy I’m going to take a stab at next, there’s going to be a fair bit more planning involved than usual.  I also have a crazy notion that I’d like to draft the whole trilogy first, then fine tune and edit each book in turn for publication.  That will hopefully mean a) that the trilogy can be as coherent and cohesive as possible, since there’ll be no rush to publish the start without really knowing all the details of the end, and b) that the three books can be published on whatever well-prepared schedule seems best rather than being fumbled out arbitrarily which will c) ideally be the best thing both creatively and commercially.  What can be the downside to this rapid and regular publication of a supremely well-planned, coherent and high-quality series, I hear you cry?  You have probably guessed already.  A long wait for the first book.  Exactly how long a wait I can’t say ’til I get going, I hope that, as with the First Law, things will go slowly at first then speed up as I get my head around the characters.  But we will see.

In any case, for the time being, I’m on a break.

So there.

Huge Discounts! Hmmm.

October 15th, 2012 • 67 Comments

Good news!  Red Country is out in the UK in three days time!

More good news!  It’s an amazon book of the week, and they’ve slash, slash, slashed the price of the hardcover to an it-should-be-criminal £7.64, that’s 55% off, or a saving of a stonking £9.35 on the RRP of £16.99.  It’s a fair bit cheaper than the mass market paperback RRP will be when it comes out.  £7.64 seems to me a fantastic price for a beautiful brand new hardcover, especially a book of this incontestably extremely high quality.  Just look at Simon Appleby’s BookGeeks review of it:

“Bloody, unheroic, compelling – Red Country is all of these things, a real page-turning fantasy. Abercrombie co-opts the best elements of the Western without pastiche or mockery, and delivers a massively enjoyable read, combining action and genuine emotion to great effect.”

You like the sound of that?  So do I!  It even has coloured end-papers like some kind of collector’s edition, for heaven’s sake, and it’s a full cup of frothy coffee cheaper than Iain M. Banks’ new hardcover on amazon, even with a meaty 50% discount of its own.  It’s a good four quid cheaper than Peter F. Hamilton’s.  I’m cutting my own throat here.  Or at least amazon are cutting theirs, especially since their normal policy is to refund the difference on a drop in price to everyone who’s pre-ordered the book, so I imagine a good few of you will notch up a refund of a couple of her Majesty’s finest British Pounds along with your purchase.  We’re paying you to read it!  You lucky, lucky consumers!

Slightly less good news.  The kindle edition remains at £8.99.  Which looks kinda silly.  And I can pretty much guarantee there’ll now be a few folks one-starring the book on account of how unfair they feel someone or other’s pricing is, as they have with Banks’ book.  Because e-books cost nothing to make, don’t you know.  Sigh.  On the one hand I think, yeah, the e-book should always be cheaper than the hardcover, and that I’d rather see the e-book a bit cheaper anyway, more round the £7-8 mark on a new book, obviously dropping off over time as the mass-market edition appears to more the £4-5 mark.  On the other I can’t help feeling this shit is really tiresome, that the paper and digital versions are different products, and that the model of heavy discounting on hardcovers is always going to produce some brief anomalies.  If the hardcover weren’t so scandalously discounted, after all, and remained a bit more than the e-book, would anyone complain?  After the week promotion, precisely as happened with Banks’ book, the price will bounce back to a more routine gigantic discount of 35%-40% ish, about a tenner, say, and the kindle edition will once again be a pound cheaper, and I will more than likely be left with a clutch of one-star reviews by folks who haven’t read the book complaining at a nebulous someone’s long-vanished pricing policy, like sea garbage left rotting up the beach after the storm has receded.

Still, what can one do but tiredly express one’s feelings to one’s editor, who can tiredly relay them to their publishing director, who can tiredly relay them to the head of fiction, who can have a monthly tired discussion about it with the board, who can kick it upstairs to guys whose pricing policy is set worldwide in consultation with shareholders and whose decision making processes cannot but move at an utterly glacial pace.  Safe to say, the kindle price of Red Country ain’t likely to be coming down this week, whatever you or I may think about it.

I guess a lot of these pricing issues on e-books, deeply frustrating though they are for writers and readers, will gradually sort themselves out.  Be nice if they sorted themselves out faster, but such is life.  For some time the approach of publishers seems to have been to deliberately make e-books as unattractive as possible in the hope of protecting their hardcover market, and fighting for their lives in an unfamiliar fog as they are, I guess you can somewhat understand their reticence.  But as the e-book sector becomes a bigger and bigger slice of the pie that approach just ain’t going to wash.  The agency pricing model which ensured publishers could keep the prices of e-books high is collapsing in the US, and Europe surely will follow, allowing much greater flexibility on promotions of e-books, currently quite strictly regulated, and opening the door for discounts on e-books even more massive than those on paper ones (since even if the development costs of an e-book are just as high as a paper book, the unit costs are undoubtedly much lower).  On the one hand, yee-ha!  Cheap stuff for consumers!

On the other hand, hmmm.  You can bet the result will be an extension of the tendency towards heavy discounting of the most successful few titles that has been going on over the last couple of decades, since supermarkets and amazon came to dominate the market.  That’s great for the big phenom writers who shift gazillions and are starting to become a standard part of the marketplace.  It’s fine for the established front listers who’ll get the big promotions and the big discounts and the big support, like Iain Banks, and Peter Hamilton, and, well, me, it would appear, fingers crossed.  It’s not so great for the big majority of writers, though, who don’t necessarily sell enough to warrant the big discount or a place on the supermarket shelves, and whose books are going to get progressively more expensive and less competitive.  Even worse, I fear, with margins so squeezed, for new writers, especially those who might be writing something uncommercial, difficult, challenging.  I tend to be optimistic with these things.  Maybe self-publishing really will become the way for new writers to flourish.  No doubt it works for some.  I remain a little dubious, though.

Still, in the meantime, Red Country for £7.64!  Woooooooooooot!

A little later: Amazon sales ranks are an arcane and secretive business, heavily affected by recency, but they’re still quite an interesting indication of what’s selling right now.  This discounting evidently works, and fast, because in the last few hours, Red Country’s Amazon UK sales rank has shot up from somewhere around 300, where it’s been for the past couple of weeks, to 47.

Red Country Facts and Figures

August 24th, 2012 • 31 Comments

Yesterday I finished going through page proofs of Red Country and sent a handful of changes back to the publisher, most of which were simple swaps of a new word for one I’d used twice in close proximity.  Amazing how these things persist to this point after all the rounds of editing.  But that means, in essence, that my involvement in the book is done.  Now it belongs to you, the readers.  Of extremely limited interest to most people, but interesting to me…

The final version of Red Country is 172,100 words.  The 1st Draft was 170,700 words, and the 2nd Draft 164,700, so somewhat to my surprise it’s actually got quite a lot longer in the finishing, although the profile has changed, with the early parts getting shorter and the later being fleshed out a bit.  Still, 172,100 is makes it by some margin my shortest book.  The others, out of interest (as close as I can reckon):

The Blade Itself – 191.2 thousand.
Before They Are Hanged – 198.3
Last Argument of Kings – 234.1
Best Served Cold – 227.7
The Heroes – 203.4

Incidentally the three standalone books were all pitched to be between 150-175,000 words so it’s only with Red Country that I’ve actually managed to hit the length I was always aiming at.  It also means I’ve written well over 1.2 million words of fiction altogether.  My fingers hurt.  And my brain, of course, but that always hurts.

Hard to be absolutely definite about this, since the start of a project has always tended to bleed into the end of the previous one for me, but looking back at my blog posts I reckon Red Country took about 22 months to write, or at least I was in a similar position with The Heroes at the end of September 2010.  By the same assessment, The Heroes took about 19 months and Best Served Cold around 21.  The timings on the trilogy are lost in the mist of time but then things were different and more hobby-ish for much of that period, without a contract or even any serious intention of getting one while I was writing The Blade Itself, so it’s tough to compare.  I’ve a vague recollection that Last Argument of Kings took about 14 months – way my fastest book as well as my longest – but then I was bringing in characters and situations that were already well established, which is a lot easier than working out new ones.

I’d like to be working a bit faster than a book every 22 months, that’s for sure.  They say a year is the ideal and I’m not honestly sure I’d ever hit that but 18 months would be nice.  Still, a lot of life stuff going on (when isn’t there?), and the more books you sell the more promotion and travelling you end up getting involved with.  Having seen how hard GRRM was working in Aviles recently I’m kind of impressed he gets anything written at all.  In the end, a book just takes as long as it takes, and there it is.

From a pain standpoint, Red Country was pretty painful.  Not quite as bad as Best Served Cold, but a good deal worse than The Heroes.  The profile was similar to Best Served Cold, actually – a lot of doubts early on about the whole idea, and about one of the two central point of view characters in particular, and therefore half the plot, really.  The first three of the five parts were slow, difficult going.  At one stage we were looking at pushing publication back to January.  But it actually helped to be somewhat forced to bring it back into this year.  Sometimes you need a kick up the ass.  Things started to motor a bit more in parts 4 and 5, and by the time I finished the last part I had a very good idea where I wanted to go, and was able to pull things together pretty quickly for the second draft, working a lot more solidly and efficiently than I had been.  That difficult character now works a hell of a lot better, and actually has gone from being very much the secondary one to being the central character in some ways.  It’s interesting that the experience of having gone through pretty much exactly this with Best Served Cold didn’t actually help me that much with Red Country.  It’s also interesting that The Heroes went so much more smoothly when it is, in many ways, a far more complicated book, at least from a plotting standpoint.  The writing life is a mystery, all right…

Proofs

August 8th, 2012 • 28 Comments

Ah ha.  Look what just dropped onto my doormat.

Why, it’s only an uncorrected manuscript proof of Joe Abercrombie’s latest, Red Country.  I can’t wait to read it.  Except of course I already have.  About thirty times.  Still, it looks most handsome I must say.  There are only 90 in existence, this time around.  Not sure why they’ve done such a small run, but small run they have done, and the chances are high that if you have to ask for one, you ain’t going to get one.  Sorry.  Not my call.  Nor do I know exactly when they’re planning to send them out.  On the other hand, if you do get one, imagine how incredibly smug you can feel about it.  And despair not, reviewers, as they’ll be sending out finished copies for review some time before publication.  Let’s have a look at the back, I’m always interested to see what outrageous lies my publisher are spreading about me lately…

 It’s all true, damn it!

Process, and Aviles

July 16th, 2012 • 19 Comments

I leave tomorrow for the Celsius 232 festival at Aviles in Asturias, Spain, where I will be spending a few days in the company of George RR Martin and a cornucopia of other authors.  Those of you preparing to get jealous, I hear the weather there is currently capricious.  Those of you who might actually be there with me, my interview is at 17.45 on Wednesday 18th.  But I’ll be there until Sunday, so by all means stop by and say hi, get a book signed, whatever.

Sadly, it means I won’t be here to update, but those of you not in spain need not despair!  I have prepared a positive bonanza of content to bring you during my absence, for this very week I am guest blogging every day at the premises of my publisher, Gollancz, on the subject of my writing process, if you can call it that.  Today, monday, a piece on planning has appeared, tomorrow, the subject shall be writing (the first draft, specifically), on wednesday I shall discuss revision, on thursday editing, and on friday finishing, all suffused with my usual wit, insight, wisdom and humility.  Ahem.

I will see y’all next week…