Category Archive for ‘progress’

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.

It’s not all whisky and video games down my way, you know.  I mean, mostly, of course, but not ALL.  Work continues, and I finally have a second draft of Red Country.  A coherent, cohesive draft with all the characters in their proper place and the right events happening at the right time and the right people thinking, saying and doing roughly the right things.  A draft I could present to someone to read without saying, ‘ignore this, and oh, this doesn’t work, and oh, I’m not sure about that, and assume this section will be a lot less, you know, shit.’  A book, you might even say.  It felt like this moment would never come at one time, so it’s good to see it all dropping into place.  Still plenty to do, though.  This week I’m taking a look through the chapters of one of the two central characters, who’s seen a lot of changes during the writing process, and whose chapters have been heavily, if not totally, rewritten at the front, to try and ensure some consistency, that key events of the past are mentioned enough but not too much, that there’s a good shape to his development and the way he thinks about things, that concerns established for him at the start pay off later.  Having stripped everything down, possibly adding a little background, texture, and personality back in where appropriate to get this character working as well as possible.

At the same time, horror of horrors, I’m reading the First Law again, probably for the first time in quite a while.  The main purpose is to familiarise myself with how returning characters came across, make sure they feel consistent in this book with what’s come before, check if there are any recurring bits of speech or thought I should be echoing here, any key events of the past that might be significant.  Strange thing, re-reading old work.  I’ll probably post some feelings when I’m done.

On Friday I’ve got a meeting with my editor when she’s going to bring me a marked-up manuscript, and the nitty-gritty changes will get underway.  Aaargh, feel the burn!

So I’ve now got to the end of the third part in my first big pass through Red Country.  There was a lot less to do here than in the first two parts – just some tightening up, a few extra sequences to add in order to keep significant characters in mind, and a few sloppy scenes that needed some rewriting.  The fourth and fifth parts should need even less work to bring them up to snuff for the time being, and they’re relatively short anyway, so it shouldn’t be long until I have a single coherent draft!  Woo hoo!  What was I worrying about?

At that point I’d normally turn my attention to more detailed character and setting type stuff but this time around the process is having to shift about due to the availability of the copy editor, who needs to start in early June, which means my editor is already  marking up the manuscript as it stands and I’m going to be responding to her input first.  Probably no bad thing as I’m getting a little jaded and could do with an outside kick in the pants.  I want to do a re-read of all my other books while it’s away with the copy editor, soak up anything necessary for returning characters, and then do a character pass trying to get all the secondary characters as differentiated and vibrant as possible – replacing bland dialogue with more personalised, bland description with more specific, and so on.  Then after the copy edit comes back and I respond, there’ll probably be a setting pass where I try and get a bit more pop into the descriptive sections, an eye on the weather and the feel of the surroundings.  Which means hopefully towards the end of July I’ll be doing my final run-through trying to get the detail of the language as good as wot I is able to do.  Then proof read.

The UK cover is developing apace – map is done and roughs for the weapons are in, design work already underway.  So should be something to see there within the next few weeks.

In awards news, I note that The Heroes had been shortlisted for this year’s renewed and reconstituted British Fantasy Award which is now operating in a similar way to the original Gemmell notion I was espousing a few posts back, funnily enough, with an academy picking a shortlist and a jury picking a winner – or actually two winners in this case, one for horror and one for fantasy.  Interesting…  I also said I’d notify folks when the voting on the Legend Award opened, so with the greatest of fake reluctance I will link to the relevant voting page.  Fly, my flying monkeys, fly!

A WAY more thrilling contest comes upon us, though, and one EVEN MORE likely to get me drunk – Whisky Deathmatch.  A summary of the rules soon to come, followed by our first bout, Bladnoch 20 vs Auchentoshan 3 Wood in a Lowland BATTLE to the DOOM.

Part V now reviewed and sent off to my readers (about whom more later), and while I keenly await their opinions on how it all comes together, I’m considering my approach to my first big review and rewrites.  With these standalone books it has tended to be the case that I get a better sense of where I’m going, of what the characters are like and what they need to be like, as I go through, as a result of which it becomes sharper along the way.  The end doesn’t need too much work, the front needs a lot to bring it all into line with the end.  This time around one of the two central points of view has been causing me trouble the whole time, so the first couple of his chapters need more or less rewriting entirely.

Traditionally I’ve used six points of view in every book.  Just seemed a good number to get the right amount of variety and options for covering the action without the whole thing becoming too diffuse.  With The Heroes, as well as the six principals, I did some scenes that strung together quite a lot of additional points of view in one way or another – extras, you might say.  The idea was to spread out the scale, give a feel of the whole battle developing, take brief looks at people on both sides and at different levels of the chain of command and flesh out some characters seen at a distance.  On the whole they were pretty successful, I think.  With Red Country I wanted to try something slightly different, and work with two central points of view plus an occasional third.  By the time I’d written two parts that way, though, I was starting to think that was feeling a bit claustrophobic, and that even though I was aiming at a more stripped down, simple, focused style of story, I was missing a trick by not applying that extras approach to some sections of this book.  So in the third, fourth, and fifth parts I did some major scenes in that style of rapid movement between minor players.  Now I need to write a new sequence in that style to go in the second part, and rewrite a sequence that was previously from one point of view to be from many.

There are some plot points that need to be worked on – ideas I had later to make things work that need setting up (or setting up better) earlier on.  A couple of new characters to slip in, a couple that can be removed, a couple that need mentioning here or there so they don’t come so much out of the blue, one that turned into a woman, you know.  There are some thematic things that need building up, a certain slant to characters and conversation that it would make sense to take – often you don’t really know what a book’s about until you get to the end of it.  There are some suggestions from my readers and editor that will need to be implemented.  Then there is some general character work to do – oftentimes my first pass is a little bland, the dialogue and description doesn’t have enough personality in it, the people don’t come over powerfully enough.  At least with the more central ones there needs to be some sense of their personality in every action and speech, ideally.  So at this stage there will be lots of shrugs, frowns, and raises of the eyebrows, and a lot of characters who talk, well, kinda like I do.  Hopefully most of those can be replaced with something more inventive that tells you something of the character in question.  That’s particularly important for the characters that have appeared in the previous books, of whom there are a few this time around.  They need to feel consistent and vivid, and as a result I probably need to do a read through of the First Law and Best Served Cold.  I wonder what I’ll make of them this time around?  But first things first, I need to read what I’ve got and get a feel for how good/bad certain parts of it are.  And to collate all my mess of notes and plans and see if there are any nuggets hidden in there I forgot to make use of.  Hopefully I can get through most of this stuff by the end of May or before, at which point I’ll hopefully have a coherent, consistent first draft (at least by my standards).  A sigh of relief will be breathed.

Then the work of editing can begin, which will include broad points from my editor plus a detailed markup, passes through to get as much personality into the points of view as possible, to fine tune the setting, to fine tune the language, then a copyedit, then a proof read, and we’ll be thinking about the cover and planning the marketing and publicity, and, and, and…