So, I've finished book 3. Only I haven't really finished book 3 because it still needs massive edits, replacing, and glueing the two strands together. That's the craft part really, rather than the creative part of pushing the story onto the page and following the different perspectives. I wrote 5,500 words yesterday - all day, the last 3 chapters of Kelleys' journey, just leaving the finishing half a chapter for today. I'm reluctant to end - I want to follow their story on to the next few years, really!
I have been asked a gazillion times by new writers - how long should a book be? Well, you'll get lots of different answers, but you won't get a look at less than 85-90k and you will struggle with over 120k (unless they are epic fantasy). Big books take up too much space on the shelf for a début and less than 90k makes it hard to write a full, character-led book. This ones at 103k at the moment and will finish around 110k. Because it's the last book of the trilogy I need to work at finishing story arcs, especially for less important characters.
The hardest thing has been killing off a couple of my characters. Their race is run, I can't see them doing anything essential, and the drama of their sacrifice works. So it has gone off to my son, Carey (who really is my no.1 editor) who has been hunched over all the chapters, sorting and making notes. He will help me stitch it together in the next few days then - Pow! Off to Charlotte, my agent (I still love saying that). Really, I write for Carey and Charlotte first, then start to refine the book for a family audience (all of whom come back with a million things they would like to change) and then off to my editor, Michael Rowley. It occurs to me - this is the end of my present collaboration with Del Rey, and then I go back to being like every other aspiring author - looking for another book deal! Scary thought, especially as I've just got used to working with Del Rey UK and I think the relationship has been a great learning curve and safe place for me, as I got used to the publishing world! I'm lucky to have an editor who really loves fantasy and sci-fi. I'm also dying to see what book 3 will look like - here is book 2.
Now I just have to come up with a name for the book. Secrets of ... what?Bloody hell, this is the hardest bit... suggestions on a postcard...
I'm so enjoying writing at the moment. I've written a third of a sequel to A Baby's Bones and I've nailed sixty thousand words of Secrets 3, with just fitting the historical strand in and writing the last three chapters to go. At last! It was a very long dry spell. Worrying about cancer and selling the house and just the everyday stresses of a big family all reacting to their Dad's illness just killed my concentration or even the interest in writing. But the last few weeks have been great. When the writing is flowing, it's like being in a boat of a fast flowing, straight bit of river. Despite a family emergency a couple of weeks ago I seemed to have kept the momentum going.
Pulling the last book of a trilogy together was both very hard and surprisingly satisfying. In the end, it all seemed to slot into place as I followed up each character. I still have a couple of loose ends and people to chase up but the first draft will be able to go off to my agent shortly. Yay! It's been a long slog. One of the things that helped me deal with an unwieldy, lumpy manuscript was to pull out the two strands and write them separately. Within those strands, I found there were story arcs I could dissect out, write as one continuous narrative (so I was sure they worked) and then pop them back into the flow. Now all I have to do is assemble what I have, write those last chapters (now I know what has to happen in them) and package it up for Charlotte. Then I can back to my heroine in ABB 2, who I left in the dark, surrounded by strange sub-human creatures in the night, defended only by her handsome cousin and her husband.
It's been a whole month since I blogged, and I have been busy with writing but not just the creative kind. Editing for publication is a serious business. What goes out has to be perfect, or at least, as close as you can get, so lots of blind corners, repetitions, awkward sentences and other mistakes have to go. The copy edit came back with lots of useful suggestions, thank goodness, sorting out the temporal problems.
I have a problem with numbers. A real problem with numbers, like I struggle to remember 4 digit numbers,and can't hold a 6 digit number in my head long enough to dial it. So keeping dates and days in my head as a story progresses - nightmare. Anyway, the copy editor not only found where I had made mistakes but suggested ways to get out of trouble. Then I worked on the manuscript for a couple of weeks and the book was gone through at the publisher's end. Finally, a whole load of typeset pages came my way courtesy of editorial assistant Emily - to be gone through one more time. Three pages of corrections later it is off, and finished.
This has released a flood of pent up story that just needed to be told. A Baby's Bones just cried out for a sequel, so in between mornings spent wrestling with Secrets 3 I have been writing ABB2. It's just steaming along at two or three thousand words most days. I've got 23,000 words in ten days, all of it historical. I've decided to try and write one whole story, then write the other strand as a separate story, a bit like I did with The Secrets of Life and Death. So satisfying to be writing original words again! I'm also writing linking chapters with book 3 - also very satisfying. This is what I want to do, write for a living, but the editing, rewriting and other writing related concerns do take up a lot of time. Meanwhile, the wait for a second book deal goes on... Just because you get one doesn't mean you'll ever get another one, a humbling thought.
We also got kittens...
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| Jasper |
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| Ki |
These are anti-cancer, anti-depressant kittens. I recommend them. maybe they are responsible for the writing mojo. Yeah, baby.
One of the unexpected benefits of writing books for a publisher is that they come up with amazing artwork for the book covers. And then, if the book sells overseas, each editor thinks about how to sell the book in their market. The publisher in Finland (LIKE) have just come up with this:
I really like it - the colour, the birds, the drop of blood. So different from the UK covers. It reminds me of paperback thrillers from the sixties and seventies, sharp. I'm wondering what the German publishers will go for. The US cover is very different again.
I love that another creative person gets to use the book as a jumping of point for their own art. I think it encourages people to speculate more, ask questions about where the character is walking and why? What about the magical glow?The UK paperback is less mysterious, I think and more related to a moment in the book. Here the font of the words tells a story all of its own.
I didn't have a say in the covers, though my opinion was sought. What can I add? I'd be pretty defensive if one of the artists concerned made me change the words! What do I know about selling a book? I think all three, in their own way, are eye-catching. My favourite will probably always be the hardback, and I love what they are hoping to do with book 2. Very classy stuff, I'll post when I can.
You write a book which you are rather pleased with, your agent likes, even your editor likes. But the process in some way is only just starting. It has to be handed to the more objective scrutiny of the copy editor.
I don't know if she liked it or not but she's noticed that I've got the timeline wrong in Book 2 - again. It's my Achilles heel - I'm absolutely rubbish with numbers. The timeline goes from March 15 to April but the character back in Mar 15 calls the character in April 10. Ouch. This means moving WHOLE CHAPTERS and worse, means that all the other stuff in them isn't necessarily in the right place now. I remember thinking a writer's life must just be so creative, sitting at their desk and just crafting lovely stories and characters. Well, it is sometimes, but more often it's rewriting, editing, fussing over the placement of a comma or a plot point, trying to find the right detail of research to support your book, rewriting some more, cutting out great chunks of stuff you love, writing whole sections of the book you didn't envisage... It's a pleasure and a privilege to be doing this, but wow, it's a lot of work!
Book 3 is in just that state, with a beginning I really like, an ending I think works very well - and basically a gaping whole of rejected chapters where the middle should be. I just carved twenty-two thousand words out of the draft and threw them on the bonfire. But the book is better for it. I just have to get A and B to the right place to connect up with the ending. No pressure then! I hope they do join up.
Meanwhile we are trying to sell our big house but although people love it - they really do - they can't cope with the location. We live at the top of a VERY steep drive... But we hardly ever get unwanted callers. It is too steep and narrow for a lot of cars to be fair, but our elderly Toyota people carrier storms up it just fine. People are wimps.
I've been very productive this week. I don't think it's a complete coincidence that this is the first week my husband went back to work as cancer free as he is probably going to get. He did his usual week's work (Mon-Wed) and so did I. I knuckled down and edited, rewrote and reshaped Secrets 3, sent off A Baby's Bones to be put to my publisher (he has an option on my next book) and I have sent book 2 off for copy edits and so on before its publication in October. The US, Finnish and German versions of book 1, The Secrets of Life and Death are set to come out in the same week, sort of Halloween time. And the US listing on Amazon has the nicest review from JD Horn, who I'm reading now. And I know this is undeniably tacky but I'm so thrilled I'm going to put it up here! Mostly because one of my favourite book ever was Kostova's The Historian and I'm thoroughly enjoying Horn's first book.
"In Rebecca Alexander’s engrossing debut, THE SECRETS OF LIFE AND DEATH, Alexander offers up the most successful blending of mystery, historical intrigue and occult fantasy since Elizabeth Kostova’s THE HISTORIAN. Inspired by an authenticated encounter between the family of Elizabeth Báthory and the occult superstars of the Elizabethan Era, John Dee and his protégé Edward Kelley, the story moves seamlessly between the contemporary tale of heroine Jackdaw Hammond, a woman living on borrowed time, and Kelley, a morally conflicted scholar who believes himself possessed by angels. Defying pigeonholing into any single genre, Alexander’s brilliant and multilayered reimagining of the vampire mythos balances contemporary fantasy with erudite, yet accessible, historical fiction."
-J.D. Horn, author of the Witching Savannah series
J D Horn's first book, The Line, is part of a series and so far it's dragged me in and kept me hooked. I'll let you know what I think of it when I finish, but it's very promising so far!
I did it. I went away to Totleigh Barton in a remote area of Devon (really, really tucked away) and did poetry. With hindsight, I wasn't really at the same level as most of the other students: not only were they much more knowledgeable and proficient and fluent than me - they were really good readers too. I learned loads, but I still came away with the most valuable lesson - I am NOT a poet. I can write poetry, sure, and I know x, y and z about poetry, but the love of it isn't there. It's that passion that makes people push their poetry into art, and I'm just not there. But I don't mind - I got some amazing feedback from both tutors (Mimi Khalvati and David Harsent) and we had an amazing guest reading and Q&A session from Maitreyabandhu.
But the urge to tell story and find plots and twists comes first for me. I did spend some time wandering in the amazing garden and thinking about characters in book 3, even though I'd promised myself I wouldn't. I was entranced by the beauty of the place, and the incredible mix of people there. The group was rich with accomplished and experienced poets, some of whom were already getting published. There were also a few (very few) who were finding their feet, like me. There were some very lively personalities there, too! Being in such a varied and funny and sometimes rowdy group (or was that mostly one Irishman and his patient, artist partner offering translations?) was a delight, if exhausting. So many creative people, so much lovely poetry by the end!
It was also a relief to get away from the six month drama that is the fallout from my husband's cancer, in the final stages of being shrivelled by radiotherapy. No kids, no sickly cat, no house-on-the market drama (except one. The BBC might be interested in using our house for one of their programmes - how cool is that?).
I won't give up on poetry because it's how I work and process the dramatic moments of my life. But next time - I'll be better prepared for the subject matter.
