One of the advantages (or disadvantages? I’m not sure,) of self-publishing is the ability to continue to mess with a book even once it’s been published. At any rate, The Witch’s Boy continues to sell, slowly but steadily, on Amazon and on Smashwords, and I continue to be happy with my decision to go for self-publishing rather than small press publishing there.
However, I read this article yesterday, which suggests ways to kickstart a bit of new life into a novel. The Witch’s Boy has any number of five star reviews, so that part is OK and I couldn’t do anything about it even if it wasn’t. The price is right already – I’m certainly not going any lower than this for an opus this size. So I thought I would try altering the cover and see if that made a difference.
I was glad to have the excuse, to be honest. While I love the Grimoire cover, it’s not what you would call eye-catching, and it is possibly a little grim. And the previous cover I’d made for it was made in days when I didn’t have much cover art experience. I now think it was a bit amateurish. I was sure I could do better.
So here’s the new cover:
Many thanks to Ruth Sims for the pull quote!
If you have the old version, and would prefer one with the new cover, I believe both Smashwords and Amazon allow you to download it again for no extra cost. Watch this space to find out if it makes things better or worse (or no different) in terms of sales 🙂
confirms what I already thought – which is that I love this book. Seriously, I am so excited about this one. This is probably bad news because it’s been my experience so far that the stories I’ve loved the most haven’t necessarily been the ones other people liked, but there’s not much I can do about that.
I’m 71 pages into a 180 page book so far. There hasn’t been a lot of hard editing yet – it’s quite a clean draft at the beginning, though I know it gets more snarly towards the end. It’s just way out of my experience that I’m still enjoying working on it. I do worry a little that it’s a mainstream fantasy with a (very low key) romance between its gay hero and its bisexual hero, and that it’s chock full of vampires (or, as I like to call them, strigoii).
Both of those things may make it a hard sell to mainstream Fantasy publishers sick to the pointy teeth of vampires, but I don’t care. This is one I really believe in, and will self-publish if it comes down to it. This is me taking a chance to do what I love, instead of sticking safely with what I’ve already done before.
But, God, it will break my heart if everyone hates this one. I’m almost scared to put it out there in case they do.
Hee, well, the meat of this post is all in the title. But if anyone fancies going and voting for this, you can find the appropriate page here http://www.theromancereviews.com/bookvote.php
And here’s the actual book page:
http://glbt.theromancereviews.com/viewbooks.php?bookid=8562
I’m not too proud to beg 🙂
As with so many things, the germ of your worldbuilding is already present in the initial big idea. At least for me, the setting turns up as part of the inspiration. The big idea comes as a Hero Role A and Hero role B [do something] in [somewhere exotic]. So, a berserker and a bard [go on pilgrimage] in [Anglo-saxon England], or a naval captain and a lieutenant [are shipwrecked] in [the Pitcairn islands].
This is obviously very convenient in one way, and slightly restrictive in another. If I try to think of an idea in a setting I don’t like, for example, nothing comes. I think this is because for me the setting is an essential on the same level of the main characters. If I can’t like the setting it’s as big a problem for me as it would be if I couldn’t like the characters. I can’t decide on a plot and then later try to decide which setting would complement that plot best. They come as a job lot.
If you can think of a plot and main characters before you think of where these things and people come from, good for you. You can then sit down and ask yourself whether you want your pirates to be modern day pirates or space pirates or historical pirates, Cornish pirates, Barbary coast pirates or Caribbean pirates, or whether your tragic bartender is a bartender in LA, the past, the future, a city ruled by supervillains or serving liquefied brains to zombies.
My advice there would be ‘choose the one you find most exciting’. Also, ‘choose the one in which you can think of lots of interesting things to happen.’ If you choose to set your scholar meets jock romance in a tea shop in the Cotswolds, you need to be the kind of writer who enjoys, and can make enjoyable, small town politics and angst on a low level, one who does not yearn for explosions and battleships (unless you’re going to have your small town invaded by tanks, of course.)
So, having decided what your setting is going to be, what next?
If you’ve decided on a real world setting, now is the time for research. Unless your setting is one with which you are already intimately familiar, you need to read up as much as you can get hold of about it. Bookmark pictures, borrow books from the library and photocopy the most relevant pages, buy books where you can afford it, talk to people who know the setting better than you, make notes and generally steep yourself in the ambiance. This applies as much to a modern city you don’t know as it would to a historical setting of any sort.
Actually, if the modern city is a city in a different country from your own, the research is even more important, because a modern city is full of modern readers who know better than you do. I’ve been reading along with a sporking of 50 Shades of Grey, where the English author has not realised that her American characters wouldn’t wear ‘dressing gowns’ or get house calls from their doctors, because these things seem self evident to her. She didn’t know that she didn’t know these things, so she didn’t know she needed to research them.
It’s best to assume you know nothing at all, and try to work up from there. What do people eat for breakfast? Where do they get their money? What do they call the thing they carry it in? Do doctors make housecalls? Would you offer a workman a cup of tea or would that be considered an invitation to rape?
In a way it’s easier if you’re writing fantasy and you can build all this stuff up from scratch. At least there you start off on the understanding that you know nothing, it’s up to you to make up everything, and yet nobody knows better than you do.
I thoroughly recommend maps and floorplans, whether these are pre-existing maps and floorplans obtained by Googling, or maps and floorplans you have to draw of your own imaginary land.
There are many many questions you need answering about any society before you can realistically write about it. Who’s in charge? (A king, a council of elders, a theocracy, a democracy, an oligarchy, secret ascended masters, an elite military caste?) How do they enforce their will? How happy are the commoners with them? Where does the wealth of the society come from? What is the basis of their economy? (Is it all peasants growing food and warriors sponging off them for protection money, or is it mostly a manufacturing and trading economy?)
What do people wear? What do they believe? What does any of that mean? How do they eat, what do they eat, who cooks it, where do they buy it from? What kinds of things do they value? Are they a literate society, if not, how do they pass down the things they think it’s important to remember? What sorts of things would they die for and why?
What is their relationship to animals (are they herders who live close to their cattle and move with them across the steppes? Are they settled agriculturalists whose cattle stay in fields which belong to the whole village? Are they wild horsemen/T-Rex riders, who ride through the settlements of more civilised people pillaging as they go? Do they use tame wolves to hunt deer or to herd sheep?
What is their relationship to the natural world? Is it an abode of demons, as the Saxons thought, or a waste of good resources waiting to be tamed, as the Georgians did? Is it full of spirits which need to be placated, or is it actively working against our heroes?
What is their society’s relationship with its neighbours and its own underdogs? Who are they at war with? Who do they despise and look down on? Who do they admire and try to emulate. What stories do they tell themselves to make themselves feel better?
Culture isn’t simply material things, it’s the attitudes and beliefs of the people. These are the things that people will live and die for. And certainly some things are universal – such as love and hate, envy and fear – but some things really aren’t – such as the belief that the gods depend on human blood to survive, or that capitalism is the universal panacea.
All of these things are things you will have to either make up or find out. After that you’ll have to find out or make up everything else, from ‘do they write on paper or tie knots in cords?’ to ‘what’s their policy on washing? Every year at Christmas or four times a day before prayers?’
In general, the bigger questions about how the society organises itself ought to be answered before you start writing, but the smaller questions can wait until you need them. You need to know whether you’re operating in a monarchy or an anarchy before you start, but you don’t need to know what they use for toilet paper unless a character is suddenly caught short. So basically, do as much world building before you start as you need to be able to understand and predict the actions of your characters. After that, fill in as you go along.
Next week, enough with the nebulosity, time to crack on with the plot.
Here’s a practice and a concept I hadn’t heard before until the vicar brought it up today in her sermon. You can see why.
Kintsukuroi: When beautiful or beloved objects have been broken, this is a technique of repairing them with gold or silver lacquer, and understanding that they are more beautiful after they’ve been repaired than they were when they were new.
Given that life has a habit of breaking us, many of us must be solid gold by now 🙂
So, I’m hating having to write “Blue-Eyed Stranger”, that morris dancer/reenactor romance I mentioned. Possibly this is because the flu has settled into something bronchial and also blocked my sinuses. Possibly being knackered and ill and having the face of ache is enough to make me not want to work on this novella. But possibly it’s just because it’s a contemporary. I don’t know.
It shouldn’t be a burden. So far it’s covered the topics of Cotswold or Border? Jubbly or authentic? Blackface – racist or not? How many people can you seat round a firepit? and Do plastic dragons eat chips? But I’m still failing to feel any warmth for it.
Do you think this is because I’m ill, or is it just that I’m really not cut out to write contemporaries? Have an excerpt to judge.
~*~*~*~
To a person, Billy and his side closed around the gap into the arena, Matt turning on the organiser. “It does say the Stomping Griffins now, doesn’t it?”
He, poor man, took off his flat cap and smoothed down his bald patch contemplatively. “It does–”
“Right, so–”
“But it also says ‘Combat display by Bretwalda.’ Sorry, we’ve double booked for some reason. Maybe you can–”
“Well, we were obviously here first.” Matt signalled to the musicians. Nancy had placed her enormous drum on the ground – a gorgeous red painted thing with the team’s black griffin on the side, its goat-skin drumheads tensioned with snow white ropes. Now she picked it up and shrugged on the harness, bent over it like the sickle moon over the shadow of the earth.
She hit it. Boom! And again. Boom! The melodeon struck up with a bagpipe-like drone just as one of the Vikings on horseback was trying to shoulder his way through the close packed black of the dancers. Maybe the drumbeat spooked it. Maybe it was the way the Boy gave an automatic leap in answer to the music. Perhaps it didn’t like this big dark faceless flapping thing jumping at its nose. All Billy knew was that the horse reared onto its back legs, kicked out, its hoof punching a hole in the drum. Wood splintered and the horse squealed, bucking and dancing to try to shake this terrifying red thing off its leg.
Bravely but very unwisely, Nancy tried to pull her ruined drum away. Billy saw the disaster in the making but not fast enough to get there in time to stop it. He was still running forward when the full weight of the horse drove up against the eighty-year-old’s shoulder, picked her off the ground and threw her. She went sailing in a way that might have been comical in a woman a quarter of her age, slammed the edge of her back into the straw bales and rolled over them to lay still on the inner edge of the arena.
“You fucker!” Billy had a stick in his hand. He didn’t think twice about running up to the horseman and belting him across the armoured shoulder for being a sick fucker who rode down old ladies. “What do you think you’re doing, you fucking wanker?!”
The rest of the side were with him in a kind of synergy that only ever happened in the dancing when they were really on form. Pudgy Matt and the Boy – who was only five years younger than Nancy himself – the normally straight-laced Pete, terminally skeptical Colin and suave Andy just as fired up by his side. Margery had siezed a spare stick and was wading in too, while Annette and Christine were on either side of Nancy’s fallen form, carefully, carefully proferring hankies and support.
The horseman didn’t even have the decency to reply, leaning down over his mount’s neck, whispering to it. But the rest of the army poured out from all around the animal and closed ranks in front of it.
“Fucking watch what you’re doing with the fucking horse!” Spectacle-helm guy got up in Billy’s face and pushed him in the chest. A hell of a lot of weight there, the shove might have knocked Billy off his feet if the dancing hadn’t made him agile enough to twist in the air and come down four-square and balanced.
“Did you see what he did? Did you see him knock down an old lady?”
“She fucking asked for it.”
Even hard-nosed spectacle-Viking himself seemed to realise he had stepped over a line with that. His eyes went wide, he backpedalled a little, raising his hands. But it was far too late for that.
“You utter…!” Graham, the bagman, danced on a Wednesday night, and did karate on a Friday. A tall man and athletic – the guy Billy was in competition with for the unspoken acknowledgement of being the side’s best dancer. He wore a short trimmed red beard and would have looked quite at home in armour, if the roles were reversed. Billy’s untutored slice to the shoulder had bounced off the horseman’s armour and been disregarded, but when Graham hit spectacle-guy in the sternum with the heel of his open hand, the guy reeled back five paces and went down.
Whisper snick sounds of swords being drawn – long blade-shapes of steel sliding against the metal lined mouths of scabbards. And Billy could see they were blunt, the points carefully rounded, the edges a good milimetre thick and smoothed off so as not to break the skin. But they were still heavy steel bars a good two feet long. They might not cut, but like the side’s sticks he was pretty sure they would still break bones.
Some of his righteous anger faltered. There were rules to this – the other side backed down in front of the threat. If they had any decency, they backed down and did not force actual blows. But this lot weren’t backing down. Even the ragged edges of the army – thin guys and short androgyns with nothing more menacing to their name than long tunics and itchy trousers were massing in backup of their leaders. Behind the swords, the jackals of this army were aiming spears at the side.
A long, tense moment, and in it the black Viking caught Billy’s eye. He could see his own thoughts reflected on the man’s handsome face. This is all getting a little out of hand.
*g* This rather delights me. I deliberately wrote False Colors with one hero who had to figure out a way of reconciling his Christianity with his homosexuality because it seemed clear to me that not enough people were telling readers that you could have both. To me it was fairly obvious that it was a Christian book as well as a m/m romance – a gay inspirational, if you like – but this is the first time I’ve been reassured that there are readers who see that too:
http://teachmetonight.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/book-news-and-questions.html
It’s been a bit discouraging that it’s been seen as a gay book first as if it couldn’t possibly be both.
For some reason, probably because Eldest is now at university and Youngest has never been known to remember birthdays or any other significant event without parental pressure, I was not expecting anyone to remember Mother’s Day this year. So imagine my shock and delight when they both collaborated to get me a present. Furthermore, it was not one of those awful ‘presents for mothers’ such as you see on the TV or in the shops. They had actually bought me something they knew I would like. I present to you the most awesome mother’s day present I’ve ever got in my life…
The white tree of Gondor
on a T-shirt.
What’s even better is that it came with a note from the T-shirt people to say that if I reviewed the shirt I’d got, they’d send me a free one, drawn from a random lucky dip selection. This seemed too good an opportunity to turn down, so I reviewed my White Tree t-shirt on Sunday night, and this morning I received
a Green Lantern one totally free. Huzzah!
Considering how tightfisted I am (such that I had to sell a book before I allowed myself to buy my Latveria T-shirt) to have two geeky T-shirts at once is infinitely cool. Mother’s Day – no longer just for pink cards and a small bunch of daffodils from church. Now with added “my children actually know what I’m like as a person.” It’s a good feeling 🙂
*g* It’s a slightly inflammatory title, I admit, but I do have a point, though it would be clearer if I rephrased it as “History and Historical Fantasy, is there a difference?”
I’m discussing this over on the Samhain Romance blog https://www.samhainpublishing.com/2013/03/history-and-fantasy-is-there-a-difference/
and although I wouldn’t say I was 100% serious about it, having seen how easily the contributions of women have been written out of the history I was taught, giving an entirely false impression, I’m not really 100% joking either. It would be nice if we could be sure history was more than just a story made up from various different viewpoints to try to fit whatever small scraps of evidence we have left, but I’m not sure if we can.
Having got your big idea and decided how long your story is going to be, it’s time to actually get started. A lot of people say they start with characters, but I think the idea must come first.
For me, character creation starts with three things. The character’s role in the story, their name and their face.
The character’s role in the story.
You don’t know whether you want a hardened gunslinger or a sensitive poet until you know what the story is roughly going to be about. It’s no good having a psychic with a neurotic horror of dirt in a story about off-road motorsport, where nothing vaguely supernatural happens at all. He’ll spend all the time in the bathroom washing, and the reader is going to be very disappointed when after all that build up about how he can see ghosts there is nary a ghost in the book.
There’s no point in creating a character who cannot fit in the story you’re telling. Create a gay recluse by all means, but then don’t expect him to be of any use as the lead character in a story about a rabble-rousing ladies man.
However, once you know that you’re writing a story in which you need a gardener and a police officer, or a were-dragon and a were-crocodile, you can begin to create those characters in a way that will allow you to tell the story, but will still provide some unexpected complexity and interest.
Their name.
A hero’s name is very important. It will tell you a great deal of information about them in a single concentrated shot. Considering what to call them will force you to ask yourself what nationality the MC is, what kind of class he is. Bert Smith is going to be a very different person from Algernon Smythe, for example, and both of them are likely to be quite different from Bogdan Sterescu. (Substitute names and examples from your own country’s varied levels of class as you like.) In choosing a name, you choose a class, and with it a lifestyle for your character. Alternatively, in considering a class and position in society, you limit your choice of name.
I have a tendency to go through at least three or four changes of name for each main character, while their personality coalesces around the name. For me, a John is a more straightforward, honest name than, for example, a Eustace. A Frank is even more so. But Roy may have some overbearing characteristics to go with his kingly name, and Victor is even worse, since the name has been used for so many villains.
Once you’ve rolled through all the possibilities and selected a name to stick, you’ve already got a basic idea of what kind of person that name belongs to, because the name brings its own preconceptions. Though you can, of course, choose to undermine those preconceptions – have an Igor who doesn’t say ‘yeth marther’ or an Anna who is an old man (it’s a Saxon king’s name after all.)
Their face.
A good shortcut for filling in the ‘what do they look like’ boxes on character sheets is to page through a bunch of pictures of actors on Google and pick one who looks roughly how you imagine your character to look. Once you’ve done this, you’ll find that hir face immediately gives you a feeling of what hir character might be like – whether he or she is kindly or incisive or suspicious, or wary – something you can use for a foundation.
When you meet a new person, you automatically make many assumptions about them on the basis of what they look like, so it’s a completely natural and instinctive process to create a character on the basis of a picture.
These three things will be enough to give you a feeling for the character, which can then be expanded into further facts.
If you Google for character creation sheets, you’ll find a whole load of options for sheets to fill in, detailing things like height, weight, distinguishing features, birthdate, occupation and so forth. These are all good things for you to know about your character. From your instinctive understanding of their character, drawn from their face, occupation and name, you can begin to build them a backstory. Where were they born and brought up? What formative events shaped them? What were their parents like? Did they have any siblings? What are their relationships with these people now?
For the purposes of the plot, each character needs to have an aim/goal/problem which drives them. You need to pick one for them which will cause them to act, but which will also be in keeping with the rest of their personality. The lawyer will have a strong drive to make sense of things – to put them in their correct boxes and order the world. The were-dragon might want to possess all the shiny things – maybe that’s why they became a famous thief.
For me, character creation is not a science but an art – a process of accretion and discovery, which happens by itself once you start to write down a character’s history. But there are many things you can also do to help it along.
You can base a character on someone you know. It’s not a good idea to just lift a person from real life and put them in a book – they might recognise themselves and be insulted/disturbed enough to sue you. But you can certainly use your knowledge of how their character works to build one very like it.
You can base a character on yourself. Again, don’t take the whole cloth and use it – that’s usually quite boring. Pick parts of yourself you understand well and recombine them. Pick other parts of yourself and discard them, replacing them with something different. Now see if the differences can be reconciled with the samenesses – you might have created someone with fatal flaws or complexities, or a split personality, or fascinating contradictions.
You can base a character on a philosophy. Ie, perhaps your character’s defining trait is that he totally believes in Christianity/Marxism/Capitalism/the belief that ‘what does not kill you makes you strong’. How would this philosophy shape a person, if they took it seriously and tried their hardest to live up to it?
You can look up the Myers-Briggs personality charts and pick a personality from there. Is he an INTJ? Is she an ESFP? How would that manifest itself in a were-crocodile? Would her wish to always be around other people be a drawback given her work as a priestess of Set, or would it just lead to her throwing the best orgies?
You can draw a half a dozen Tarot cards and with the aid of a handful of website telling you how to interpret them, you can come up with a psychological sketch of your character – tweaking it as necessary to fit into your story. Is he the Fool, suspended between decisions, or the Empress, looking for rulership and harmony in the world?
You can get hold of a couple of role-playing games and roll a few main characters with their character generation systems.
If none of these work, I also have a set of cards and a book which I can highly recommend, called The Writer’s Brainstorming Kit by Pam Cutcheon and Michael Waite, which has 50 different cards so you can pick six or seven character traits at once and see if you can find a way to reconcile them into one balanced character. Remarkably, dealing traits at random often results in something you can work with – because your subconscious figures out how they could work together as one rounded human being. And because these come at random they’re often stranger and more interesting than what you might come up with when you’re being all rational and super-ego driven.
Once you have your main characters, it’s time to think about your setting/world, and that’s another separate question I’ll come to next week in Write On – world building.
