I went to see The Eagle last night. I’m fairly certain that I read the book in my youth, but it must have been at least 30 years ago, and the only thing that struck me as familiar in the film was “Roman discovers that his slave is actually a very important person & undergoes a kind of role reversal.” I didn’t remember the book as having so many fight scenes in it. It’s all very clouded but I thought it was mostly travelling and conversation – quite tense conversation, true, but not full out warfare.
I’m also uncertain as to whether it was my own imagination that made me expect torcs and round-houses and more of an Asterix the Gaul look for the Celts than a Last of the Mohicans.
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It’s been a long dry spell since Shining in the Sun came out. In fact I’ve been writing more than ever before, but as it’s all been going into Under the Hill, I haven’t had anything to show for it yet.
However, I can now proudly announce that I’ve just signed a contract with Carina Press for my new Age of Sail story – the novella formerly known as Forced, aka The Pirate Novella Without a Title.
It does have a proper, permanent title now, and will henceforth be known as By Honor Betrayed, which is not only a much better title, but actually reflects the theme.
Carina being extremely efficient, I’ve already got a release date, which is 7th November 2011. That gives me a nice run up to try and get a few more things finished and submitted this year, so that in future I don’t have quite the barren wasteland between new releases as I have had in 2010/11.
First of all, I was summoned to the door this morning and handed a great big box I had not been expecting at all. And lo! When I opened it, there were my author’s copies of Shining in the Sun in print:
It’s such a great moment when you can hold your book in your hands. It never gets old. And although ebooks may be the wave of the future, they can’t quite give you the sheer feeling that you have written a real book as a print copy can. It’s also interesting how different the cover looks in real life. On the screen it’s quite yellow, but in the flesh it’s more of a golden-brown.
Anyway, that’s probably interesting only to me. What’s interesting to everyone (I imagine) is this cool vlog on YouTube by Peter Jackson. I had been underwhelmed by the prospects of The Hobbit as directed by him, since I didn’t like what he’d done with The Two Towers or The Return of the King. But now that underwhelm-ment is turning into anticipation. I’m sure it’ll be wrong in multiple places, I’m sure it will annoy the Tolkien purist in me, but I still can’t wait:
I haven’t been well today, so instead of writing I have been brainstorming, which involves less shutting myself in an unappealing spare room while hammering at a keyboard, and more sitting in a sunny lounge with a cup of tea and a blank notebook.
One of the most magical things about the writing process for me often occurs when I’m working my way through the second draft. I know that there is something wrong with a plot thread. I’ve thought about it enough to have finally worked out what it is. I just don’t know what to do about it.
In Shining in the Sun it was a question of why on earth Alec would have to spend a whole week combing Cornwall for any sign of Darren, so that he could apologize for forgetting to mention he was engaged, when he had Darren’s mobile phone number all along.
In The Witch’s Boy it was the central question of how to tie the two halves of the book together. Yes, Adela knew she needed to find a witch of her own to go up against the bad guy. But how was I to get her to go straight to Sulien without it looking like a massive and unbelievable coincidence?
In Under the Hill it’s the fact that Flynn warns Chris of a threatened elvish invasion long before he can possibly have known about it. And when he does find out about it, he’s being held in stasis and couldn’t possibly tell Chris. But getting Chris out of prison later absolutely depends on Chris knowing about it at the right time.
In the case of both of my published books, I had no idea how I was going to resolve these problems. In fact, though I knew there was something wrong I hadn’t even realized what the problem really was until I was half way through the second draft, at which point it dawned on me and started to make my life a misery. “Your book is horribly flawed!” it said. “Why not give up now and start a more interesting one? The best you can hope for with this one is that nobody spots the mistake, but you’ll know it’s there. Probably everyone else will too.”
I doggedly ignored the voice and carried on revising, and then, one day, completely out of the blue, the solution came to me. I don’t get much in the way of inspiration, normally. I don’t have a constant stream of ideas, and my characters are rarely chatty, but oh boy, this sudden twist where I know what to do to solve a problem I’d been sure was insolvable – that’s the real thing.
In Shining in the Sun it turned out that Krissy had told Darren that his abusive ex was after him – so he had turned his phone off and was hiding from Max – meaning Alec couldn’t find him either.
In The Witch’s Boy it turned out that a character I had introduced very early on, on the principle of “if you don’t know what happens next, have a man with a gun enter the room,” turned out to have a family backstory that tied everything together beautifully. So beautifully it looked like I’d meant it all along.
I don’t know that my solution in Under the Hill is quite as elegant as Gunnar’s ring – I’d have to go a long way to beat that – but today I am celebrating the mystery and brilliance of inspiration. It seems to hit you from outside after your own brain is exhausted. I wasn’t at all sure it would happen this time – I never am. I feel certain there’s no guarantee that it always will. But today it did. Hurray! I think I’ve cracked it!
For this brilliant review of Captain’s Surrender, made all the better by the fact that she didn’t think she liked Age of Sail stories 🙂
I wish I could tell you how much I loved this book, how it transported me, how profoundly it moved me. If this blog did its job, I would be able to articulate perfectly what I am feeling right now just remembering reading the final chapters of this book. Joy, elation, wrenching emotion.
Can I just say “squeeee!” in a high pitched fangirly way, possibly while flailing my hands around in an attempt to convey how delighted I am. Fantastic! Thank you 🙂
If you’re in the UK in July and are interested in GBLT fiction, consider coming to the UK Meet on 23rd July. More info here at the website.
http://ukmeet.weebly.com/index.html
anyone at all who is attending (whether professional writer or not) is invited to submit a story for the freebie British Flash anthology, details here:
http://josephinemyles.com/uk-meet/british-flash-call-for-submissions/
and/or for the professionally published anthology Tea and Crumpet, profits from which will go to fund the meet next year:
http://josephinemyles.com/uk-meet/tea-and-crumpets-call-for-submissions/
Not much time left on those submissions calls, so if you mean to come, best get writing now 😉
One of the worst things about LJ being down so often this week is that I use LJ to read my RSS feeds. I not only keep up with my LJ friends, but use LJ’s feed aggregator to read author blogs. If LJ is going to be this flaky in future, that needs to change.
If you are an author and you have a non-LJ blog with an RSS feed, would you mind posting the URL of your blog’s RSS feed here, so that I can add it to my Google Reader? Thank you!
And if you would like to add mine, it is http://alexbeecroft.com/feed/
Testing blog crossposting. Please ignore.
In 2008 I published The Witch’s Boy for the first time in print and ebook format through Lulu.com. A little later, I accepted a contract from a publisher to publish it under their imprint in 2009. Once I’d signed the contract, I retired the Lulu version and made it unavailable.
Then complications ensued, with the result that no new version was published in 2009, or in 2010. By spring 2011 my contract with the publisher had lapsed and there was still no sign of it being published. So on Friday I gave the publisher notice that I no longer wanted them to publish it, and I un-retired the Lulu version again. That’s this one:
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I’ve noticed a pattern among my friends who are new authors. They almost always start off reviewing books. Even if they don’t write reviews for a review site, they write up what they think about the books they read and post them on Amazon or on Goodreads. There’s a good reason why so many writers also write book reviews – it’s because, being writers, they a) read a lot and are excited by books and b) are interested in all those technical matters that go into making a book a good one.
Writers read voraciously and they pay attention to things like the strength of a book’s plot, characters and setting, because writing books has taught them the importance of such things. They have learned to analyse how books are written, what’s a good technique and what isn’t, what works and what doesn’t, and why. So really, with these qualities, authors must make ideal book reviewers, am I right?
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