The travel curse strikes again…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Synopsis: many years ago 2 sons-in-law invented a new passive verb: “To be noramlyed”. The meaning: when you travel with any member of the Noramly family, something will go wrong with your plans. Now read on…

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Daughter and husband have been noramlyed. Firstly, she and her husband sent their passports off to have a Chinese visa inserted…but only one passport came back. Much telephoning and pleading ensured.

Promise was extracted that passport would arrive on plane at local airport at 11 pm, the night before they were to leave at 7 am. Hmm.

Drive out to airport. One hour later, it was established that a) passport was not at airport and in fact no one had the faintest dea where it was, and b) the plane it was supposed to have come in on was not arriving – at all. Which might not have been such a huge problem, had it not been the same plane they were supposed to be taking out the next morning. Which might not have been such a huge problem, except that they were connecting to a flight, to China, in Atlanta and there was no other flight that would get them there in time to make the connection.

Midnight to 2am, they spend 2 hours on 2 telephones to:
a) find out where passport is
b) book new flights
c) persuade airline to add 2 days on to end of trip seeing as they were going to knock 2 off the beginning – yep, they couldn’t get them to China until 2 days later!

Of course, there are all kinds of knock on effects too…

Noramlyed, definitely.
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A fantastic journey

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Once, walking across the Hungarian steppes* in the company of a wonderful ornithologist with the unlikely name of Atilla, I saw that we were passed every couple of minutes by Red Admiral butterflies, all flying in the same direction. To my astonishment, Atilla told me these were on migration and that some of them would end up in Africa.

I marvelled then at the capacity for something so delicately fragile to make that long journey, but that achievement is dimmed in the face of something I read about yesterday.

Biologist Charles Anderson has published details of the mass migration in the Journal of Tropical Ecology. You can – and ought to – read all about it here, in a BBC article, just to get that sensawunda moment that raises the hairs on the back of your neck…

Imagine, five species of dragonflies setting off on a round trip of 14000 to 18000 kms (9000 to 11000 miles) , much of it across open ocean**.
Imagine them doing it in one direction against the prevailing wind…
which necessitates them flying at above 1000m, possibly as high as 6000m (19,000’+.)

It takes them 4 generations to make the round trip.

And the bit that really interested me was that they are taking the same route as a number of species of falcons, cuckoos, nightjars and bee-eaters. Which looooooove insects.

*Hortabagy Puszta National Park
**The Monarch butterflies are real wimps, only achieving 7,000kms (4,300 miles) in four generations.

Racist covers?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Read what Justin Larbalestier has to say about the cover of one of her YA books.

Readers in the USA have also complained to me that my character Blaze also suffered from whitewashing*, especially insulting to me as I am the mother of children who are not white, and I quite deliberately depicted a main female protagonist who was not either.

But authors often don’t get to choose.

* Actually, she is sort of vaguely dusky on the cover of The Aware (book1)
The woman on the cover of Gilfeather (book 2) is supposed to be the blonde, Flame – but she was drawn with two arms wielding a sword (ok, one of them is blue!), which is not remotely like the description of Flame…the woman never picks up a sword, for heaven’s sake. Quite apart from the fact that she loses an arm early on in the first novel. So a lot of readers think she is supposed to be Blaze.

Kids in the mall

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Grandson and friend in the downtown mall (pix is taken outside and that sofa is tiled…)

And note: I have started on Book 3 of the trilogy (see sidebar for progress meter). Note that the meter is more for me, than you…

AAARGH!

So I opted for the glossary

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I sent off the MS of Book 2 Stormlord Rising for copy edit – with a glossary added because many of you said you liked them*.

Now I am clearing the deck desk, ready for the plunge into book 3.

And as a continuation if my last post: apparently many fans of sff really don’t seem to like book trailers – at least those fans who follow the genre on line.

…For any of the following reasons:
“I want to do my own imagining, especially of characters and the world.”
“I can get what I want from the blurb.”
“They are mostly amateurish and boring.”
“What is on the trailer isn’t really in the book (unlike movie trailers.)”

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*There was no glossary for book 1 and I have designed this one for people who need an aide memoire of who and what was in book 1.

Book trailers – What do you think?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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If you don’t know what a book trailer is, pop over here to take a look.

What I want to know is – would a book trailer influence you to buy or not buy a book?
What would you like a book trailer to tell you? What makes a good/bad book trailer?

Here’s another example of a trailer – an obviously very, very expensive, professionally done one. Kinda amused me. I think. Or grossed me out, or something.

More photos – Baltimore

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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On the way between Newark Airport and Charlottesville, we stopped in Baltimore and went for a ride across the harbour and a walk…

Can’t say it had been high on my “must see” places, but it really was a lovely area to spend some time in. Baltimore on Chesapeake Bay has always been a working harbour.

The first photo is extraordinary – it’s a lighthouse which used to be standing on some rocks in the middle of the estuary – and it had a live in lighthousekeeper. One scary job in a storm, I would have thought. Now how can I use that in one of my books…hmmm….

Pix 2 has to be one of my favourite bookshop locations – on the waterfront, in a power house with Hard Rock Cafe to hand…

And here is one of the original ships of the American navy, the Constellation.
The rest are just interesting buildings. One of the nice things about the old town is the little decorative bits…





So how many times have I read it?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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The other day I mentioned I was bored with the book. I think that is actually a sign that it is ready to be launched into the hands of the copy editor. In a way, I’m bored because it is as good as I know how to make it…which I think is not bad – i.e. I don’t think it is going to bore anyone else!

So how many times have I read it?

  • I read it as I wrote it. 1x
  • I read and re-work whatever I wrote the day before, then proceed with the new day’s writing. 2x
  • Halfway through the book I read all that I have written, so by the time I finish the first draft, I have actually read and re-worked it two and a half times. 2.5 x
  • I read it through and make major structural alterations 3.5 x
  • After those alterations I read it again to fine tune. 4.5 x
  • After the fine tuning, I read and rework it again and send it off to the beta readers 5.5 x
  • While the beta readers and reading it, I work through it again 6.5 x
  • With the beta readers input back to me, I work through it again 7.5 x
  • I read it again for dialogue-spelling-naming-distances-times consistency/continuity and to turf out repetition 8.5 x
  • Read it aloud for flow/rhythm and to catch typos and grammatical errors (and I still don’t catch them all!!) 9.5 x
  • Send off to editor. When I get it back, read to tweak the areas suggested. 10.5 x

Which is where I am now.

  • The next re-read and re-work is when I get it back from the copy editor 11.5 x
  • Final re-read of the galleys (aka arcs, first pages) for any egregious errors 12.5 x

And that’s it.
Quite frankly, some of the troublesome bits get a lot more than the 12.5 times.

This is a huge door stop of a book – 180,000 words. It comes in at 619 pages in the Australian/UK paperback size (i.e., not as small as the American mass market paperback, not as large as the trade paperback.) I have not only read it more than 12 times in the past 12 months, I have re-worked it at each draft.

No wonder I want to stop.