Glenda Larke

See also Part 1; Part 2; and Part 3.

So there I am, with a finished version of the story that makes me reasonably happy. Remember, parts of this book have already been rewritten several times. So, what’s next?

Next comes the meticulous sentence by sentence rewrite. The first bit is the easiest : the spellcheck. Making sure I haven’t misspelled proper names as well as ordinary words.
The rest is so much harder because the spellcheck can’t tell you that you’ve written “there” when you mean “they’re” – and I do that silly sort of stuff a lot because I tend to “hear” words rather than see them as I write. In addition I’m a lousy copy editor and tend to read what I think is there and not what really is.
At this stage, the grammar function can be helpful too – it can point out some mistakes, as long as you don’t take too much notice of the things it doesn’t do too well.

So how do I find all the rough edges that spellcheck can’t show me? Well, I run a “find” [under edit on the toolbar] of some things that I know need checking. For example, I look for “really” and “very” and “seemed” and all those other words that I know I use far too much. Expressions too: “made an effort” was a favourite of mine for a while. And in one book I had over a 100 instances of “of course”, most of which needed turfing out – of course! It’s all too easy to have one’s characters sighing all the time, or shrugging – find out what your favourites are, and replace most of them. Look for cliches and think of better ways of saying the same thing.

Once all that is done, I click on that funny little backwards “P” thingy on the standard toolbar – the one that shows up all formatting. It puts a dot between every word. With that function on, I then re-read the whole MS. I find all those little dots force me to slow down and read every single word. And oh, the mistakes I find with that. I blush, correct them, and move on. This is the stage when I find a lot of overuse of words [e.g. using “discovered” four times on one page], as well as typos, missing words, etc. After that, I run another spell check.

Is my MS ready to send off to the publisher or agent yet? Absolutely not. But it is ready for beta readers. More about these wonderful people next time.

The hotel was at 1,550m; nights are cool or even downright cold. Our room cost 50 Malaysian ringgit for one night. That’s about USD 18.00.

There were candles on the table – electricity only ran from dusk to midnight, it seems. No hot water in the bathroom, but never mind, there was an electric kettle. Just remember not to leave your bath till morning.

We turned on the lights come sunset – didn’t work. Went downstairs (no phone – you didn’t think there would be, did you?) and told the manager. He came up, stood on the bed, and gave the fluorescent bulb a twist. Let there be light…but not in the bathroom. The bulb there didn’t work at all and they didn’t have another.

Still, with a view like that out of the window, who cares?

And here’s a lantern bug that came visiting. That strange black thing on the head is just ornamention. The poor thing could no longer fly because of a huge fungal growth on its abdomen.

That’s life in a plant eat bug world…

It was a good weekend.

The usual Sunday grammar or style tip…

I have just been through my copyedit of “The Shadow of Tyr“. And I bless my wonderful copy editor who has the eyesight of an eagle after a mouse when it comes to picking up mistakes… Inevitably, there are some mistakes that crop up where I have been too smart for the good of the copy.

We all know about the use of the subjunctive changing the form of the verb “to be” – like this:

If I were a writer, I would want to write a book like that.
He would be ecstatic, if he were published.

Normally, we would say “was” with the subject “I” or “he”, but not in these above examples. Why not? Because they are conditional [subjunctive] constructions using the “if”….”would” form. In these above sentences, using “were” is correct grammar.

But I went overboard and used “were” with “he” in this construction:
He wasn’t sure if he were successful.
But that’s not a subjunctive sentence! No “would”. No sense of “if this happened, then that would happen”. I was just being too smart without thinking about what I was doing. And ended up wrong.
Correct: He wasn’t sure if he was successful.

One other problem I have is with separating “too” or “either” from the rest of the sentence.
As in a sentence like this:
He was riding a camel too.
or:
He wasn’t riding a camel either.

I have a tendency to stick in the comma all the time – which is not a good idea. It’s easy to be wrong. I’ll talk about this more next week.

I fell to thinking about this after reading Jonathan Strahan’s blog. Not which writers exactly, but the “unanswerableness” of the question.

If you look at my blog profile, you will see that I didn’t answer those questions about “what is your favorite movie/book/music…” etc. I find them as senseless as Jonathan does. I like all types and how do you compare a 1930’s b & w classic film to, say Crash? And even when I admit to having favorite authors, stacks of them, how can you compare Terry Pratchett and Guy Gavriel Kay and Ian Rankin?

And so, which authors have influenced me? …Well, I can tell you one author who had a definite impact at a very early age. She wrote gripping stuff, unputdownable, in which I immersed myself entirely. One of her books was probably my first lesson on using tension to keep the reader’s focus.

Trouble is, I can’t remember her name, and I am not sure which book it was – although I can tell you the name of the series. They were all about a girl called Milly Molly Mandy, and I was just five.

And why on earth would I be able to remember its impact? Well, I was on my way to school back in – well, a long time ago. I paid tuppence for a two mile ride on the Perth/Armidale bus down Albany Highway – which was a very rural road at that time. I was reading – and went past the stop near the school because I was so engrossed. The bus disgorged half a dozen other children, but not me. When I did realise what had happened some time later (on raising my head from the book), I wailed – loud and long. The bus conductress – I even remember her name, Inez – told me not to worry, I could go on to the depot and then the bus was going to turn around and come back again. She would put me off at the correct stop. I was still traumatised. And humiliated too – it was all over the school and the community to the extent that my parents knew about it by the time I arrived home from school that day.

Yep, there was a book that influenced me. Taught me never to get too engrossed in reading while riding public transport. My first lesson about the power of the written word.

Over on the Deep Genre site for 25th June, there’s an interesting discussion going on about why fantasy outsells science fiction. They had some excellent theories, many of which might explain the difference. Here’s my (expanded) comment:

With fantasy, it is possible to have the ordinary person triumph over the most horrendous situations.

I think that in today’s society, we face a myriad problems which seem unsolvable (even to sf writers, unless there is huge intervention at governmental levels and the massive investment of capital). We have problems like global warming and the war in Iraq, to whether my office block/tube train is going to be hit by terrorists, to whether there really is going to be a future in which I can clear my credit card debt, find a decent job in a place I want to live in, bring up my kids to be decent human beings, and end up with enough money for my retirement and health care.

When people faced with this kind of life buy a book to read, they want to do more than just “get away from it all”. They want to be left with the feeling that an ordinary person can make a difference. Not some genius scientist, or an astronaut – but an office worker from Milton Keynes or Hoboken, or a medieval shoemaker from Upper Yikmak. Fantasy leaves them feeling better about themselves, and gives them a sense of the possibility of empowerment. So what if it took a magic spell or similar, the struggle to obtain that spell or that magic can still inspire if the book was a good one. The little man (or woman) can triumph.

In a topic like this, I think we should never lose sight of the fact that people who read a site like Deep Genre – and leave a comment – are a very small minority of sff readers. We are the writers and the fans, the editors and the con goers. The people who buy most fantasy and sf are just people who want to get away from it all and be left with a good feeling, when they put the book down, about the possibilities open to them in their own lives.

And, of course, everybody reading this blog is instantly going to think of twenty exceptions where complex, thought provoking, depressing books hit the best seller lists…