Most authors these days use beta readers, generous folk who are prepared to read an unedited book in manuscript form and give their comments, all aimed at making it better.

My friend and beta reader, Donna Hanson, is interviewing various authors about this process.

You can see her blog here.

And my interview answers here.

This is the view from our family room of the orchid shade house.

And in amongst the orchids closest to the window, there is a bulbul nest…and yes, those yellow dangling things are the heavily perfumed blossoms. So not only do I have flowers, I also have birds in the hanging pot!

Today I sent back to the proofs of “Stormlord’s Exile”.  Tomorrow I am going to Fraser’s Hill again to be one of the trainers for a session on birding.

The other piece of news I have is that it looks as if “The Masks of Yedron” will not be the next book I write after all. It will get written, just not yet… Such is the world of publishing. One never knows what is around the corner. And no, I can’t say yet exactly what the next book is going to be, or when I’ll be able to tell you.

…you can always rely on the tropics for a diversion.

I am at the moment reading my book aloud. That’s right, aloud. To myself. From a printout, which I correct as I find all the mistakes I never saw when reading silently. A ton of them, in fact. And when I get hoarse, I take the corrections and put them in the digital copy on my computer. (Have you any idea how long it is going to take me to read aloud 600 pages? No, I thought not. This is day 3 and I have done a mere 28,500 words.)

Anyway, here it is 11pm and along came a diversion, to sit on the edge of the laptop lid, and then on my dictionary cover, finally on my arm… while my husband and I scrambled to take pictures.

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Anyway, here I have no idea what it is, but it stood tiptoe on its pointy little feet, long-legged, two antennae thrust forward like horns, beady eyes, wings disproportionally long like a glider, body squat like a flea.

I think I’ll go to bed.
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When you name towns and people and the geographical landmarks of a fantasy world, you are bound to irritate some readers. But, they say, that name has Celtic origins, and that one Germanic, so how can they both be in your fantasy world? Or something similar.
My reply is, well, they are both in our world, are they not?

This attitude has earned me some criticism in the past. My reasoning is as follows:

Take a look at this selection of names that have been around for generations in England:
Courtney and Chelsea (Old English), Riley and Abigail (Irish), Eric and Arnold (Nordic), Charles and Henry (French), William and Richard (Norman).

Quite a mix, some of them Anglicized, some not. In other words, those who inhabited that section of the British Isles we now call England were no purists. The Norman invaders may have brought their own names, but that didn’t put a stop to the usage of previous names, and so on. I think that a writer who makes their naming system too rigid, must be writing of a world that never changes, and is never influenced by outsiders. So I look askance at a fantasy land where every female name ends in “ia” and masculine names all sound macho; or where all the town names are Germanic – or any other scheme that is just too bound by rules or uniformity.

I could have used names totally unknown to any reader. You know, things like “Neiggharg”, “T’lebb” and “Pottarossmolleth”. I prefer to use names found on – or similar to those found on – Earth, and let you, the reader, deal with them.

In the land of the Quartern, names are a mix, and show many influences for a reason. Some don’t mean anything at all.

Once someone has read the book, some influences should be more clear. Many names which may seem made-up actually have meaning to those with a specialised interest (e.g. Sardonyx) – and in my world, there is a reason for all this. Some names are mispellings, just as happens in real life. (Why – on Earth – did Nova Zeelandia not become New Zeeland?)

So when you look at the towns* or the people** of the Quartern, don’t be surprised if you find names that have varied origins. Of course, just as the reader has to mentally replace “English” with the language of the Quartern, so s/he has mentally to replace the idea of “Portuguese” or “Arabic” with other unnamed languages of countries outside the Quartern. (Btw, the map maker, Perdita Phillips, added in some names of her own too…)

What am I trying to say from all this variety?
That the Quartern was either inhabited by people of many cultural backgrounds, or was invaded multiple times, or had many trading partners or immigrants … just exactly what the answer is, you can work out for yourself if you want, as you read the trilogy. Or you can read the book and not worry about the back story of the world at all. The hints are there for those who like a layered story, and can just as easily be ignored if you prefer a straight tale.

But please don’t expect a naming scheme that is beautifully ordered and systematic, because you won’t get it, any more than you do in, say, England or Australia or America.

* For example:
Scarcleft – based on geographical formations
Sloweater – pertaining to the results of the movement of a geographical formation
Qanatend – Arabic/English
Dollypot – name of a tool
Fourcross Tell – English/Arabic word for a geographical formation
Athro Purida – Latin/Portuguese

** For example:
Laisa (Danish)
Senya (Greek)
Terelle (American)
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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.

Fantasy writing gets mocked a lot for sticking to certain tropes of the genre. You know: Dark Overlords, goat-herding boys who end up being the hero and so forth. There are lots of fun sites about it; see here and here for a start. I even read two books back to back with exactly the same beginning – a boy goes out into the woods to do something or other, comes home to find his whole village/family wiped out by the villains of the piece. And they weren’t the first books I had read chronicling that identical event, either – or the last.

A beginning writer, on reading URLs like those above (apart from laughing like mad), is likely to despair. How do your write a fantasy that doesn’t tread old, much-travelled ground? Well, the answer is that you don’t let it bother you.

And here’s one reason why not:

A long time ago, when I was thinking about writing a new novel – the one that was to become The Aware – I was chatting to someone who began to mock fantasy. Yeah, he said, castles and forests and wolves and riding off on quests. They are all the same. I was so mad at his dismissive, scornful attitude, that I thought to myself, Right – no castles, no forests, no wolves, no horses… Damn it, there won’t even be a tree in this one!

I suppose it would have been easy enough to set the book in a desert, but I thought that was the easy way out. Besides, it had been done before. No, I wanted something that had never been tried, and so I created Gorthan Spit. No trees, no castles or wolves or brooding forests – but a fascinating place nonetheless.

But then…where did I go from there? Well, my first scene in the book was set in an inn.
And guess what: a book opening in an inn is such a fantasy cliché. It’s a great place to start, you see. You can gather some of your main characters together – have them meet one another for the first time. You can introduce so much of the background, politics, the world, in the conversation of the people sitting around having a drink. And you can write the first bit of the nastiness that is going to overtake your protagonist – the monster/villain who comes to the inn door in the middle of the night, or the soldiers riding up, or whatever piece of villainy that is going to confront your hero or heroine.

My point is this: using fantasy tropes is not altogether a bad thing. They have become tropes because they make a good story. It’s how you use them that counts. Think about mainstream literature – how many coming of age books have you read that all follow similar paths? Does it matter? No, because in the long run what counts is the story. And how well you tell it. Each coming of age story is different. Each writer’s way of dealing with the same issues is a different take on the same theme.

More about good storytelling tomorrow…

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[This is actually an idea by author Josh Palmatier. What happens is this: a number of authors are putting up an example of a successful query letter, i.e. one that either got them an agent or an editor. In other words, they post a query that succeeded. In addition, the writer might also post a discussion about how they write queries or whatever they feel might help other aspiring writers with writing their own queries.
At the end of this post there is a link to all the other blog posts on queries posted by all of the other writers.]

My advice on writing a query letter:
If you ignore instructions, you are doomed from the start.

The first thing to do before writing a query letter is to see what a particular publisher or agent wants. And nowadays that’s usually easy – you look at their website. Can you send them an email? Do they want the first three chapters with the query letter or do they want the query first?

Don’t send a two page query letter if they ask for one page. Don’t send it as an email attachment if they ask you not to. Or maybe they are a publisher who doesn’t want a query from anyone but an agent? Then don’t waste your time sending one. Different countries have different ways of doing things too; don’t expect to use the same letter to appeal to an American agent and a British agent…

Back in the days when I started querying, in the late 1980s, finding the prerequisite information was harder. There was no internet. I used the UK Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, ran a finger down the columns of agents to the first one that said they were looking at fantasy, and sent off a query letter.

The letter below was more or less it (and you are going to tear your hair out in frustration knowing that anyone could get anywhere with something like this – but back in those days quite frankly there wasn’t as much competition. You know what? – When you had to type an MS, fewer people actually ever finished a book…) :

Dear (agent’s name)

Please find enclosed the first three chapters of a completed a fantasy novel of 90,000 words, entitled* Blaze Halfbreed. I hope you will consider reading the whole novel with a view to representation.

I am an Australian teacher presently living in Vienna, Austria. My only previously published work has been non-fiction articles for nature and travel magazines.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yours sincerely,

….
* Some purists insist that you can’t use entitled in this context. They are wrong. Entitled not only means what is due to you, but also the designation, or title.

Yep, that was it. I suspect this kind of query letter will not get you far today. The book, btw, became somewhat longer after agent and editorial advice, and was changed from a standalone to the first book of a trilogy. It was eventually published as The Aware, Book One of The Isles of Glory. My agent was the first person to ever read it, other than myself.

Nowadays it pays to add some kind of a hook to get the agent or editor interested in reading those three chapters – but I would still keep the rest of the letter short and pithy. At this point in your relationship, an agent or editor is not interested in the fact that you work as a trapeze artist or an ambulance driver (unless of course you’ve written a book about a cowardly trapeze artist or a traumatised ambulance driver). I included the bit about the non-fiction publications merely to show that I can write professionally enough to be published. No details, because I doubt the agent would have been familiar with the magazines involved. If I’d written for a well-known international magazine, then I would have added “including Playboy” or whatever.

If you want to know how to write a query letter with a hook, then look at the archives of Pub Rants or Miss Snark. In the end, though, it will be your book that gets you an agent or a publisher, not your query letter. And it is better to expend your energies in writing that irresistible first chapter than agonising too much over a letter. One good sentence or a short paragraph that tells the reader enough about the book to intrigue should be sufficient. Don’t try to summarise the story!

Something like this might have done the trick for “Blaze Halfbreed”: When you can’t legally stay in one place for more than three days because you lack citizenship, you have to be special to earn a living – or indeed to stay alive. Fortunately Blaze is special. She not only wields a large sword, she can physically see what few people can: magic.

And here is the list of other authors who will be posting their own query letters sometime today – and theirs will probably be much more up-to-date and relevant to today’s situation than mine.

Paul Crilley
Chris Dolley
Diana Pharaoh Francis
Gregory Frost
Simon Haynes
Jacqueline Kessler
John Levitt
Joshua Palmatier
Janni Lee Simner
Maria V. Snyder
Jennifer Stevenson
Edward Willett
David J. Williams