Touching Distance

Been a hard week at the keyboard on Children of The Glyph, not as hard as the guys out there slaving to keep the world going.

Good work and good luck to those people, putting me to shame.

Anyway, the days have been full – had to cut 13,000 words in the re-structure, but managed to bash the book out to 90,000 words. I expect a bit more fiddling will solve it all, but the paragraphs, like furniture have all been rearranged Feng Shui style, so it all flows better.

Getting close now, really close! 🙂

Just got to finalise the cover…

#DeathtotheSong.

Return of the Hack

Well, not quite.

The Children of the Glyph Manuscript has been returned with some developmental guidance. It’s good news. I need to tighten up a few things, but the benchmark is a lot higher now than it was this time last year. I just have to nail down structure a bit more and it’s DONE.

I have a few positive takeaways:

My characters, dialogue (with a kink here and there) and story arcs are great. Worldbuilding is good. POV discipline is nailed. It’s falling into place.

Just the structure. A bit of brickwork, cement, pointing and coving and the artifice is complete.

Not bad for a hack-job! 🙂

Have a good one, adventurers.

A Mars A Day…

Image Courtesy of NASA

…Helps you Work, Rest and Slay.

No, not the chocolate bar then, but an image like this cropped up on my laptop background a couple of days ago and it’s weird, I took one look at it and knew where I was – kind of. Looking at Mars through a telescope or camera when there’s a dust storm (nearly always) it looks hazy and smooth.

I don’t know why anyone else would love Mars, but I do.

I mean everything about it is inhospitable. It’s freezing cold, so you’d die of exposure, the air is poisonous, so you’d suffocate. The air pressure is so thin, that any water on your eyes or tongue would boil off instantly, your lungs would burst if you didn’t breathe out immediately.

There’s no magnetic shield of any density. The Radiation will fry your butt like a chicken. Speaking of which, there’s nothing to eat, nothing grows. The soil is two different flavours: toxic and even more toxic. It’s a barren, desert wasteland.

Nothing up there is small. There’s the biggest mountain known to man up there, so big if you were standing atop it, you can’t even see the planet you’re on. Then there’s a slice in the surface, five times the length and seven times the depth of the Grand Canyon.

Everything will kill you up there. Everything is big.

Exactly as it should be for a God of War.

And it’s pretty, because who doesn’t like the red one?

Anyway, that’s for today adventurers, just a slice of rumination at the wonders of the universe. May your sun always shine and your road smooth. 🙂

First bite is with the Eye

Courtesy of my dude, Ken over at Creative Covers

Just a snippet today. Editorial Report is due out on friday and this time I will have to forego any extension.

Needs must and I need, and must, press on with this.

I can do it.

#DeathtotheSong

Stop the Bus!

I was rolling quite happily down the word avenue, crossing paragraph plaza and boom! Or actually more like, creaking and a pop as the tyres came off. My editor has suggested she wants to delve into the MS for Children of The Glyph a little more, which is horrifying.

After my previous report from Hannah, I was treated to an exceptionally well-worded instruction on how my structure is typically 1980’s claptrap and I needed to learn to write better. It was nicer than that, but effectively that was the essence.

I have learned a lot since then and I feel that I’ve got it in my grasp. It’s still wriggling, like a large hairy caterpillar, but whilst it’s tickling my hand to let it go, it’s so fuzzy I want to show it to my friends. Ahem.

The structural delve will take another two weeks. So we’re still going round the houses on other projects. It will be fine. Crazily, the current situation is having the effect of giving me more time than usual to crack on, but I’m still stuck in the first half of Rebellion of Mars – now 50k re-written and only 53k left to do! Yay!

Urgh.

Fortunately, the editor has told me that the story so far is vivid and exciting with lots of potential. This is good, (not now Jocko!) because this fits the thread I’m hearing. Three editors have said the same thing. I’m honing the method, sharpening the tools.

Wait – anyone seen a large caterpillar?

Stay safe adventurers! 🙂

Breakthrough

Well, it’s not an advert for the Queen song, but you check it out, it’s good and pertinent!

I’ve been ripping apart Rebellion of Mars and reading through the report of my Editor, Hannah. She gives a lot of great guidance about Protagonist Agency. This is important, because instead of being a victim to circumstance, it makes the Protag an actor under his own power.

This does two things.

Firstly, it makes it more interesting to read and write, building character connection with audience and author. We can start to root for them, to feel as they do, hope for them and see what happens.

Secondly, it allows for better set up and payoff – the character takes an action, it has logical consequences and thereby builds momentum for the story as well, increasing pace and keeping those pages turning.

So, the third draft, kind of, is underway at the moment. I can feel the story is now unfolding into the way it wants to be told, as opposed to the way I wanted to initially tell it. It’s a bit m ore natural and presents more options to me, but the Protag character has shifted slightly, so I’m trying to nail him back down.

It’s all swings and roundabouts folks!

In other news, I’m waiting to hear from my other editor, who is due to send me an interim note tomorrow about how she’s finding Children of the Glyph, which I expect back with a complete report on 03 April. Getting close now.

Stay safe, take care and try to keep going adventurers! 🙂

Dingle Dangle

Watching the news is making me ill – no, not from this bloody awful bug going around, but the absolutely infuriating reporting.

We get it, you want views, you want clicks, you need to win the ratings war, but for so-called professional writers, some of whom would look down on “Common-garden folk” like yours truly (because he has to self-publish, don’t-you-know, couldn’t get an agent, don’t-you-know, fah, fah, what, what) are doing the unthinkable.

They’re playing Dangling Participle Bingo!

“But Arron!” I hear you (probably not) cry, “what is this terrible faux pas, which has fired thy wrath and driven you from your Chaises-Longues?”

Here:

“Walking through the kitchen, the smoke alarm was going off.”

– Some fool

This sentence literally means that the smoke alarm was taking a stroll – and there are many like it in the news today. The reason is to try and drum up emphasis, drama, to heighten the tension and I’ve done it myself. (Horror!)

And they are all doing it.

But it’s like the Red Pill from the matrix. Once you see it? Once you truly recognise what you’re doing, it becomes obvious. You can’t not-see it. Read that sentence again.

Do you see how it looks backwards now? Did you have to read it twice?

“The smoke alarm was going off as he made his way through the kitchen.”

Better? Of course it is, not only was the example backwards, it was dull as the crud on the side of a bus. Now we have a bit of drama and it’s that valuable golden ticket:

It’s easy to read.

Try to spot a few Danglies (you know what I mean!) yourself and try it out. Don’t be afraid to shout at the TV.

“See that? Dangling Participle. If I wrote that in a book, Hannah (my usual editor) would tear my arse off.”

Arron Owen (don’t-you-know, fah, fah, what, what).

Have fun playing Dingle Dangle (Participle) Bingo! 🙂

It’s Away

Well, we’re here. The editor has taken control of my manuscript for Children of The Glyph and it will be returned in three weeks with the verdict of its current state.

I was quite nervous about letting it go, maybe imagining that it’s similar to how a parent feels to giving their child to the first day of school – albeit a very watered down version of that. It took me fifteen minutes to get the reply email the right tone for sending the document off.

Silly, I know.

I hope it’s good, or better than my previous efforts. I regret this will probably be the last time I actually use an editor like this as if I can’t get it right by now – after nearly a year of trying to write professionally, I obviously can’t get my head around fundamental concepts of what people call the “craft” (I really don’t like that word) and should maybe re-evaluate my plans.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

So now we wait, but being idle is not an option. I am still struggling with other projects and hope to wrestle them into coherence before too long.

Have a profitable day travellers and I hope you’re all doing well! 🙂

Week In, Week Out

Well that was a pretty stiff week for my calendar. We’ve been doing so much here I haven’t even had time to say hello to everyone – including any new followers I picked up – hello there!

I know there’s a flu going around and I hope you’re all doing well and that this thing passes quickly – but there’s so much of it in the news and elsewhere, that I wanted to try and keep this as a small area of sanity, so that’s all I will say.

I managed three whole days where I got down to business and am still hitting Rebellion of Mars – I know, it’s boring to you, but it has to be done. Despite my best efforts, I failed to get Children of The Glyph out last year, but I’m hoping it will all come together soon and maybe I will have two novels out this year. Kind of exciting, kind of crazy.

About par for the course on this blog.

Have managed to reformat another 11,000 words of RoM, but it’s hard going – I’m having to do a lot of re-write and make a lot of style choices about protagonist motivation and agency. I have a feeling whole swathes of the book will be scrapped and replaced, but if it makes it better or tighter, then it’s worth it.

Anyway, that was my literary week fellow traveller let me know how yours went below and have a good one this time around! 🙂