I posted this myself!

I’ve managed to defeat the blank page of doom, and get the first few hundred words down for the fantasy novel.  I have my book of notes and sketches, and I’m fairly happy I know where I’m going with it for now.  One thing I have to concentrate on is not getting distracted by maps.  I love maps, and if I’m not careful, I’ll spend most of the day working out and drawing maps of the world, or just looking at places on Google maps. 

I’ve had more feedback for The Eye of the Beholder.  I’m very pleased to hear that so far people have been enjoying the stories. 

I’ve also had a couple of questions about publishing on the Kindle.  It’s an interesting debate that people are still arguing if being “indie published” is legitimate.  Here’s my two cents on it:

Publishing on the Kindle is fairly straightforward, if time-consuming.  The time-consuming bit is that you need to have edited your work and formatted it to display correctly on the Kindle.  

It is perfectly possible to do this to a professional standard.  After all, the people who do it professionally are people that are good at checking grammar, spelling and layouts.  Before they got that job, they were still probably good at checking grammar, spelling and layouts.  As long as you have someone like that checking your work, you’re good.

You will probably find some spelling errors or mistakes creep through anyway.  That is not uncommon – pretty much any professionally published book I’ve read has a typo in it somewhere that had been missed.  The beauty of the Kindle is that if you find out about these errors, you can update the file to correct them.

 Is it ok to indie publish?  Absolutely!  (Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it!)

There is still this strange taboo about putting your work out there for writers, which doesn’t exist in other formats.  Say for example; music.   Yes, there are some people that will be putting stories up because they got rejected from every publisher for being terrible.  Likewise, there are some that just didn’t get a chance because the publishers thought it was a good story, but wouldn’t make them any money.  And then there are those of us that decided to cut out the middle man entirely and just put our work out there.

 

Why did I do it?  Well, perhaps I am being unfair to publishers, but I couldn’t see anyone taking up a collection of short genre stories written by an as-yet-unknown author.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t think they were good enough; I would never publish something that I didn’t think was up to standard.  But I wanted to get those stories out and let the readers decide if they liked them for themselves, rather than have a third party decide that they won’t for them.

 

I have faith that with the preview system, readers can check out a book, and decide if they want to read it based on the writing.  If a book is good, you can leave a good review.  If it is bad, you can leave a critical one.  Or if you are feeling nice you could contact the author directly with some advice on how to tidy it up.  I don’t think most readers would dismiss a book just because it was indie published; it’s the writing that counts.

Will I go down the traditional publishing route in future?  Maybe.  The one advantage that the traditional route has is marketing.  It’s all very nice my book being up there for the readers to make their own choice, but if they never hear of it, they won’t get the chance. 

Nom nom bread.

It’s been two weeks since the book launch, and it’s had its first reviews! :) Quite a few people are in the process of reading it too, and I’m looking forward to hearing their verdicts. In the meantime, I’m ready to start my next project. This one is going to be a fantasy novel. I do have more sci-fi stories to tell, but for now it’s time to put away the lasers and crack out the swords.

The hardest thing about starting a story is getting those first few pages down. It’s daunting to look at the blank page and think of tackling the entire word count all in one go. I like to have some structure before I start typing, and the best way I have found to do this is with good old pen and paper. It’s a tip that I picked up from an interview with Tim Schafer – just write everything down. I have a pad and I put all of my ideas into it. I highlight what I like, cross out what I don’t, and sometimes a coherent story appears. It can be difficult to do this. I guess most people would have the same feeling of not wanting to “ruin the page” by putting down something that you don’t think will make it into the final draft. But it helps to clear it out of your head anyway.

I’m feeling the onset of autumn this week. Really the weather has been autumnal all summer here, but today it was really dark when I woke up, giving that feeling of the sun not having yet risen. This has caused me to go on a baking spree. I had my first attempt at making wholemeal bread, which didn’t turn out too badly, considering I misunderstood one of the instructions. (It is pretty dense.) I’ll try again soon.

It’s actually one of my favourite parts of fantasy stories. What kind of bread do they have? The type of bread gives you so much information about the world and the character. When they are on the road, are they eating coarse black bread, soft white loaves, or magical sweet lembas? A city lined with vendors selling spiced flatbreads will give you a different feeling altogether than a row of shops selling rolls. (Batches!) I automatically have respect for a character that can bake their own bread and it comes out light and fluffy, because that’s hard to do! They must have practiced quite a bit to get the technique down.

 So whatever happens to the characters in my next story, you can bet that bread will feature somewhere.

The Eye of the Beholder

It's the moment you have all been waiting for!
The Eye of the Beholder is available on Amazon Kindle now!

Take a look, read the first story for free!
(And please leave an (honest) review!)

Don’t judge a book by its cover...

Unless you think the cover is awesome, in which case, feel free to judge away!

Presenting to you, “The Eye of the Beholder” cover art.

As you may have guessed, this means I’m onto the polishing stage for the collection, and I’m looking to launch it within the next couple of weeks.  I’ll have an official date for you as soon as possible!

So get your Kindles ready and I’ll see you soon!

My face hurts.

Another slight delay this week.  I’ve been a bit ill, and managed to burst the blood vessels in my face from being sick.  Gross I know.  The result is I have a lovely mottled effect that feels like a (very sore) bruise extending from my eyes to my chin.  I’m back to typing today, so things should get back on track.  I know you’ve probably all been holding your breath for the story collection, but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep you waiting a little longer! 

In other news, if you are in the London area, be sure to go along to get your copy of Queen of the World signed by Ben Hennessy!  I’m unfortunately not going to make it due to being on another land mass, however I’m eagerly awaiting my copy of the paperback, which should be arriving this week.      

And finally, a little inspiration!  Last weekend I went over to Scotland, here are some of the shots from that trip!

All photographs copyright © Sarah Cosgrove 2012

Local words

The point of language is to communicate an idea.  I’ve always found it interesting that the same creature came up with different sounds for different things, even to the extent that some humans can’t make the sounds that other humans do.  (For example, some languages have trouble with “th” in English.  And no one but the Danes can manage “Rødgrød med fløde”)

Why did one set of people agree that a tree is called a “tree”, but another that it’s an “arbre”?

But then to complicate things even more, there are words that only exist in local regions within languages.  One of the biggest debates between people in the UK is what this is called:

Image credit

I’d call that a batch.  A lot of people would call it a bread roll.  Some people call it a cob, others a bun, and if you go to Bradford it’s a teacake (seriously, Bradford?!)

So can you get away with local words when writing?  Maybe.  Even though I maintain it’s a batch, if I mentioned one in my story, I’d probably not call it that, because I know that anyone from outside of the Midlands would get confused. 

But maybe I could get away with “scraze”?  That’s what we call what others would call a graze.  I guess it came about as a cross between scrape and graze. 

I suppose this leads onto the question of why I want to use local words at all, and not the “proper” ones in the dictionary.

Well there are two reasons:

One is, characters don’t just use words out of the dictionary.  They have their own words for things, and probably have a few good regional ones of their own.

Two is, the dictionary isn’t language.  It’s a reference for all those words that people made up.  And some words haven’t been made up yet.

So make sure you don’t get in a mardy.  I’m off to eat a batch in the spinney!   

It was merely a setback!

So I imagined this week I’d be saying how my Sci-Fi story collection was nicely second drafted.  But it isn’t.

My editor (paid in chocolate/coffee) read through the last story to be reviewed, got half way through, and came to the conclusion that it didn’t live up to the standard of the other stories.

This didn’t upset me; in a way I was relieved.  You see the thing was, I knew it wasn’t good enough, before I’d even handed it over to be read.  I wanted to be told to keep that one out.  Why didn’t I make the call myself?  Perhaps a lack of confidence.

Would I be able to write a better story?
What if I’d run out of ideas?

What if I’d been deluding myself and all the stories weren’t good enough? 

I spent the next two days thinking.

Strangely that is one of the toughest parts of being an author.  You can spend hours or days, sitting, walking, doodling, making a drink, getting a snack, staring into space… and to the whole world it looks like you aren’t doing anything at all.

It sounds very lame when at the end of the day someone asks how it went, and you reply:

“Good.  I thought about a lot of stuff.”

The world values the physical, and if you don’t have something to show at the end of the day, you don’t really have a mark of progress.  I went through a stage of feeling worried and guilty that I wouldn’t have anything to show by the end of this week, that it would be a “wasted” week. 

Looking back on it, I can now see it’s been a valuable week.  I’ve learned a good lesson on how to deal with a setback, and maybe gained a little confidence too.

No one was angry that I’d been delayed in my plan.  I did get some new ideas.  I started writing one, it’s going well, and I’m enjoying it.  I can say with certainty that the final product will be as good as I can make it – and a bar to beat for my future endeavours.