Want to win a copy?

I'm giving away three copies of the new Song of the Beast and an advance reader copy (ARC) of The Daemon Prism in the next couple of months through Goodreads. Here are the links. They're free, of course, but you do have to sign up on the site.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Song of the Beast
by Carol Berg

Giveaway ends November 30, 2011.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

And for The Daemon Prism ARC (Note this one doesn't start until November):

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Daemon Prism

by Carol Berg

Giveaway ends November 30, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Goodreads is an interesting site. I haven't spent as much time there as I would like, but I intend to. What I've seen, I like. Lots of book reviews, reading groups, and some good discussions (especially in the fantasy realm where I've peeked). It is a site that is devoted to readers, and you can get recommendations on books from serious readers. There are lots of ways to trace through particular reviewers, or authors and so forth. Read more of this post!

ARC Giveaway

My publisher is giving away ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) of eight forthcoming Ace/Roc novels at the Dear Author blog today. Hie thee over there and you could win one of eight different new releases, including, as it happens, The Spirit Lens.


All you have to do is comment on the post, telling which are your first two choices and who among all Ace/Roc authors you recommend. Read more of this post!

Revision 3 - Pervasive Changes

One week in. How is the revision going? Overall, I've dealt with the easy issues. The first six chapters are much leaner, much cleaner, much clearer. I've cut out some 2500 words in a fairly painless fashion.

Now I just have to move forward on the linear review, tightening and weaving in the more pervasive changes.

Here are some examples of things I'm keeping in mind.



1. Characters At one point a character we've met only peripherally turns up dead. The implications of the death are huge. In order for this event to carry the weight that it should, readers really need to have a better handle on who this person is. My solution? Rewrite a scene in chapter 3, involving this character instead of the person who was formerly involved. Also, keep this character in mind as I read through the book and look for further opportunities to involve the person, at least enough to keep his or her identity clear in the reader's mind.

2. Worldbuilding Mages are very much resented in this world. Not only do their magics not work reliably, but "licensed" mages have a stranglehold on magical practice and do their best to eliminate the competition of small practitioners, old grannies and hedge-uncles who work magic by instinct. By the time I got to the end I realized I had not demonstrated this until somewhere around the middle of the book. I need to look for opportunities to drop in little tidbits to make this clear.

3. Dropped Threads My investigator/sorcerer Dante purposefully lets it be known that he possesses a particular set of unsavory skills. By the end I discovered that I had sort of lost that thread in the story. I know he is pursuing it, but the reader might not, and it will be extremely important in The Soul Mirror. I need to keep this near the surface of the reader's mind.

4. Clarifications One of the first things a student of sorcery learns is how to sense enchantments. There are three states that are very different: those spells that are bound and waiting to be triggered, enchantments that are active, and the residue left by enchantments that are finished. As these are essential forensic skills for our investigators, I need to make clear the difference in these three states.

I have about ten more issues, and seem to be adding items to the list faster than I'm taking them off.

Next up - the very best thing about revision. The insights that come once you get so totally immersed in the story as a whole. And yes, I had one. I'll have to figure out how to describe it without giving anything away.

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The Right Ordering of Endings

Having so recently emerged from the boiling kettle of devising an ending for this book, I thought it might be well to speak to some ending considerations.

I think of endings as a ziggurat - a stepped pyramid. Once the rising action of the climax begins, there is no going back down to the beginning level. Of course, there may be several parts to an ending, and you can have a short breathing space between them, but you don't want to let down and rest, as you might with story arcs earlier in the book. And the level step, or breathing space, should be short, compared to the elevation gain with each piece of the climax. Never let yourself lose the elevation gain.

Once you've reached the summit--the final battle, the climactic confrontation, the split, the bomb, the rescue, the cataclysm, the unveiling, the kiss, whatever it might be--it's time for a brief denouement. Contrary to popular misconception, the denouement is not the climax itself, but the winding up of threads, the actual resolution that follows upon the climactic events of the story. It is what you find on that summit, not the climbing action of getting there. And you notice that the actual area at the summit is much smaller than the base of the pyramid, and much smaller than the combined effort of getting to such a height. The harmonious shape of the ziggurat demands it.

So what are my rules of thumb wrt endings that my recent efforts (and six chapters in two weeks is definitely an effort for me!) recalled to me?




1. Don't introduce something new - a new power, an artifact we haven't seen, or a new character who is the exact locksmith needed to work things out. It's too convenient. It smacks of deus ex machina - and readers will throw the book across the room. You might get away with such a thing earlier in the story (though you shouldn't) but never, never at the end. Many people consider this a common flaw of fantastic literature - "oh, the author can make anything happen at the end, magic, reconfiguring the tachyon particles, or whatever. It's just too easy." I believe you have to make the rules of your magic or science or culture or alternate reality so clear that your climactic events can most definitely lead to failure. DOn't let it be easy.

2. Use people and events from earlier in the story to bind the whole thing together. If your story starts with a book (like Valen's book of maps in Flesh and Spirit) think carefully about what part the book plays in the climax. If you need an unlocking spell, make sure we know they exist in this magic system. If a dead body turns up, make sure your readers know the significance of that person (hmmm...oops...a matter for revision) and can feel the emotions you want to drive the conflict and climax.

If you are lacking the particular whizbo, person, or talent you need to feed the action, go back and put it (or him or her) in earlier - but seamlessly please. Don't hang a bright red arrow pointing to the golden ball that's just the right shape to plug the dike! The ball needs to serve a function in the earlier part of the story, too.

3. If you find yourself explaining too much, stop. Remember those short steps on the ziggurat? If you make one step horribly wider than the others, you've thrown off the balance. So look at what you're trying to explain and figure out how to salt in the explanations earlier, so that the reader will say, "Ah, yes. Wow! Of course!" as she is swept to the ending.

4. Be meticulous about your characters' decisions that lead them into and get them out of the climactic events. Explore all options. Why did he choose just the right path that would get him out of a jam? Let the climactic events flow naturally out of the building tension of the story, and your characters' dramatic reversals - maybe the thing they said they would never do - build upon the trail of evidence you've laid.

5. Did you tie off enough threads? Endings should not be a checkoff list, but don't leave the reader hanging with the big stuff. You want to leave readers with the feeling that life goes on, but you want to satisfy their most urgent questions. "Well did Gerick stay in Avonar or go back to where he had been living?" "Did Valen ever get a chance to have that great party he kept hankering after for a THOUSAND PAGES?" "Did Seyonne get it back?" (Well you have to leave some questions open...)

6. If there is to be a sequel, did you leave the right threads open? Is there a spooky undertone to the denouement? Check out the ending of The Soul Weaver (D'Arnath Book 3). At one time, it was the third of three books. When I discovered the "story arc" of Daughter of Ancients, I went back and modified the denouement. I'll bet you can pick out the pieces I slipped in.

Once you've completed those last chapters, reread your first chapter. Consider balance and symmetry. What were your hero's emotions, expectations, and opinions. How have they changed?

Consider the mood. Did you start off writing a farce and end up in a deadly, gripping battle for survival? Is your reader going to be confused that you started off a bedroom farce and ended up with a serial rapist threatening your heroine?

Or if your opening posed a mystery that turned out to be much wider and deeper than the original question, did you set the spooky music playing early on? Yeah. I think so. Cool!


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The Turning Point

Every author will recount the difficulties of the wretched middle of a book’s development. "It’s all crap," he’ll say. "It’s as boring as watching paint dry." "I’ve got the focus all wrong." "This will never come together."

All the gleeful laying out of enticing clues, and ambiguous new characters, and discovery of new magic has long given way to the difficult, often frustrating work of
- creating tension, and upping the tension with each twist and turn of the plot
- choreographing climactic action
- developing scenes that actually forward the plot and don’t just recapitulate
- getting to the nitty-gritty events that impact your characters’ growth and change.

The end still seems as distant as ever and may be less clear than when you started. The threads of logic have gotten tangled. There are too many characters and no clear villains. You can’t figure out how the heck to get from Eltevire to Vernase because you already set Vernase within a day’s travel of Merona, and at this point in the book you just don’t want your characters traveling for a week. Chapter 17 turned into two chapters when you realized you’d been so determined to get through it, you’d let your poor captive investigator escape the very torment he’d been investigating [never let him off easy just to get that chapter done], and there are still at least two entire story arcs you haven’t touched yet. Uh...yeah, this is getting personal.

Well maybe this isn’t the exact set of circumstances that drive every author up the wall when she reaches approximately 2/3 of the way through a new book. These are certainly the ones that have popped to my mind over the past couple of weeks. Plus we’ve been in and out to a family wedding in Seattle and spent one day driving mom into the mountains to see the glorious aspens, and a couple more doing handouts for the Vancouver conference that is coming up Real Soon Now. And, holy moly, this presidential election is SO distracting [more on this in another post you may or may not want to read!]

But, as it happens, my little cadre of fellow writers set up another mountain retreat for this past weekend. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to go, but I desperately needed some concentrated, relatively undistractable time, and my ES (Extraordinary Spouse) had a ton of work to do for a client, too. Two full days of writing and some twenty pages later and I’ve reached the Turning Point, where my investigators emerge from a near catastrophe and put together the chain of evidence in an entirely different way to point the spotlight (or the spyglass, as may be) on a totally unsuspected suspect. And what do I find?



I had actually laid in enough clues for them to draw this conclusion. I had actually put them through enough of a wringer to force them to look at things a different way. I’ve left myself pointed in exactly the direction I meant to go all along.

OK. I still worry about the focus and the missing spark and the wordy first chapters the fact that I’ve still got a lot of story to tell, and I’ve got one BIG motivation still to work out. But details in past chapters can now be refined and enhanced because I’ve put together this piece of the story. I can probably rip out a few extraneous pieces because they weren’t needed. I can strengthen the presentation of the main characters because now I know that at this particular point in chapter 21, the three are in harmony. I can make sure the pace of their change from their first meeting to this point is clear. And I can lay in the "festering sores" that will send it all to heck, because now I know when the descent must begin.

I woke up this morning with one idea for revising an early scene, because now I'm seeing a particular character's arc more clearly.

Last night driving home from Denver on a very misty, cold dark night, I realized that one "consequence" I had set up for the end was just really tooooo dark. And this morning upon waking, I knew what I had to do about it, because it fit perfectly with another character's arc.

I'm hoping for more such revelations this week, if I can keep my reacquired focus.

I’m still in the wretched middle, but maybe…just maybe…I’ve turned the corner.
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From Sale to Shelf: Part 4

Once I return the copyedited manuscript, I feel as if the book is truly complete. I go back to work on the next project. But there are a few things left to look at: cover art galley proofs, and ARCs.

Sometime in the next weeks, my editor will send me a jpg cover image or an actual cover flat. This is the first time I get to see the cover and it is always a "gulp" moment. Will it match my vision? Will it be striking enough to draw new readers? Will the back copy give away secrets? Will it reflect my own words? Would it make me want to read the book?

I have been fortunate with covers. All the artists have been excellent, even if their vision didn't match mine. Several of my covers have actually given me goose bumps! (Revelation, Restoration). Some covers have fit my image exactly (Daughter of Ancients, Son of Avonar) or even taken my vision one step farther (Revelation). Some have been beautiful or striking - which is the most important function of covers - despite not fitting my image of the person or scene depicted (Flesh and Spirit, Breath and Bone, Restoration). Only two have disappointed. Proof is left to the reader...

Once I have the cover image, I need to start thinking about marketing tasks - making bookmarks, fliers, updating the website, and so forth. Mostly I procrastinate...because I don't like the marketing stuff, but I DO like starting a new book!

But at sometime a month or six weeks after the copyedits have gone in, I'll receive another bundle of pages in the mail from my editor.


These are the galleys or proof pages, the typeset pages printed just as they'll look in the book. For a mass market paperback (the smaller format) I'll see two facing pages per 8 1/2 x 11 sheet. For a trade paperback, I'll see one page per sheet.

This is the first time I see the "book design," the typeface, the chapter headers, the beautiful drop caps they have at the beginning of the Flesh and Spirit chapters, or how they handled the narrator sections in Song of the Beast or the "Part" divisions in Breath and Bone. This pass is really for hunting typos, misspellings, or any other mistake that might have been entered in the typesetting process. These are typically very few.

The tricky thing is that the lines and paragraphs are now set tightly on the page. Removing or adding a word or even a comma requires the whole line to be re-typeset. If the word or punctuation is in the middle of a paragraph, the entire paragraph must be reset. If the length of the paragraph changes, it pushes or contracts the text that follows it. Typesetting is expensive.

But as with any time I read the manuscript start to finish, I find things I want to change. Can I do that? Yes, within reason.
1. Certainly errors must be fixed. Those aren't optional. Typesetting errors aren't "charged" to me!
2. I can certainly tweak a word, phrase, or even a sentence, if I see a critical need. The trick is to replace a removed word with something of similar length. I've even gone through and changed a made-up word or a character name - simple replacements are the easiest to deal with.
3. For slightly more complicated changes, if I can make restricts the resetting to a single paragraph, not changing the page length, I'll usually do it.
4. The toughest pieces to deal with are places where I think the prose needs to be tightened, ie. words removed and not replaced. I have actually squeezed this through on one book, in places where the actual chapter page length has not changed. My editor was merciful.

I absolutely cannot do anything that will change the page numbering. The entire rest of the book would have to be reset = Very Expensive.

Once I've made all the changes and fixes, I pull out those pages. I make sure the marks are very clear - don't want to introduce more typos or errors! And then I count the number of pages. And then I try to figure out if that number will make my editor nervous or, heaven forbid, cause the publisher to charge me the cost of retypesetting!! I don't have a set number I'm allowed, but I can get a creepy feeling if the stack of pages is more than about 25. I read each one and decide if this is critical. I keep all error fixes that I've found. But some of my own changes... Honestly, some things a reader will never notice, and I reluctantly pull them out.

I ship off the proof pages that contain corrections, and now I'm really finished. The next time I see the book it will be bound. First, I'll see the ARC (Advance Reader Copy). This bound book has no cover art, and the text is essentially the uncorrected text. It is produced at the same time as the proof pages, and is sent out to reviewers, bookstores, and the like. Sometimes they show up on ebay!

But one day a padded envelope shows up in the mail with my first real copy of the book, real cover, corrected text, and I sit and read and say, "Wow, did I really write this? It looks like a real book!"

Any questions?

My cover artists
Luis Royo: Flesh and Spirit, Breath and Bone

Matt Stawicki: Revelation, Restoration, Song of the Beast, Son of Avonar, Guardians of the Keep, The Soul Weaver, Daughter of Ancients

Kevin Murphy: Transformation




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Critical Mass

Astonishing how a week can change things. Has it already been a week? How time does fly when one is immersed in the Work. After almost a week of floundering, researching, consulting, analyzing, and cracking skull on keyboard, I got moving on the harbor scene. It flowed. I love it when I've gathered enough information, motivation, world building details, and plot elements that I can immerse myself in the scene without stopping to look things up. The worst thing I have to worry about is communicating how the tall, carved posts with the bird capitals form a great rectangle on the pleasure barge and that silk draperies and canopies are hung from them. I would like to make the posts curve outward so that when they fix new ropes between them to hang the celebration banners brought on board, the banners will obscure some of the silk draperies, but still leave space between. But I need to describe all this in a matter of a few words so we don't interrupt the action. Well, ok, I won't worry about the outward curve (though it would look really cool.)

As I write I do find myself changing some details as I go. Halfway through the scene I move the oarsmen from "belowdecks," when I realize from looking at every pleasure barge picture I can find, that yes, some barges have decks, but these are really shallow draught vessels and you can't necessarily fit men and oars underneath. All the pictures show them on the "main level." But this doesn't mean they are on the deck. They can be in an open hull part of the barge. OK. That works. I put them in the stern, because that seems like the "back of the bus" and the guests would be in the bow, but pictures show that lots of rowing barges put the rowers in the bow - facing backward for rowing, of course, with the bargemaster facing forward. I like the look of the picture I found. So I adjust the words and put them in the bow and the main "gallery" is in the stern. Move everyone around. It works. And then comes the disaster...

...in the story, not the writing (I hope!)...and then comes the magic
that was the reason for all this research and setup. And the magic doesn't come from the place Portier thought it would. And people die. And Portier's expectations, illusions, and hopes are crushed. Action only has meaning in the reactions of the characters.

Did you know that there are Naval Field Medical Manuals online, that tell about phosphorus burns and treatment? [I am smiling here.] Which leads into the "aftermath" chapter. Because when everything goes wrong/blows up/turns south, our heroes have to regroup. Which is another whole chapter!!

Portier is wounded - not something a librarian is accustomed to. It's only small, but leads to interesting revelations about our sorcerer. The character interaction is the most fun - I really have to be careful about too much talking heads in this story. With a mystery, there are clues and interconnections to be analyzed, especially when everything you think you've figured out is proved wrong. I'm going to have to figure out some different way to do this...

And so it goes. I know several things that have to happen next. A visit to Collegia Magica Seravain is one of the big ones. But I think...we may have to go ghost hunting first. Now where did that come from??????

Stay tuned...

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Word Count Isn't Everything

I haven't written all that many words this week - a few thousand. Early action is a bear when you don't have the novel plotted and outlined. It is much easier to figure out where to start than to figure out what, out of all the myriad possibilities, happens next, and what does it look like, feel like smell like, and who on earth is there and why?

I have pages of notes by now, jotted as I write. Some are lists of Potential Clues and Their Rationale:

• The arrow tipped with a common poison (not magic) but enspelled in a most suspicious way.
• What does the lensmaker know?
• Whose knife killed the mule? And why?
  

Many of them are Things We Need To See:

• The suspects and the queen
• Dante shows magic of the kind to garner the interest of the bad guys
  
• The inverted village [No, I won't tell what that means.]
• A public demonstration of the new science vs inadequate magic
  

Others are Events That Need To Happen

• The trial
• The third assassination attempt
• A visit to Collegia Seravain
• Ilario's science exposition (this is a new one that I came up with only yesterday)
  

Some of these clues, needs, and events such as the trial and the inverted village, I've known since the proposal - sketched in to give an idea of the story. More of them, such as Ilario's science exposition, are ideas generated by the writing itself - I love it when that happens. So how do I use these lists?

What I want is for the Event ideas to subsume the Things We Need To See - the cool things the reader must experience in order to interpret (and, I hope, enjoy!!) the story. In this case, as I just realized, the idea of Ilario sponsoring an "exposition" because he thinks the word sounds intellectual and the event might counter the common belief that he has the intellect of a flea, has given me a place for Dante to show something that intrigues the bad guys, as well as the public demonstration of the new science vs failing magic. All of a sudden I have generated a major scene, as well as the scenes leading up to this exposition - where we will surely accomplish some of the smaller events that need to happen and the encounters that need to occur and will give Portier a chance to slip in some investigation he might not otherwise have occasion to do.

A major scene of this nature will often provide a turning point in the story. I often like to make it a twist, a reversal of fortune or expectation that will lure the reader into the next arc. Think of Osriel's revelation scene in the refectory in Breath and Bone, or Seri standing in a murdered servant's room with a flower in her hand in Guardians of the Keep, finally understanding her nephew's behavior, or Seyonne rescuing Aleksander from the prison tower in Transformation.

I never understood story arcs until my first editor pointed out the four principal arcs in Transformation. [Can you name them?] I had structured the story by instinct, and she showed me not only what they were, but where I had failed to maintain the sense of rising tension that is integral to a story arc. A novel usually has a single overall story arc that is the major character or plot arc that directs the plot. Within that, it may have three, four, five or more major arcs - these progressions of rising tension that result in a climax of some kind. And within those may be smaller arcs, nesting, overlapping, all drawing the reader through the story. Writers may or may not have a handle on these structural pieces to begin with, but by the time that novel goes to the publisher, they'd better.

Somehow, by recognizing the significance of Ilario's Science Exposition along with the other motives and clues I've struggled with this week, I have been able to make a great leap today. I now have four defined story arcs and an idea of the climactic scene of each. The accumulation of hints and clues and events that were causing me to tear out my hair earlier in the week have now begun to sort themselves out. This one belongs in the assassination arc. This one contributes to the trial arc...and so forth. I feel mightily accomplished. Word count isn't everything!

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