We took an overnight trip to Honolulu to share Thanksgiving with family there — and that is the last trip currently planned. I’ve really enjoyed our travels this year and I’ve been lucky to be able to go, but traveling while trying to meet writing deadlines is a little stressful. At this point, I’m eager to just settle down and focus on writing for a couple of months — which is convenient, because I have a lot of writing to do. The two big projects are Book 2 of The Red Trilogy, and Book 3 of The Red Trilogy.

* Status of Book 2: The Trials — I just received the editorial notes from Joe Monti at Saga Press. I haven’t even gone over Joe’s comments yet, but this has become the top priority.

* Status of Book 3: For the past few weeks I’ve been working on the second draft. There is much, much, much more to do. This is second priority, but still critical.

When all of this is done, I want to get back to writing shorter fiction for a while, but that won’t be until February at the earliest. I am definitely not going to meet my short fiction goal for the year. Oh well. We do what we can. :-/

Over the past few months, many of you have asked Whatever happened to The Red: Trials? This was the sequel to my 2013 self-published novel The Red: First Light and had been scheduled to publish last May. It has not been published (yet) and now I’m finally free to say why. So here’s the story:

Last spring I got to talking with my long-time agent. Naturally, we hadn’t had much business with each other since I started self-publishing, but one thing led to another, he read The Red: First Light, loved it, and asked if he could auction that book along with Trials, and an as-yet-unwritten final novel in the trilogy.

I thought about it. I talked the idea over with my husband. I added up what First Light had already earned, and I estimated what I might expect to earn in the next year or two. The finances convinced me: an auction was worth trying, so long as it was a walk-away deal. My agent agreed: if I didn’t get an offer I liked, I would continue on my own.

In fact, I planned to continue as before, publishing The Red: Trials according to the original schedule, but during the auction period I was asked to hold off on releasing it. On reflection that seemed a reasonable request, so I agreed. It was a gamble though, because I was giving up a wonderful publicity opportunity. Fortunately, the gamble proved worthwhile.

The big news: Now that the contract has been signed, I am very pleased to announce that The Red series has been acquired by Joe Monti, Executive Editor at Saga Press, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Joe has been very enthusiastic, and I am all approving of the marketing direction he has in mind. I see this deal as a fantastic opportunity to get my name out in the world and more widely known, which should help push sales of my backlist, which might lead to me earning a reasonable income from writing for, essentially, the first time ever. My husband has always been the primary breadwinner around here, so the opportunity to give back to him means a lot to me.

For now, The Red: First Light has been withdrawn from sale pending the release of the forthcoming Saga Press edition.

I’m not turning my back on self-publishing, but after almost five years at this game, it felt like the time had come to try something different. I think that’s the key, to keep trying new things, and this is the right thing for me, and for my family, at this time.

I do have one regret: I know I’m disappointing several of you who’ve let me know that you’re eagerly awaiting Trials. Be assured that it will be published, just a little later than initially planned and under the slightly modified title The Trials. I hope you’ll stick with me until then. And I do want to thank all the readers and reviewers who supported the original edition, and made this step forward possible for me.

I’ll be sending out my newsletter at rare intervals, as always, so if you’d like a notification of the publication date of the Saga Press edition of the series—or occasional news on my other books and writing—please sign up using the form in the right column of this page.

And in the meantime, I have a lot of other novels! If you haven’t read them yet, check out Memory or The Bohr Maker. Both are good places to start if you’d like to get to know my work.

NO WAY OUT BUT FORWARD

Back-cover copy:
Lieutenant James Shelley and his squad of US Army soldiers were on a quest for justice when they carried out the unauthorized mission known as First Light. They returned home to America to face a court-martial, determined to expose the corruption in the chain of command that compelled their actions. But in a country still reeling from the nuclear terrorism of Coma Day, the courtroom is only one battlefield. A new cycle of violence ignites when rumors of the elusive, rogue AI known as the Red go public—and Shelley is, once again, pulled into the fray.

Challenged by his enemies, driven by ideals, Shelley feels compelled to act—but are the harrowing choices he makes really his own, or are they made for him, by the Red? With millions of lives at stake in a game of nuclear cat-and-mouse, does it even matter?

Digital painting by Dallas Nagata White
Cover design by Emily Irwin

Dallas also did the cover painting for The Red: First Light.

Emily did the cover painting and cover design for Memory.

Here’s a blog post on the Maui artists I’ve worked with.

(For those of you who are writers, I’d thought I’d talk a little about the editorial process behind my newest books.)

The process I use to get a novel ready for publication is the same now as when I was traditionally published. I write the entire manuscript with no outside input. When I have a solid draft, I send it to one or more beta readers and then process their comments. This step can be repeated, though I usually don’t, in large part because experienced beta readers are always in short supply. So once I’ve worked through beta-reader comments, the manuscript is ready to be seen by a professional editor.

What does an editor do? It depends what you hire her for and how much detail work you’re after (or you need). The more experience you’ve had with writing, the less supervision you’re likely to need. I’ve written quite a few novels at this point, so I get an overall edit that looks mostly at structure and internal logic.

Judith Tarr served as editor for both The Red: First Light and The Red: Trials. What Judy provides is a letter giving a general assessment of the novel, covering both its strengths and its weaknesses, and then the nitty gritty of specific comments, using Word’s comment feature to annotate the manuscript from beginning to end.

For First Light there were over 700 editorial comments. Trials had only half that—either because Judy despaired or else she really did feel that Trials was initially better written. 😉
(more…)

I am DONE WITH THIS NOVEL.

Or … I am done pending feedback from my copyeditor, Chaz Brenchley.

What does a copyeditor do?
A good copyeditor will read through the manuscript, attending to the nitty-gritty details of grammar, spelling, capitalization, and consistency of story elements.

Some examples:

* look for typos, missing words, missing punctuation, misspelled words

* look for incorrect punctuation

* make sure there is consistency in the way words are spelled and capitalized. For example, I always use “nightvision” instead of “night vision.” And where abbreviations and acronyms are used, I tend to skip the periods, so “US Army” or “Washington DC.”

* make sure that characters’ names and physical attributes are consistent throughout (except of course where those physical attributes change).

* make sure characters are where they are supposed to be and have not magically transported elsewhere.

Copyediting is a tough, demanding job. Part of the skill set is to know when an author has deliberately and effectively violated the rules of grammar. For example, I might use a comma splice on occasion to rush the action forward. Is it an effective use? The copyeditor might have an opinion on that.
(more…)

I’m almost done.

As reported in my last post, I’ve been working through the comments provided by my editor, Judith Tarr. I haven’t instituted all of them, but I’ve carefully considered them all, and have addressed a large majority. I’ll write more on the editing process later — like after I do my taxes! In the US, taxes are due on April 15, so I really need to get on that!

But for The Red: Trials there are two more steps left in the revision process. Today I printed out a fresh copy of the manuscript. I’ll be doing a quick read-through of that, looking for any inconsistencies or awkward word choices that may have been introduced in the latest revision. Reading a printed manuscript is different from reading on a computer screen. It’s easy to get used to the words on the screen — the brain makes assumptions about what is there — so shifting the format by reading a printed version gives a fresher perspective, and problems that were invisible before are suddenly revealed. That’s the theory, anyway. Hopefully, this won’t take more than two to three days.

Whatever changes I make on the printed manuscript will need to be entered in the Word document. After that, comes the last step: the manuscript goes off to Chaz Brenchley for a copyedit. Chaz copyedited The Red: First Light, and I’m very happy that he’s agreed to do Trials as well. If you’re not familiar with Chaz, check out my “Book Rave” post on his novel Dispossession — and he has a lot more fiction to offer.

Once I get the copyedited manuscript back from Chaz, I’ll need to enter the corrections, and then The Red: Trials will be officially DONE. It’s taken a bit longer than I’d originally hoped, but if all goes well, it will launch on May 20.

If you haven’t already, please sign up for my very occasional newsletter. It’s the most reliable way to learn when I’ve got a new book or story out.

As mentioned here before, almost two weeks ago I managed, with grace and style (not!), to fracture my jaw. The oral surgeon thought it minor enough that we could proceed with “no treatment” other than a liquid diet. But on a followup visit, he decided the teeth were not realigning on their own — so now I have a mouthful of metal. This isn’t quite a wired jaw. It’s called “elastics” because rubber bands are used to link the upper and lower teeth, instead of wire, and I get to take the elastics off a few times a day to eat drink and brush my teeth.

The whole incident is quite unpleasant as you can imagine. I’m not in pain right now, but the pressure on the jaw is uncomfortable, and talking while the rubber bands are in place is really hard. So far I’ve lost around six pounds, which in other circumstances might be a good thing, but I’m now under 120-pounds for the first time since some long-ago college finals week. I really don’t want to keep losing at that rate for another month, so I need to deal better with diet.

But on to the important part: How does this affect the release of The Red: Trials?

The manuscript was still with my editor, Judith Tarr, when this first happened. She sent her editorial letter and comments last Friday, and gave the novel a nice thumb’s up: “My biggest problem was finding myself reading breathlessly, in pure reader mode, racing from scene to scene, in classic ‘can’t put down’ fashion, when I needed to slow down and put on my editor hat.”

As with First Light, her editing is insightful and thorough, so there is work to be done, but mostly in clarifying and drawing out details — there won’t be any major remodeling. I’ve made a solid start on the revision and hope to get back to it today. The goal is for the novel to be released in late May, and I’m still hoping to accomplish that.

I should have cover art to share with you soon. In the meantime, once again, if you’ve read and enjoyed The Red: First Light, please consider writing a brief reader review at Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble. There’s no need to say much — a line or two is fine — but reader reviews really do help with visibility. Thank you!

…is done.

For certain, generous definitions of “done.” The story is missing a two to three page epilogue, which I’m putting off until I have a better idea of what else, if anything, I’ll do in this story world.

For some reason, I don’t write in classic trilogies. Episodic novels are more my style, which explains the duologies of Deception Well/Vast, The Dread Hammer/Hepen The Watcher, and now The Red: First Light/Trials.

At any rate, this is a solid draft. I’m printing it out now, will read it over again and revise in that form, then send it off to beta readers, hopefully by the end of the month — with an epilogue attached.

So…I just finished a very rough draft of The Red: Trials, the follow up to The Red: First Light. There is A LOT of fixing up, figuring out, and filling in to do — and maybe there will be fatal flaws, I don’t know — but this was a very difficult book for me, so getting to this point is a triumph.

For those of you who are writers, I thought I’d share my experience of how I finally got those last pages done, in case you might find it helpful someday.

With many writers it’s common to write faster as you approach the end. That’s usually the case for me, but it didn’t happen this time. I was still slogging through it, even though I really didn’t have that far to go.

This has happened to me before. Long ago, when I was writing the first draft of my novel Vast, I was stuck. I was maybe 80% through and I couldn’t write anymore. I had a decision to make about how the end would work, and the uncertainty of what that decision would be worked to hold me back. I’m a very linear writer. I write chapter 1, then chapter 2, and so on, through to the end. I don’t jump around — until I got stuck writing Vast, that is. Eventually, out of desperation or despair, I jumped ahead and wrote the climactic end of the novel–and after that, writing the rest of the draft was relatively easy.

Every novel is different. With Trials I wasn’t facing a decision about the end. I knew how it would end — the generalities anyway, if not the details — but as with Vast, it turns out I needed to write the climactic ending scene before I could write all the scenes leading up to it. After a terrible writing day, I sat down on the evening of November 21, and skipped to the end. 1500 words later I felt far, far better about things. Over the next five days I added another 8500 words to create the missing scenes. I won’t say the writing was painless, but it was much less of a struggle than almost all the rest of the novel.

So this is the Vast method: when you’ve struggled close to the end but the story still isn’t writing itself, try writing the climactic scene first, and then drop back and fill in the rest.

Sometimes it works.