cowseattlesparks
If anybody else wants to take a crack at the manuscript and finds either of these formats Relevant to Interests, I shall provide them! Same for anyone who’s already volunteered. Please let me know!
Ha, glancing back at the big revise and resubmit post, I realized I actually didn’t say what the editor’s big issue with the story structure was. Oops. Clearly, the post needed an edit pass. 😉
Anyway, I’d said that the structure of the The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk is supposed to be “one big story in three parts”, akin to Lord of the Rings. However, what the editor said about this was that she’d prefer to see less setup for Book 2 and more of a sense of resolution for this book.
I get that. Certainly in Fellowship of the Ring, the biggest plot questions are of course not resolved, but there is a local resolution of sorts with the dissolution of the Fellowship. With my story, the idea here is that Book 1 is supposed to be Faanshi’s local arc, Book 2 is Julian’s, and Book 3 is Kestar’s. But clearly, I need better closure for Faanshi’s local arc.
The editor has given me several thoughts about how to tackle this, and I’m already thinking about which bits at the very end of Book 1 may be shifted over into the beginning of Book 2. This would serve nicely for giving Book 1 a less open ending while at the same time opening Book 2 with a sense of “okay, things are darker now, get ready”.
I’m also thinking that perhaps, structure-wise, I should think less “Lord of the Rings” and perhaps more “Star Wars”. (Which is kinda lulzy, given that I’ve got a bit of a Han-Luke-Leia dynamic going on with Julian, Kestar, and Faanshi, only without the Wookiee. Because Nine-Fingered Rab would take issues with being compared to Chewie, I fear!) The ultimate defeat of the Empire of course doesn’t happen until the third movie, but in ANH, you do have the nice big local resolution of “YAY the Death Star is asploded!”
Much thinking to do. And I’ve already had five, count ’em, five people volunteer to beta read; many thanks in advance to mamishkajennygriffeegerimaplejoelysuemari_mac1109apel
OKAY! Given my last post, I am now doing an in-depth review of the editorial feedback from Carina Press, and beginning to organize notes for a plan of attack on how to address the various recommendations.
However, given that this will be Lament‘s fifth draft (possibly sixth, if I do a separate word count reduction pass) and I’ve already gotten a little cross-eyed with editing this thing already, fresh eyes on it would be really, really good. So does anybody want to do a read-through for me? Specifically, I need someone who can:
- Read the entire manuscript,
- Review the list of editorial recommendations,
- Tell me if you think they’re reasonable, and
- For added bonus points, brainstorm with me on whether the game plan I’m developing to address them is feasible.
Let me emphasize: I need someone who can read the whole manuscript, all 118K words of it. Given that several of these recommendations address the overall structure of the story, a few chapters won’t cut it here. Also, my ideal time frame for this would be “some time before the end of this month”. It’ll take me at least a week or two to really properly hammer out the game plan, and if I could start hardcore edits in October, that would be awesome.
I will trade an equivalent beta read to any of my fellow writers out there for their own work, or do something else nifty in exchange for non-writers!
I finally heard back from Carina Press today about my submission of Lament of the Dove to them, and I gotta say, folks, this is hands down the best not-an-acceptance response I’ve had to a story to date.
One of Carina’s editors sent me a very long and detailed feedback letter not only calling out the various problems she had with the story but also the bits she very much liked. Just about everything she had to say I think can be chalked up to the fact that it took me so long to write and then edit this thing–long enough that I of course had my rounds with the breast cancer in between, and long enough that my writing style changed in the meantime. I’d already felt that the latter half of the story had better pacing and tighter prose, and from what this editor is saying, she seems to agree with that.
The biggest thing she’s calling out as a problem point has to do with the overall story structure. Lament is of course intended to be Book 1 of a three-part story, but the thing is, most people hear that and they think “trilogy”. The structure of The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk is intended to be less “trilogy” and more “one big story in three parts”, similar to The Lord of the Rings. (That, along with how I also have elves in my story, being the only comparison I will ever make of my work to Tolkien!)
She’s also suggesting I yank 6-12K of words out of various places. My gut reaction to this: CAN DO SPORT. As y’all know I’ve already yoinked half a book’s worth of words out of this thing already, so I’m pretty sure this’ll be cake by comparison. 😉
Here are a couple of awesome money quotes, though:
“I love your writing, your vivid descriptions and your world-building. Your characters are well-drawn and larger-than-life, and the conflict is strong enough to sustain the story.”
And:
“Julian is my favorite character, and his developing relationship with Faanshi is nicely drawn. Even your minor characters shine from the page. I particularly like Ulima.”
No offense to Faerie Blood, which is of course the Book of My Heart with all the things I love in it, but I’ve always felt that Lament of the Dove is a much more complex work. To get this kind of feedback on it gratifies me immensely.
This does of course mean a sudden huge shift in my writing priorities for the rest of the year. I’ll keep doing new words as I can, but the emphasis now is going to have to go on the new fifth draft of Lament! The editor was very, very clear that even if I do revise and resubmit, this won’t necessarily guarantee an offer from Carina–but that’s okay. The important thing here is to make my book MORE AWESOME. And this is the kind of feedback that’ll help me do it.
Okay, Julian, Faanshi, and Kes, you guys ready? Let’s get back to it.
Author Darcy Pattison had a lovely idea, or so I learned on the Twitternets: Random Publicity Week, encouraging all of us to take the time to do that Goodreads or Amazon or B&N review to support books by our friends and fellow authors. You know how this works: you’ve been swearing up and down you’d do that, right? Now is your chance! From today until the 10th, I encourage you all to commit random acts of publicity to support other people’s books that you love!
Today, I’m going to take the time to plug a post by J.C. Hutchins, the author of 7th Son, who in turn plugged a novel that has come to life under bittersweet circumstances. He posts very eloquently over here about his close friend Zellie Blake, a young woman who’s recently lost a fight with cancer. Her friends have pooled resources to publish her novel Lightning Strikes via Lulu, to raise money for cancer research.
As many of you know, I’ve gone a few rounds with cancer myself. So this is a random act of publicity that’s actually a little less random for me personally, and more, well, y’know, meaningful. So go check out Mr. Hutchins’ post, and if you’re moved to do so, consider buying the book. Cancer fighters like me will appreciate it very much.
I’ve finally gotten my next round of royalties for Faerie Blood and Defiance, and I’m not terribly surprised that they are tiny. To all of you out there who have bought copies of these works this year, though, as always, I thank you for your support!
Along with the royalties, though, I have also gotten the news that Drollerie’s agreement for audio versions of our works has dissolved. So, sadly, this means that there will be no audio version of Faerie Blood for now. If I get any further updates about this, I will be sure to pass the word.
Over in the land of Lament of the Dove, there are still open queries on that. A couple are to agents, but the primary one of interest remains to Carina Press. I’m not expecting pings back from the agents at this point since it’s been long enough on those queries that either they’re not getting back to me, or else they’re so backed up that they’re not going to be able to do so in a timely fashion anyway.
My strategy for querying agents is, I think, going to have to change. I’ve been focusing on querying people who accept email submissions, but since I’ve pretty much exhausted the pool of people I’m interested in, I’m going to have to branch out to sending snailmail. And if Carina says no, print partials or fulls of Lament will be going out, too. But I’ll give it a little longer before Operation Paper Querying will have to go into effect.
Shadow of the Rook is the book that has my attention at the moment, just because Lament is the thing with the biggest active query. Like Lament, Shadow is taking its time organically growing in my brain; I’m only just now inching into Chapter 4, trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to have one of the characters who made it all the way through Book 1 survive for the bulk of Book 2. And I’m pleased to note that while I didn’t write nearly as much as I should have done this weekend, I have nonetheless accomplished some word count!
Written this weekend: 538
Chapter 4 total: 831
Shadow of the Rook total (first draft): 18,259
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
After the awesomeness that is Crocodile on the Sandbank, the mighty opening round of the Amelia Peabody series, a reader might wonder how Elizabeth Peters could possibly have packed more awesome into these books. The answer: by the introduction of Amelia and Emerson’s son, the “catastrophically precocious” Walter Peabody Emerson, better known by his nickname of Ramses.
The opening of this book remains one of my favorite bits in the entire series. It’s four years after the events of Book 1, and Amelia and Emerson have been staying at home in England raising their small son rather than risking him by a return to Egypt. In a quick little sequence of anecdotes, Amelia provides a delightful little portrait of exactly what this kid is like, from how he started to talk at a very early age to how he delighted in his father reading grisly accounts of mummies to him, and most of all in digging up bones out of the garden. He’s a bit too twee at this early age, though, as his dialogue is written out with some baby pronunication that makes him a bit hard to read. I was cheerfully willing to overlook that though for the giggle factor of young Ramses interrupting a tea party his mother is having–by bringing Amelia a particularly filthy femur, and horrifying all the other women present. Muaha.
Sadly, Ramses is not actually much in this book. The main gist of the plot involves one Lady Baskerville coming to beg Emerson for assistance, for her husband, himself a well-known excavator, has died in the middle of digging into a new tomb. Lady Baskerville wants Emerson to continue the job–and if at all possible, to investigate the mystery of her husband’s death and other strange circumstances that have surrounded their entire dig. And it’s certainly an entertaining mystery, notable for setting up a lot of the standard elements of an Amelia Peabody book: murder, a budding young romance, and someone (or multiple someones) being attracted passionately to Emerson! One other plot element is introduced here as well that will resonate through several of the following novels: the Emersons’ acqusition of the cat Bastet.
So even though the main plot doesn’t stand out for me as much as with the rest of the series, there are still a whole bunch of important things introduced here that set up books to come. For this one, four stars.