Category Archives: Impish Press

Strong Mystery: A new book by Raven Bond

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Too much fun. For the past month I’ve been editing, formatting and proofing Raven’s omnibus edition Strong Mystery. The goal was to get it done in time for him to read from it at Gearcon, a Steampunk convention in Portland. He’s a guest author there. I wanted him to have physical copies to sell at the bookshop, along with his other series novel, Wind Dancer.

I’ve been coming home from work, having dinner and then sitting down again with InDesign. Later, once I’d printed it out, there seemed to be a couple weeks of redlining (marking the print out with a red pen) and fixing before it was ready to send to print. Happily, the copies arrived this week.

This week I’ve been transferring all the corrections to the Word files so I can publish to kindle. Just a few pages left and it will likely be up online tomorrow. In reading the three stories together, I realize once more what a terrific writer he is. The plots are tight, the murder mysteries play out well, and the magic system is believable. I can’t wait until he writes the next one.

6 books published in a year: now we are six!

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It’s a little crazy, right? Our tiny publishing company, Impish Press, has launched six new books in the past year. After the writing, that includes all the traditional and hybrid indie tasks of

  1. Line editing
  2. Proof reading
  3. Continuity
  4. Book design
  5. Conversion to kindle
  6. Design for print
  7. Cover design
  8. Back cover / description writing
  9. Web site design
  10. Marketing

All while I held down a full-time job at Microsoft, and Raven took care of everything with the house plus full-time writing. Admittedly, I have a past life in publishing, web development and design. However, there was guerilla time management in there, along with more than a dash of persistence. My partner is encouraging me to think about making the next book I write on how we managed to write AND publish a book every two months on average. It’s beginning to look more than likely I’ll oblige him. From what I read, short kindle books for the Do It Yourself market are a good niche.

I thought I might start with a quick guide to exactly how I format styles in word (after scrivener export) to avoid tears before bedtime when I convert to kindle. With screen shots and measurements. Think that’d be interesting?

What subjects would you like to see covered, dear readers? Use the comments section and I’ll try to answer questions.

Library of Time

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Magic in the library

Magic in the library – Ria Loader

Library of Time is an urban fantasy about a librarian who has walked away from the magical world to make her way in the city of Seattle. She’s hiding a part of a magical library for her long time teacher. What could possibly go wrong? The teacher goes missing under mysterious circumstances, the missing library is being sought by many otherworldly magical beings, and she finds herself on the run. Trying to make sense of what’s going on, she is helped and hindered by allies and friends alike. She will need to put aside her aversion to power and claim her magical inheritance if she is going to survive.

Buy it on Kindle (266 pages) or print edition 330 pages). Hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it.

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I just got a box of books in the mail; finally I have copies in my hands. What a journey this has been. Galleys seemed to take forever. I kept having to remind myself of Sting’s words about creative projects, something along the lines of “no project is ever finished; at some stage you just need to abandon it”. That’s true in some sense. At least the editor and author can keep on fiddling with commas until doomsday on the ebook but with the print version you just need to commit. No doubt I’ll keep finding tiny comma inconsistencies that will bother me much more than anyone else. Meantime, I’m going to stack up the books and take pictures of my hoard. So satisfying.

 

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Writing process – top 10 ways of finding grammar errors

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Grammar errors are one of the most pesky things to eradicate in the writing process. Scrivener doesn’t find grammar mistakes, and while MS Word is pretty good at finding normal passive errors, it fails to recognize idiom. Language is changing. Sentences can and often do start with ‘and, but, or, though’ in colloquial use.wordsForBooks

If you’re like me, when you write the first draft you don’t pay any attention to the rules. Well, truth to tell, rules are hardly ever my best thing. I tend to think in fragments; that means some of my characters share this trait. Enough said.

Even in a blog, the sentence construction is not a slave to the Oxford English way of writing. Be a bit boring if it was. However, the unintentional grammar error is the bane of a writer’s existence. It’s just fine to break rules on purpose, so long as you know your purpose. Richard Morgan stood the grammar rules on their collective head in Altered Carbon. His more stream-of-consciousness writing included sentence fragments much of the time. None of that made it difficult to read. Instead, it made his protagonist much more sympathetic. So how do I find those errors in the editing process? I have a few tips and tricks to share.

  1. Walk away from the writing for a couple of days to give yourself some distance
  2. Print it out and keep a highlighting pen handy to mark the pieces to come back to
  3. Read it out loud to a friend. The tongue will trip over phrases that aren’t quite right
  4. Do an editing pass with track-changes on
  5. Try turning it upside down – for those of us who can read that way, the comma and grammar errors jump out
  6. Do an editing pass just for dialog.
  7. Use Find / Replace to fix issues like quote plus period (“. wrong) rather than period plus quote (.” correct)
  8. Write with a manual of style handy – look up stuff that you know you get wrong
  9. Replace instances of passive voice (often uses words that end in y) with active voice (often ends in ‘ed’)
  10. Relax about it. No matter how many times you edit, someone will disagree with your choices

I hope some of these prove helpful. Please share the tips and tricks you have found work for you.

Writing process – the first edits

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There are a few different notions floating around about how to edit a story. Rachel Aaron talks about an arc for each chapter, an arc for a book, and another arc over a series. I agree with her about having a structure, however, I like to be a bit more organic and varied about it so far. I have a rise and fall in each section. When I reach one of what feels like a natural stopping place, I go back and see if I can make the tension a little tighter, and the resolution a bit more satisfying, even if it is just a section.

However, Jim Butcher also gave some great advice in his blog. He talked about scene and setting. One of his examples was the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes back. His argument was that the whole movie was setting, culminating in the one scene “Luke, I am your father.” That was the payoff. Jim follows that structure in the Harry Dresden novels and the Alera ones too. It works for him, and I’ve learned a bunch from playing with the model of scene and setting or vice versa.

Another idea I’ve run across is one that I like a lot. I think it was Janeke who suggested making a pass through a story for each of the characters, to make sure they sound and act like themselves, with consistency. This is something I always do now. Wouldn’t do for one of the characters to be ‘out of character’ as it were. I’ve extended this to the places as well. Another thing that a beta reader suggested was to have a certain atmosphere associated with a character. Edward, a shape shifted dragon, is new to his human body and is just a bit clumsy in it. He is, however, a dangerous and ancient being who is larger than the human form he is currently inhabiting. Adding some grace notes like shadows to the room that give a hint of his gravitas are the equivalent of the music that accompanies Darth Vader (dum dum dum da da dum …) when he is on screen.

The same goes for the sounds, sights and other sensory information. It is those things that ground the experience we are writing about. If you are like me, those things come in to add depth to the world and the experiences. In the first draft the sketch goes down, telling the story and moving the plot along. In the second pass I want to know what color that robe is and how it is decorated. I want some light and shadow in the room and the fragrance in the air or at least a description of the food on the plate. Cooking is magic too, a person needs to eat, and magical beings are embodied in the world. I find that years after I read a book for the first time, it is the small embellishments that I remember. Captain Picard likes Earl Grey tea. Modesty Blaise preferred a one-piece swimsuit and a kongo as a weapon. Willie Garvin was all about the knives, but James Bond preferred a Berretta. I like to ask myself for at least one defining characteristic for each minor character, and more for the mainline characters, including turns of phrase and patterns in their speech.

I make an editing pass for each of the main characters, another for the sensory elements, and a pass for consistency. Then I ask “how could this be more interesting to the reader?” to tease out things I know but may have forgotten to say explicitly in the story. I am always learning more about the writing and trying to make each story better than the last.

I wonder what editing tips and tricks others have to share from their experiences?

Norman’s pool – a magical place

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normansPoolOne of the sites visited by our protagonist Mira Abrose Argent in Library of Time was Norman’s Pool at the Norman Lindsay Gallery. It is an amazing place all on its own and I wanted to share a little more about the location. It is the former home of artist Norman Lindsay, a multi-talented Australian artist.

When I lived in Sydney, I visited the gallery every couple of years. It is one of those places that rekindles a sense of wonder and child-like enjoyment. Norman’s talent ran all the way from illustrating children’s books, writing novels, model ship building, painting in oil and watercolor, sculpting and sketching. His lithographs are multi-layered exemplars of the art. His work was one of the reasons I studied print-making in art school; I wanted to experiment with the techniques he pioneered. It ought to be noted that it was his wife, Rose Lindsay, who did most of the print runs. She was pretty amazing as a person, a model and an artist.

th3DG401AVHowever, it is the grounds of the place that are the most evocative to the would-be artist. Life-sized statues of nymphs, fauns and satyrs romp through the grounds, sculpted hastily from chicken wire and concrete that seems to linger on beyond their ephemeral materials; their sly smiles and sidewise glances provoke smiles from the visitors to the gallery. It is clear that the spirits that the artist saw animating nature did not remain elusive to his maker’s hands.

An Artist is a kind of magician I’ve always thought, making something from nothing and giving the viewer a sense of connection with what the artist sees of the numinous or hidden world of spirit.

Vision and the sight are recurring themes in the current set of novels. What happens if you look too deeply and see too much? How can true sight be a gift and a burden at the same time? Does knowledge equal power, or does it show too clearly the hidden cost of wielding magical power and mundane power in the world. All good food for thought, and Norman Lindsay saw and revealed many hypocritical attitudes in the early half of the twentieth century. His clear vision got him into a different kind of trouble than my characters experience, however, it was fun to add the place to the story. It stars as a meeting place where almost anyone or any otherworldly being might just drop by for a visit.

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I remember the place fondly for the art, the statues, and for the half-glimpsed view of the world of the artist who lived there. It is a place that has inspired more than one artist and author over the years and I am pleased count myself among them.

If you caught the film ‘Sirens’ a while back, that is set in the same location. It stars Ella McPherson, Hugh Grant and Sam Neil. It may not be a spectacularly good bio-pic but it does the grounds and the mores of the time justice. A fun romp of a movie, it is quite naughty in juxtaposing the bohemian ways of the artist and the models with the more straight-laced morals of the preacher who thinks himself rather ‘modern’ in his views. It is a quirky send-up, though fairly gentle in its humor. I found it charming.

As a place, Norman’s pool is now empty of water for most of the year; you’ll have to imagine what it would have been like with water lilies. In the hot Australian summer, it would have been a favorite place to get some relief from the heat. The surrounding bush is beautiful, resinous and fragrant with Eucalyptus. The surrounding walks are private and a little wild and the calls of the birds could be the laughter of women or dryads calling from the bush. Quite a magical place, and a great day-trip from Sydney. I recommend it highly.