The Editing Process

            I haven’t had a blog about my writing recently, so I thought I ought to change that. Since I finished writing my latest book last week (throw confetti!), I thought it would be appropriate to share what happens next.

            While I budget myself a year to write each of my books, that clock stops ticking when I write the last word of the book (usually with a couple months to spare). The process, however, does not stop there. That is when the editing starts.

            First, naturally, I read through the book myself, fixing all the typos I can find, smoothing out awkward sentences and such. Sometimes I need to rewrite sections that aren't good enough and occasionally there’s a minor plot hole to fix (for a while, in my second book, there was an object in two places at once). Once that’s done, I hand the book off to my wife, Colleen.

            Now, Colleen has a very special job while editing. Not only does she have to watch for the same flaws I did, but she also needs to fill in a few... blanks that I left for her. Blanks that tend to look like [INSERT DESCRIPTION], [DESCRIBE PRETTY SUNRISE] or [DESCRIBE DAY AT FAIR]. Plus she has to report back to me on her thoughts on the book (incidentally, two chapters into the latest one she has emphatically declared that this is my best book yet. Be excited).

            Then the book comes back to me to go through once again. I read the whole book again, making the same edits as before and making Colleen’s suggested changes, as well as editing her new parts (sometimes – although rarely – I send some back to her to be rewritten with, usually with specific requests). Oh, and I get to read her delightful comments, particularly on some of the references I made.

            Once I'm done that edit, the book goes off to my parents. I know this might seem cheesy to some people, but my parents (along with being awesome) are very talented and, while most parents will shower their children’s work with praise, mine have always been fantastic at providing wonderful feedback.

            My dad has done a fair amount of writing himself, and – back when he had more free time – he used to tell his great stories at schools and events. He is also a library technician and he reads a lot. Like me, he is the type of person who analyses a book while he’s reading it, picking up on the foreshadowing and guessing what’s going to happen next. He’s my best source of feedback on the book’s overall content. He’s stopped bothering with doing technical edits because my mom will catch all of those.

            My mom is one of those (despicable) people who are amazing at everything they do. She knows her grammar exceptionally well and, if she’s not sure on something, she takes the time to look it up. She also reads at a snail’s pace, making her an ideal line editor. By the time she’s done reading my book, I'm confident that there are next to no technical errors remaining. It’s definitely worth waiting the six (or more) months it takes her to read the whole book.

            With my feedback from my parents, I go through the book again, making even more changes. Then, it’s time to get down to business. I sit down with Colleen and we go through the book together, making it as perfect as we can. This is where the greatest conflicts in our marriage come from – we once spent over an hour arguing over the wording of a sentence. It was great.

            At long last, the book gets declared done and I get to work on getting it published, which will involve even more editing.

            Blogs, on the other hand, are much simpler. I usually skim through them once after writing them, then don’t bother with any editing until someone sends me a text of Facebook message to let me know I've got a bunch of typos. Thanks, editing types! All literature would be a lot messier without an outside eye to whip thins into shape.

            (P.S. I'm taking the liberty of not reading a single word I wrote in this blog. How did I do?)

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Spider Assassins Want Me Dead

            The first spider that tried to kill me did so when I was around eight years old. I was about to leave the bathroom when I saw this large spider sitting on the doorframe. I quickly opened the door and found myself leaping back and screaming like a little girl (I can honestly say that it was the only time in my life when I’ve really screamed. I also dislike the term “scream like a little girl”, but it is really the only apt description). The diabolical spider had stung a thread across the door so that it would go flying straight at my unsuspecting face when the door was opened!

            Well, it didn’t get me and I recovered from the trauma. I was okay for about a week until I pulled a Kleenex out of a box and a different spider came out with it, lunging at me! It was at that point that I knew that the spiders had it in for me. The more I watched, the more I became convinced that my parents’ house had a division of specially trained, licensed to kill, secret agent spiders.

            I even considered writing a book about them. From the perspective of the spider agents, of course – a series of short stories about each spider’s attempt to kill a targeted human, all ending abruptly as the human’s protector (my mom) put an end to their attempts.

            I must say, though, that I have to admire the spiders for their skills. Why, this one spider was running along the top of a doorframe when, out of the blue, it fastened a web, dropped down into the doorway and let its weight and momentum carry it back up to the doorframe where it continued running as if nothing had happened.

            Incidentally, that ninja spider would have landed right on my head had I not noticed it and stopped walking through the door.

            What’s that? You’re a bit skeptical about all these spiders trying to kill me? Well, let me tell you... When I wasn’t living at my parents’ house, there were no spider problems. My wife and I even had a gigantic spider (we named it Peter) living outside our window and it never troubled us. Now that we’re back at my parents’ house, there have been a number of weak attempts – that is, weak compared to this really good one.

            This spider was very clever (past tense because my wife recently managed to dispatch it). It made its home between our mattress and the box-spring – the two piece box-spring. If we lifted the mattress to get it, it could just scurry down the crack and be lost before we could get at it.

            For months it lived there, coming out only at night to feed on me – or, perhaps to inject me with venom that would kill me once it reached a great enough concentration. I’m glad it was slain when it was, otherwise who knows what could have happened. I might have dropped dead at any moment and nev

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Colleen on Food

Today's blog is brought to you by my wife and co-author Colleen regarding one of her favourite subjects: Food.

I've always enjoyed cooking. But even longer than that I've enjoyed eating. At some point I discovered that food wasn't just a phenomenon that occurred when mom was around; I had control! Once that transition happened there was no looking back. I started with Mr. Noodles and then the rest is a blur until the present day. I take on any cooking challenge and I defeat most foods that I come across. The majority of the time when I fail in the kitchen it's because I went free-form, sans recipe or the recipe I did use was faulty. As egotistical as that sounds I swear it's the honest truth.

Cooking always seemed to come naturally to me. At age ten I broached the subject of home made bread with my mother. Time and again she had attempted this feat and her efforts had always turned out “smelling of beer” she told me and as a result she was fearful of teaching her young daughter. We tried anyway and my mother was astonished at the result. Not only was the braided loaf pretty as a picture but there was not a whiff of beer to be smelled. I try to tackle every culinary challenge with the same fearlessness I had at ten.

Cooking will never be a chore for me. Each aspect of it is a delight. I wish I could wave a magic wand and infuse other people with this love I have because I know too many of us dread entering a kitchen. Of course when you've been obligated to perform this traditionally “womanly” task since age fourteen, it's a little hard to find the fun in it after sixty odd years.

I also adore giving back to the people I love. I regularly baked brownies for my amateur theatre group, cookies for my live action role play group, innumerable meals for my family, casseroles for ailing relatives. My knee-jerk reaction to any situation is food. A few years ago I heard that my husband's grandmother had fallen and broken a hip. Instantly I asked “Should I cook something for grandpa?” And nothing makes friends faster than hearing “These cookies are great! Who made them?” One Christmas I decided to give an uncle the twelve days of cookies. I ended up wrapping a box weighing over thirteen pounds, of just cookies. The joy of eating is very seriously rivalled by the joy of giving and sharing a meal.

My husband has told me several times that what I cook is the best of its kind he's ever had or that he doesn't normally like whatever it is but when I make it he can't stop eating it. He once told me that my deep-fried “potato thingies” (a mashed potato French fry based on a Julia Child recipe) were the single most delicious thing he'd ever eaten. He's also accused me of trying to fatten him up with all my cooking. Feeding him is the greatest pleasure I have in an activity I already deeply adore.

I manage to infuse almost every aspect of my life with food. One of my duties as Jonathan's co-author is to assist in the descriptions of his writing. When he draws a blank he will leave [DESCRIPTION HERE] in the manuscript and I will add my imagination in the form of clothing, hair colour, fireworks displays, meadows of flowers and even a chocolate chip cookie. One chapter in his first book found the main character trying chocolate for the first time courtesy of a cook, who I was given free reign to do with as I pleased. Of course, there is no better way to introduce anyone to chocolate than with this time-honoured treat. I went to town describing how a freshly baked, warm, chewy, sweet chocolate chip cookie feels, tastes and smells. After that, the minor cook character earned a larger role in the book.

I hope to someday publish a cookbook and share my first love with the world at large, but for now I have the joy of keeping a relatively small corner of the globe happy and well fed.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

 

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Character Developments

            In my opinion, the most important part of a book is its characters. It doesn't matter how good the story is; if the characters are too flat, too perfect or too unbelievable, no one will want to read it. Consequently, a lot of work needs to go into creating a character.

            Every time I introduce a new character (at least, one I feel is important enough to name), I pause in my writing to come up with some background information for them. Sometimes it’s just a few sentences describing what they look like and how they act, often I add in a bit of history to explain their personality and where they came from and, every so often, I go into great detail about their history – sometimes tying their ancestry into the history I've written or even panning a book surrounding them. Then I go back to my book and continue writing.

            This is where it gets complicated and even a little weird. You see, that first little bit of writing was just the start of the character. They are then born in my mind and developed further and further as they are written. In fact, it gets to a point where they take on a life of their own. They seem to gain the ability to think for themselves and, as their writer, I feel like I become a tool for telling their stories. I can’t count the times that my characters have surprised me with things they've said or done! Or the times they've done things I specifically wanted them not to (probably just to spite me).

            Needless to say, because of how lifelike characters can become, authors can get very attached to them. It’s a bit like raising children, really. You want what’s best for them and want to teach them not to make all the mistakes you know they’re going to, but you know you need to let them go ahead with it so they’ll learn. It becomes hard, sometimes, to put them through all the trials and torments that make a good story, but it has to be done because otherwise there’s no story to be told.

            The worst thing is when you have to kill off a character. It is extremely difficult to do, but often a necessity. Even a minor character has to have enough effort put into them that their death will have meaning to the readers, which means the author has to have a deep connection with them. The result is feeling like you've just killed a good friend.

            Personally, I find it fascinating that a fictional character – a figment of my imagination! – can become so incredibly real. It’s almost as if sections of my brain take on the role of these characters, telling me how they’d act and why. That’s the only explanation I can find for how this phenomenon occurs. Either that or I'm just crazy. Then again, I've heard so many other authors say the same thing that I can’t be that crazy.

            If nothing else, learning about this has made me rethink how mad I used to get at authors for killing off characters I liked. I realize now that those characters were just living out their own lives and their deaths probably were harder for their authors than for me. Unless, of course, those authors were sadistic psychopaths....

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

 

Descriptions

            Descriptions are something that I've always struggled with. As you can imagine, this makes my job as a writer rather difficult.

            At some point in my life, I stopped viewing things based on how they looked and saw them for what they were (this is hard to explain... when you look at a tree, you can see bark, leaves, branches, ect. - all the things that make up a tree, or you can see it as a tree - an entity made up of many parts, seen or unseen. This is very abstract thinking, I know). I think this was also around the time I stopped drawing – I had discovered that there was just too much detail in the world around me and there was no way I could capture it on paper. This managed to sneak into my writing as well. I can write that her hair is red, but if I try to describe the exact shade of red the description ends up far too long and takes away from the story.

            It’s no big surprise that my writing style took a turn away from descriptions. I like to let the reader’s imagination do most of the work – after all, that’s where books will always be superior to movies and video games. My writing evolved to a point where I felt it was pretty much seamless, but I always worried about if there was enough description. As the author, I can’t really tell – though I must say that when I do discover a place I want to add a description in, I can never manage it without breaking the flow of the story.

            Another big problem with descriptions is racism. I pride myself in not being racist – I don’t pay any attention to stereotypes and I very firmly believe that all people are people, regardless of what they look like. The problem is that I'm so anti-racist that one day I discovered that I’d gone right through and out the other side of racism. When I described people, I couldn't comment on the colour of their skin because to do so would be racist. Then one day it suddenly hit me that this was another form of racism – to ignore the colour of someone’s skin because there’s no politically correct way of commenting on it is to ignore part of who that person is. It was terrifying to me that I’d worked so hard to not be racist only to become racist in a way I hadn't anticipated. I'm still working my way through editing skin colour back into my vocabulary and, let me tell you, it’s very hard to take the taboo off words you've avoided all your life.

            In fantasy worlds, racism is something of a given. This was something else that came as a shock to me when I noticed it. If you pick up a fantasy book and start reading it, you find humans, elves and dwarves, all of whom have their own racial traits and most of whom are inherently good. Then you read about goblins, trolls and giants. Immediately, you assume they are evil and, let’s face it, you’re right. This is something built into our reading experiences and we simply accept them without even seeing the blatant racism right before our eyes.

            I first tried to change that when I was twelve. My protagonist found himself in a very friendly village where anyone of any race could live in peace. One of the cooks for the community was an orc. I must admit that the poor guy had a hard time fitting in (he kept putting bugs in the food to add flavour , but he was making an effort at least. Ever since then, I have always believed that there was some good in every race and, while some are predominantly evil, it is because of their upbringing, not what they were born as.

            In spite of all my troubles with descriptions, I've persevered and made three very important discoveries. The first is that less is more; all I need to do is sketch out an idea and let the reader’s imagination do the rest – it makes my books far better to read than if I described every detail. Second, the more I describe, the better I get at it, so giving up is out of the question. And finally, I don’t need to write descriptions at all; I can make Colleen do it for me.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.