Seems like I’m being bundled off to California after all (sadly for nothing remotely related to books and writing). This week hasn’t been particularly productive so far, so I’m hoping for better in the small hours of the morning in a quiet hotel in the middle of nowhere LA outskirts.

First ever royalty cheque metaphorically arrived this morning. Much celebrating (family trip to Costas for toasted cheese and ham sandwiches and coffee. Truly I am the king of partying).

First there was fantasycon, and then there was the copy-editing of The Adamantine Palace and then there was editing lots of family trees and then the Gollancz annual party and a whole gang of new faces that I have to remember and then more King of the Crags (75k words and buzzing along nicely now). The day-job is getting crazy (maybe having to go to California for a few days, maybe not, who knows, job’s on the brink of being finished and stuff keeps breaking…), everyone’s been ill but now we’re all better and I’m still almost a non-smoker (4 weeks now).

Eesh. I want a holiday. A proper, quiet, do-nothing-all-day-between-a-lake-and-a-mountain-holiday…

The first bound proofs arrived in the post this morning. As did the following from one of the Gollancz publicity team. Now, they might not be exactly impartial, but this is the first time anyone who didn’t have anything to do with creating The Adamantine Palace has written to me about it, so I’m just going to pretend that they’re impartial and revel in it.

“…I’m not usually someone to heap praise on a book I’ve not finished yet, but I just had to write and let you know that I took Adamantine Palace home last night and promptly missed my tube stop, I was so gripped. I’m around 150 pages into it (I was even late for a friend’s birthday as I lost track of time)  and I already know that I’m reading my favourite fantasy novel in quite a long time… I’m absolutely gripped – the characters are fantastic, the backstage political machinations utterly gripping and not too complex or heavy to follow and the dragons! With the most sparse of descriptions, you’ve brought these things to life… Their size, their power, their majesty – I can see these things living and breathing (fire) and they’re awesome.

As I said, I’m only 150 or so pages in but you’ve got me. You’ve got me really good.”

Apologies to anyone who has/had to have some sort of social interaction with me with me for the next few days – I’ll try to keep the big happy grin under control…

I was kind of hoping that rewriting King of the Crags from the start, given the revised ending to The Adamantine Palace, would cause the circumstances of two rather important characters ending up in a room together with a crossbow and a heady portion of murderous intent to go away. Sadly, the character who contrived for this to happen has still managed to do so.

Bloody pesky meddling characters.

Crags has reached about 65000 words.

The first cut of a cover for The Adamantine Palace has arrived. I would post it up, but apparently it’s corrupted in such a way that only Windows Photo Gallery can open it. Go figure. Eventually, when I work it out, I’ll put it up here. OK, OK, now I know the difference between cmyk and rgb. Or rather, I know there is a difference. So here it is. I hope…

King of the Crags is about half done. Give or take. OK, will definitely be half done by the end of FantasyCon.

I am absurdly over-excited. I’ve had my first request for an interview!*

*By a non-family member, that is…

I have now seen the copy for the early bound copies of The Adamantine Palace. Wow. Makes me want to go and read it all over again. Naturally I have proposed some changes (revenge, ha-haa), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many high-intensity words strung together anywhere else except… except in the blurb on the back of books…

In other news, copy-editing is due to finish in the second half of September, King of the Crags has recovered to about 45k words with about another 10k that can still be re-used from the first attempt (unfortunately all work on Order of the Scales, which amounted to about another 10k words will have to be permanently binned following the changes to The Adamantine Palace. Ho hum) and I’m still dithering about whether to attend Fantasycon this year.

And number one son’s obsession with Star Wars now means he’s learning to play the piano so he can play the Imperial March on the piano. He’s five, and when he grows up, he doesn’t want to be a train driver or a fireman, he wants to be a Jedi.

So do I. Still. Damn.

Well that’s it. Everything Simon has asked for, I have done (I think). I’ve been over all the changes and back again and TAP is better for it. And probably better for the changed ending (which is certainly going to make writing King of the Crags a bit easier).

All I have to do is press the send button and it’s done. I imagine this is what it will feel like when the first of my children finally leaves home. It’s a mixture of being really pleased and proud to see it go, and being desperately apprehensive that it’s going to get the shit kicked out of it and some running home again in floods of tears. It’s true that there’s still copy-editing and proof-editing to go, but this the point at which I feel like I’m saying: ‘This is it. This is the best I can do.’ Which I suppose I am. Eeep.

Next to all that, junking the c. 70000 words of King of the Crags I’d already done and starting all over again seems like trivia.

Fare well, little manuscript…

Rumour has it that The Adamantine Palace will now be published in March next year, not June/July. Amazon certainly seem to think so…

After a long chat with Simon (Spanton, editor for The Adamantine Palace), it has become clear that the ending had to change. Now I have to admit, the ending I wrote wasn’t the ending I was aiming for, nor the ending I was expecting. It has caused me some considerable difficulty in a couple of ways that I won’t go into right now for fear of dropping an immense spoiler. So maybe that’s why I didn’t put up much of a defence. The fact that the two other people to read the book both firmly thought I’d done the wrong thing, while I didn’t have much conviction either way had a lot to do with it too. The trouble is, how can I ever know who was right? Books don’t have multiple versions and ‘author’s cuts’ (in general).

That was yesterday. Today I wrote a new ending while I was suppose to be watching number one son play tennis. Now I just need to find the courage to let anyone have a look at it…

Simon has finally sent me through all his comments on the first draft of The Adamantine Palace and it seems like we’re still on the same sort of wavelength. Nothing that requires any major rework by the looks of it. Work on King of the Crags is now suspended for the summer, to be resumed in September (probably).

First Reader is immensely smug. The first thing Simon’s notes say are: ‘My most serious quibble is with the end…’

Damn. Out-voted.

The first book I ever wrote (alright, let’s say the first book that I ever finished writing) was supposed to be a prequel to another book that I really wanted to write. Now the rather obvious thing about a prequel is that any characters that are supposed to appear in subsequent stories are obliged to look after themselves. They might go through some torrid times, suffer the odd unexpected mutilation or disfiguring scar and the like, but, fundamentally, when the reader closes the book at the end, they have to be still alive. On the whole, this is quite important. Unless you’re writing about the undead, or some sort of eternal embodiment of good, evil, carrots, etc. Or they might be wizards with clever arcane ways of not being dead after all.

Or maybe it was a vision, or a dream, or maybe they time-travel from the past to appear in future installments before travelling back again in order to be snuffed out at the appropriate point… OK, OK, there are quite a lot of ways of getting around a character being dead. That’s not the point.

The point is that my leading protagonist wasn’t undead or a wizard or a time-traveller or the eternal avatar of some sort of root vegetable. He was an ordinary sword-slinging Joe. He was supposed to stay alive and play an important part in events to come, and he didn’t. This wasn’t some sort of accident, either. He set out to die with deliberate intent. When he left on his quest in chapter five or six or whenever it was, he already knew he wasn’t coming back. And he didn’t.

Non-writers boggle at this. How, they wonder, can a character possibly die when that’s not the author wants? How can they take on a life of their own to such an extent that the omnipotent creator of their world is no longer in control of their destiny? The trivial answer, obviously, is that they can’t, that said omnipotent creator can write whatever ending they damn well feel like. But it doesn’t work like that. Characters have to act with an internal consistency that drives them onwards and forces their path. Their choices are made for them, not by the author, but by their own beliefs and drives. The path of a tragic character, in hindsight, should seem almost inevitable, or perhaps swing on one decision, apparently of little consequence, early in the story. That’s how it works for me, at least. That’s what I like in what others write, and so that’s what I aim to follow. My character set off on his path, reached the end, duly died, and that story was much the better for it. The sequel never happened.

Why am I posting this? Because I’m about a third of the way through the King of the Crags, I’ve just stuck two characters in a room together, and had a very unexpected result. And this time, not writing a sequel will make my editor extremely tetchy.

It seems I have a bit of thinking to do…

Just got my copy of New Horizons through the post (a new publication of the British Fantasy Society), which has my story, The Snow Fox at the end of it. So I am now, officially, for the first time, published! It’s a nice feeling.

This is about how I write. Or rather where. In the before-time, when The Adamantine Palace was a twinkle in someone else’s eye, I had some definite aspirations in that direction. I would have a proper desk instead of a glorified shelf. I’d have a comfy chair instead of some amputated space-hopper Swiss-Ball thing. I’d have a nice keyboard, and a monitor that worked and didn’t randomly switch off and refuse to work for days at a time until I took all the screws out of the laptop case, did absolutely nothing else at all and then put them back again (with one unaccountably left over, of course). Nothing special, just the simple earthy dreams of a lowly writer.

So when the first advance cheque arrived, I bought myself a little treat. Dreams of writing via thought-transference while sitting in a levitating ergo-pod at a desk the size of Mars would have to wait until at least book two or three, but I could at least get myself a laptop which didn’t have keys missing and a monitor that was sensitive to the phases of the moon.

Easy. Job done. Hurrah! My so-called desk would still only fit a ham sandwich or a cup of coffee but not both at the same time, and I’d still be forced to sit with perfect spinal posture whether I like it or not (except when I fall off), but now there would be nothing standing between me and a good dose of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Except…

Except I went wireless at the same time. See, I thought that being able to send and receive e-mails from my little shelf, instead of having to do it from the Big PC That’s Only Really There For E-Mails And Playing Crysis, would be useful. I thought it would save time. It was an honest mistake, it really was…

Do I get to use my little laptop? Ha! Do I have to queue? Oh yes. Do I have to sit and watch other people ‘update their profile’ and ‘just check their e-mail’? Oh yes. Do I pine for the good old days where all I had to do was get out the screw-driver and I’d be back in business is a mere couple of hours? Oh yes, yes, YES! Was I given an earful of abuse (I quote: ‘I only need it for five minutes.’) and practically kicked off-line even when I was writing this. Sad but true.

Friends, think before you WLink.

It amazes me how many mistakes the first draft of a book can carry. Proof-reading a first draft is humbling. Yes, I’ve abused apostrophes, yes I’ve had ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’. I’ve forgotten words that are necessary to make a proper sentence and then wondered what on earth it was supposed to mean in the first place. I’ve even managed to adopt two alternate spellings for the name of a major character. Twice.

This sort of lackadaisical carelessness leads to the inevitable necessity of the proof-reading ones own work. Thankfully that’s in the past for now. As of today, the first ‘official’ draft of The Adamantine Palace is on its way to my editor, and I’m already busy writing a whole new set of stupid mistakes for King of the Crags, which at last has a chapter one that’s going to stick.

So, thank F**K that’s over. I hate proof-reading, which probably makes me exactly like almost every other author (I’ve yet to hear of an author saying ‘you know what, absolutely the best bit is going back after that first draft and pulling out all the typos. That’s where the real kick is’). It goes something like this…

It starts like a long holiday to somewhere exotic might start. You get an idea that you might like to go somewhere. You have a look at the travel guides and figure out the places you want to go (this becomes The Plot). If you’re me, after half an hour, you’ve figured out the essential stops, the must-visit monuments and so forth and you’re already booking tickets on the next flight to Mongolia, on the assumption that everything else will somehow fall into place. (Others may be more meticulous in their plans. When it comes to holidays to Mongolia, I’m not the man to plan). Then there’s the actual holiday itself. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to visit all the places you planned and plenty that you didn’t, and the whole experience will be that much richer for all the little adventures you didn’t expect, all the people and places that weren’t in the guidebook. Hurrah!

If you’re inclined, you can even relive the experience. For most people, this means remembering all the cool stuff, dwelling on the highlights, lingering on the bits that made your skin tingle with excitement and awe. The proof-reader, though, has a slightly different job. The proof-reader is the little critic, the nit-picker, the person whose job it is to winkle out every little defect. The proof-reader’s narration of a holiday goes like this:

“Right. First picture. That’s the airport carpark. In the distance. What I’m really drawing attention to is the queue, because that was really far too long. And look at the state of the pay-machines. Manky as shit. Now then, second picture. The airport lounge. Bear with me, because there’s quite a bit going wrong here…” There isn’t even much of a pay-off. “Right. This is the road out to the Most Fantastic Place In The World. It needs some work. Here and here. Pot-holes, see. Minibus. Here’s a picture of the broken air-conditioner. Eventually we got there. Yeah. The Most Fantastic Place In the World. Spent a week there. Killer. Recommend it. Didn’t get any pictures though, but here are those potholes on the road again, on the way back this time. See how they’re already worse than on the way out.”

Proof-reading sucks. Proof-reading deliberately and wilfully bypasses all the wonder and all the magic. Proof-reading requires no creativity of imagination, what it requires is a fierce concentration and a slavish attention to detail. Proof-reading is joyless. I hate it.

Naturally, with these thoughts in my head, the world of software sprang to mind. According to NASA: “One industry guideline is to expect approximately 7 errors per 1000 Source Lines of Code (SLOC). This estimate is helpful in an overall estimate of the number of errors…” I think I found about 3000 errors in 110000 words (i.e. about 20000 Source Lines of Prose (SLOP) as I propose to call them). This leads, clearly and umambiguously, to the following conclusions:
- NASA will not be employing me to write novels
- No wonder my software never compiles

I should point out, I suppose, that I don’t meant to denigrate the job of the proof-reader. We all have our inner proof-reader, and those who have dedicated their lives to exercising theirs so that the rest of us don’t have to deserve nothing but praise. These are probably the people who, in desperate counter-balance to their day-jobs, are the most electric people in town.

I promised myself I would write the first few chapters of the second dragon book before I went back and fiddled with the first. There were lots of good reasons for this. Lots and lots.

And now I have lots and lots of first chapters. And they’re not working. Every few days, it’s off to the toilet with the laptop, give it a *good* shake over the bowl, watch all the bad words tumble out of the USB ports and the *flush* them away. And then, like bad rash, they come back again.

First chapters suck.

(names changed to protect the not-so-innocent)

Scene: Author and First Reader are sitting in the lounge. Author has finally consented to evening of Chinese Takeway after being slowly bludgeoned into submission with the words ‘Crispy Chilli Beef’ for pretty much all of April. This is supposed to be a big treat for First Reader. Author is anticipating a restless night of Monosodium Glutamate-fuelled dreams. (LSD, pah! When you’re ready, try the hard stuff mate), followed by the inevitable grogginess of post-MSG hangover.

First Reader: When are you going to e-mail Editor?

Author: When it’s *finished* finished.

First Reader: No, really, when are you going to e-mail Editor?

Author (who has clear stumbled blindly into an Incorrect Answer situation): I dunno. Middle of May. Maybe.

First Reader: How about the week after next?

Author (playing trump card): Ah-HA! Isn’t that the London Book Fair? I’m sure Editor will be far too busy. (smug smug smug)

First Reader (revealing bigger trump card with the bored ease of one who *always* has the ace): No, that’s *next* week.

Author (floundering): Well what’s the point? I’m about to stop writing first chapters for <the next book> and start reworking <the current book>. I’ll send it when it’s done. Editor isn’t expecting it for a while, and is probably quite busy you know.

First Reader: Well what about the ending?

Author: You mean the ending that’s mine and that I like and think is right and rather shocking and unexpected and have no intention of changing? You mean that ending?

First Reader: Yes

Author: …

First Reader: I’m not sure I like it.

Author (manfully resisting urge to embed laptop into First Reader) …

First Reader: What if Editor doesn’t like it?

Author: …

First Reader: So why don’t you e-mail Editor?

[Author descends into a lengthy dissertation on the pros and cons of this course of action, pausing to consider all possible responses, likely impacts etc. etc. and only barely manages to avoid using prawn crackers and sweet-and-sour sauce to assemble risk-benefit charts across the table]

Author: Well. I suppose. On balance.

First Reader: What?

Author: What?

First Reader: Oh, I got bored and stopped listening five minutes ago. If you don’t want to, then don’t.

Author: Pardon?

First Reader (waiting until the precise moment that Author consumes last mouthful of MSG-saturated lemon-cardboard-and-string Peking style chicken, then pushing largely untouched plate away): I don’t know what’s happened to this takeaway, but this is crap. I don’t know why you’re eating it. [Scene ends as First Reader exits to deposit takeaway menu in the recycle bin. Author has acquired several strange ticks and twitches.]

Editor, please, for the sake of my sanity and a little peace and quiet, please telegram the following at the earliest opportunity: Good to know you’re making progress STOP Very busy publishing *other* books now STOP Will read when *finished* finished STOP Good luck!

Or something like that.

Regards,

Author

I guess it counts as news of a sort, so here’s a post announcing the redevelopment of the Stephen Deas website! It’s the first in the News category, by the way. We can always remove or edit it later; it’s just being a placeholder for now.

I remember the first time I wrote the last word of a novel. It was wonderful. Each one since has been special too, but none of them are as good as the first. These days, I can see them coming, I know they’re going to come, and by the time they arrive, I know they’re going to be fine, and my thoughts are already moving on to the seventeen extra characters and three new religions I’ve introduced in the last chapter in order to force the ending I want, and how to integrate them back into the rest of the story without just throwing it away and starting from scratch.

Still, it’s done and it’s on time, and with a bit of polishing and some hundreds-and-thousands sprinked on top, it might even be rather good.

Correct as of 19th June 2015. I will periodically update this for major changes.
Historical Fiction as S J Deas (William Falkland)

William Falkland has spent six years fighting for the king. It’s four years since he last saw his family, and all he wants to do is go home; [...]