The year of the Yang Water Dragon is upon us. Dragon years are lucky years to be born, to be married, to be, well, anything. Fingers crossed, it’s a good year to publish books with dragons in. We shall see.

Celebrating the year of the dragon, I’m offering readers of my Memory of Flames series a chance to be a dragon themselves. For the next fifteen days, I’ll take suggestions for names for dragons in the comments section to this post. The name I like best will appear in The Black Mausoleum alongside Blackscar.

Dragons have two names, as anyone who’s read the series will know. They have their “common” given to them by the dragon-riders who fly them – names such as Snow, Ash, Onyx, Unmaker, B’Thannan, Silence, Diamond Eye, Vengeance and so forth. Customs and traditions around naming vary from eyrie to eyrie.

Dragons also have the names that were given to them by the Silver Kings, long ago, names that they have forgotten but remember as the awaken from the alchemy of the eyrie masters. These tend to be names intended to capture a feeling or a sensation: Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost, Crisp Cold Shaft of Winter Sunlight, Black Scar of Sorrow Left Upon the Earth.

I’ll take either. Or even both

So here’s an excerpt of something of a work in progress.  Dragons are noticably lacking, it’s not something my editor has seen yet, and possibly he might never see it, since this is an as-yet-unfinished manuscript. I have quite a lot of those. It feels a bit more heroic than epic, this one, more swords-and-a-little-bit-of-sorcery-but-actually-mostly-axes and was sort of spawned by a visit to last year’s Jorvik festival.

Speaking of axes, the polls for the David Gemmell Legend Award for the best fantasy books of 2011 are now open. And I want an axe. No, really, I do want an axe, so vote for me, damn your eyes, ME! For I think The Order of the Scales really, really deserves it for the best fantasy cover art of 2011

(OK, yes, you’re actually voting for Dominic Harman).

For the best epic/heroic fantasy novel of 2011. And yes, I did mean it about wanting an axe, thanks. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything else of any significance with dragons in on the list…

<sigh>

For the best debut epic/heroic fantasy novel of 2011

Grumpy Jonnic is for someone who indirectly helped with various efforts to burn down Wales years ago. Hello Jon!

Uh, so here we are in 2012 and Santa was kind enough to land a copy of Skyrim on my desk and now I’m quietly watching all my delivery deadlines sail off into the wild blue yonder. Or white and snowy yonder, as the case may be. Ah well.

So what’s up for this year:

February 7th: The Order of the Scales comes out in the US and (I think) in France. The dragons made it to a couple of best-of lists again this year – over at the Ranting Dragon and an honourable mention at the bottom of the Wertzone Awards. You read these two pages, you realise what a lot of great fantasy we had last year.

April: The Warlock’s Shadow comes out in small form. I feel kind of sorry for the thief-taker and his boy – they haven’t taken off quite like the dragons did, but I love them just the same. The third book, The King’s Assassin,has been delivered but there won’t be any more in this series, not directly. However, as the Enormous Crocodile would say, I have secret plans and clever tricks…

May: Not sure of the dates, exactly, but The Black Mausoleum comes out around this time and I’m supposed to be delivering Dragon Queen. Dragon Queen is is going to be a bit different. And a bit bigger. Most of it is set in the world of the Taiytakei, but currently there are parts set in the dragon-realms, a part in Deepwater and some parts in Tethis, the centre of the action in The King’s Assassin. I say currently because it’s still in work, but Skyrim or otherwise, I shall make it my resolutino this year to deliver this one on time. Much more character-focussed than the first three books, this one. I hope.

Summer: Allegedly, all three volumes of the Memory of Flames come out in Germany, one each month. More news on that when I actually know.

The project-about-which-I-shall-not-speak is also supposed to be delivered. That’s more of a self-imposed deadline than anything else. More, er… Skyrim prone, that one. Three Sodium Hydride manuscripts before the summer holidays and I’ll be happy.

It’s also possible that The King’s Assassin will come out in August. Or maybe October. It’s delivered, that’s all I can say for sure so far.

Something might happen in Poland at some point. Chances are I’ll heart about it long after the event. In fact, all sorts of things might happen in the last third of the year. I’m hoping for some rather more exciting (for me at least) news for the back end of the year, but it’s an unceratin world and an uncertain profession, this authoring lark. Appearances at conventions and so forth might be a bit thin on the ground this year due to circumstances beyond my control (and not Skyrim, really really) but I’ll do as much as I can.

Anyway, happy new year, and I raise a glass to all you dragon-lovers! Cheers!

In the spirit of the season, have a present – an excerpty thingy.

Being a seson of not doing much real work, this is one of those times of year when I think about what comes next. So on the cards at the moment, we have:

• Heroic fantasy in which a soldier and a scholar chase a demon across the ruins of a once-great empire.
• Time-travelling teenagers
• Minoan steampunk
• A thirties-noir style fantasy in which wizards are madmen locked up in cages and the dead rise from old battlefields.
• A vaguely sensible attempt at some Martian SF
• Something I can’t even begin to describe but involves a magical parakeet from Belgium who speaks deathless wisdom and can defy time.

I’d say let me know here who you fancy, but it’s the parrot, isn’t it…

Here’s the cover for the last of the three Thief-Taker books. A shady fellow with a hood and a swanky sword skulking around a throne-room at night? Could this be the The King’s Assassin, perchance? I think, at last, it could be. Berren, at last, on the cover of one of his books. I want his boots.

Ladies and gentlemen,

It has come to my attention that there may be some people out there who do actually deserve to be eaten by dragons. It has also come to my attention that I have some spare spear-carrier characters in The Black Mausoleum who do, indeed, suffer this fate, but also last long enough to get names.

Suggestions, are welcomed. I was thinking fictional (your favourite game character, the character that the really annoying guy you knew in school used to play who never got his come-uppance, your GM’s favourite NPC Jones (the one who has the +10 Amulet of Plot Immunity and is always one step ahead of everything). However, given that I’m currently toying with “Sepp” or possibly “Blatter” or possibly both, I suppose others may at least amuse me, so go for it. Sadly “Fred Goodwin” doesn’t really fit as the name for an Adamantine Man. I think I may give him a cartoon soon.

Enjoy.

PS: A couple of recent new reviews for The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice: “skilfully crafted” (Quippe) and “realistic, complex characters, with a realistic, complex relationship and adventures to match” Specusphere

There’s some real blogging over here this week (thought I’d deface someone else’s site for a change).

(Updated 22/11)

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s almost finished. The last read-through of The King’s Assassin is almost finished. The first structural rewrite of Dragon Queen is almost finished. Here’s a tiny tiny spoiler. It’s a story about a queen and her dragon and the dragon-queen is . . .

Ah no. But who would you want it to be?

The edits for The Black Mausoleum are (still) almost finished (definitely by the end of last week, was it? But I’m not ready for them just yet so that’s OK). The samples chapters for Mystery Project U are almost finished. A pitch for a new YA series is almost ready.

With a bit of luck, they’ll all be finished (except the edits) by the end of the week, in which case I might even have a week off and see how far I can raise my blood pressure by playing some more Dark Souls CoD MW3.

After that, back to Sodium Hydride project, and then back to Dragon Queen in the new year.

This is a brief post about how books get written. My books, at least.

Most of the advice I’ve seen about writing a book, at least about the initial writing of a book, goes along the lines of keep writing. When I was writing my first stories (long before The Adamantine Palace), I think I used to agonise over every sentence before moving on to the next one. Now I’m working in collaboration someone else and I’m watching them do the same, it’s bringing all that back. Every. Single. Word.
Think about it.
Maybe change it.
Two
or
three
times
before
moving
on.
And then rewrite the sentence five minutes later.
And the whole paragraph the next day.
And again the next.

It’s very hard, I think, when you haven’t gone through the whole process a half a dozen times, to just keep going even when you know what you’re writing isn’t your best. I’ve seen it written in probably half a dozen different places (and that’s without actually looking for such advice) that this is what a writer should do, but I’ve never seen anyone say why. So here are some whys:

Blockage: “Frank clenched his fists.” Used clenched two sentences ago? Just plain don’t like it? Feel the need for a different word but can’t think of it? Well you can either just stick with “clenched” and change it in the rewrites later or you can sit around banging your head against a Thesaurus until the right word comes along. I think I spent two days entirely stuck over one word once. Two wasted days. And with hindsight, nine times out of ten, what changes in the rewrite isn’t just the word, it’s the whole sentence. Best to keep going.

Acceptance of the rewrite: I used to think that the first draft was basically it, and so it had to be almost perfect. Rewrites are for sorting out the odd clunky sentence that somehow got away, grammatical errors, typos and the like, right? No. The first draft of Dragon Queen (in work at the moment) came in at 145k words. The second draft is going to be around 200k. One point of view has been removed completely, three have been added and two have been greatly expanded. The whole tone of the story has changed. Elements of plot have been removed, elements of character added and the setting has gone from pencil sketches to a full-colour draft. That’s what a rewrite is – or what it can be. True enough, not all of them are like that. Some first drafts come out better than others, but that’s what they can be like. Personally, I expect to do three or four rewrites before I submit to my editor. The odd clunky sentence, the typos? That’s the last of them. Now it might be that you can get a first draft almost exactly right if your painstaking about every sentence, but for me, putting that effort in to the first draft would make it almost impossible to bring myself to make massive revisions such as those I’m making at the moment. I recommend against giving yourself such an impediment. Accept the rewrite as inevitable, and then be pleased if it turns out to be easy.

And last but definitely not least…

The Plot-With-A-Will-Of-Its-Own: So here’s a situation, one I’m in right now with Volume one of Codename Sodium Hydride: you get to the last act, and you realise that there is a much, much better  denouement than the one you originally had in mind when you gave your editor your synopsis. Trouble is that to do it, you need to go back and make some changes. Maybe not big things, but lots of little things. Changing the focus a little. Bringing a couple of background characters out of the shadows a little, pushing someone you thought was going to be a major character out of focus. In essence, the realisation that there is a much better book than the one you set out to write, and it’s really not the different either. Now you can get there by painstakingly writing five hundred perfect words every day or you can get there by slamming down five thousand and using “clenched” in every other sentence, it really doesn’t matter. Both drafts give you the basic shape of your story, and both will let you know at about the same time that there’s a better one just a rewrite away. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which way round is the more frustrating.

The vomit draft: Get it out as fast as you can, and it usually stinks. Embrace the joy of rewrites.

OK, first one to post a link here to an Amazon review of The Warlock’s Shadow gets a T-shirt. Bonus points if you can correctly count the number of typos and errors in the “Product Description” (thanks Amazon).

And….. go!