Magical Words

This isn’t, I’m afraid, going to be much of a post. I’m in the home stretch of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, which has just crested 175K in length (ai!), and which has, oh, somewhere between one and seven thousand words left. I’m hoping it’s around 4K, and then all I’ve got left to do is rewrite the prologue and fix all my NOTES and do a spell check and turn it in.

You would think this would be cause for great celebration. Realistically, it’s cause for an extremely heavy sigh of relief more than delight, and maybe an evening off, and then I have to go directly into doing what Luna calls “author alterations” and most other houses call “galleys” for HANDS OF FLAME, because they were due yesterday and my editor’s assistant managed to get me an extension til Friday, so, yeah, basically no rest for the wicked.

But next week I get to take the week off before starting the fourth Walker Papers novel! Where “take the week off” means “write a short story, and possibly as many as three comic book scripts”. Though if it turns out to be 3 scripts, then I probably won’t start WP #4 until June, and will take *two* weeks “off” to write those other things.

Yes, folks, this is the life of a working writer. Ah, the glamour.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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I don’t typically do my research–hm. I’d better start this again.

I’d been about to say, I don’t typically do my research until after the fact, except that’s wildly untrue. Before I started the Walker Papers, I read every book about shamanism I could get my hands on (and I’m really looking forward to an excuse to buy a few more when I start that series up again in a few weeks! ahahah!). I’ve been an Elizabethan-era buff since I was a little kid, though I’ve got nothing on many of my friends in enthusiasm for the topic. So I do groundwork research before I start, but when I get down to the details…

Well, my manuscripts have a lot of notes in them. Literally: when I’m writing and I can’t, for example, remember what the proper word for the back of a ship is, my manuscript reads, “toward the NOTE: NAME FOR THE BACK OF THE BOAT O.O they went”. Injured a character in a modern-world story? NOTE: LOOK UP HARLEM HOSPITALS. Can’t remember a character’s name? NOTE: FIND OUT HIS NAME AND FOR GOD’S SAKE, CATIE, YOU SHOULD WRITE THIS $#!7 DOWN! I only stop to go find out that it’s called the stern if there’s some reason I can’t continue forward without actually knowing that. There usually isn’t.

I have a friend who–when I’m not working quite as close to the wire as I am now–plays unpaid research assistant. She’ll read my rough drafts and I get emails back full of answers to my NOTES. I’m *desperately* grateful to her for this, and have dreams that someday I’ll be rich enough to make her a paid research assistant. But with my last few books I’ve been tapping into another research resource, which I like to call Livejournal knows all.

It’s amazing what you can ask the internet and get back instantaneous answers on. For HOUSE OF CARDS, I needed, oh, a handful of legal terms that I just didn’t even know enough words about to know where to /start/ looking, much less get the right ones. Turned out there were lawyers and legal aides on my friends list. I needed a high-end fountain pen, the kind that runs to silly expensive. *Lots* of pen buffs on my friends list. I just now needed a couple of translations to Italian and French, and a Latin declamation, and lookit that, one of my friends has a PhD in Latin, which I had no idea until now.

I swear it feels like cheating. I don’t know why (probably because I’m of the last generation to grow up using libraries for research instead of Google, actually, now that I think about it). I mean, it is not in fact cheating to go to people and say, “Hey, you know more than I do about this, can you tell me about it?” That’s precisely what research is. But somehow flinging it out to five hundred people to see if any of them *happen* to know seems like a shortcut somehow.

I *love* it. Usually what I get back is a barrage of information that I sift through and … gosh. Use what’s appropriate. Kind of like real research. Or a barrage that at least gives me the right language to use to find what I /am/ looking for.

So today I’ve been running back and forth from my work computer to my ‘net computer, asking questions and getting answers while I’ve been doing revisions on my manuscript. It’s not the most efficient way to do this–usually I don’t address the NOTES until the very last thing before the spell check–but I’m in the revision stages and have been looking things up anyway, so why not. All part of the process.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Poster’s note: I met Yanni several months ago, online, when she invited me to participate in a Subterranean Press anthology, literally the day after I’d been thinking, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to get a chance to work with SubPress someday?” She’s up next in our ongoing attempts to get a view of other angles of the publishing industry, so without further ado, here’s Yanni! -Catie

–

Hi there and welcome to the show! I’m Yanni Kuznia. In another life I was a Russian historian, professional actress, and stuntwoman. In this life, I’m Director of Production at Subterranean Press. For those of you not familiar with Subterranean, or SubPress as we affectionately call it, we publish lavishly designed, and frequently illustrated, collector’s and trade editions of a wide variety of books, both new and previously published.

I’ll be honest: I’m pretty new to the whole publishing industry. About a year ago, I met Bill Schafer, the owner of SubPress at PenguiCon 5.0 while I was liasing for Guest of Honor Elizabeth Bear. After Bear introduced us, we happened to sit next to each other during a rather dull panel. We snarked a bit, then decided to take it outside. Turns out our senses of humor gelled quite nicely and we lived within shouting distance of each other. Not long after, Bill offered my first professional proofing gig. He called it my audition (he was pandering to my actress nature). If I did well, there would be more proofing jobs in the future. Apparently, I must have done something right as I’ve been at SubPress full-time for something like seven or eight months now. It’s been quite the learning experience for me, with a lot of growing pains and even a few screw-ups.

The question I’m asked most about my job is, obviously enough, what do I actually do? Well, my work starts after the publishing arrangements with the author, agent, and/or original publisher (if applicable) have been made. The computer file for the book is sent to me and from there I must: prepare the file for the designer; approve the initial book design, proof the book (either myself or send it to somebody else), find artwork, choose the materials the book will be printed on, and bound in, and send everything off to be printed. Thus far I’ve taken three books through the entire process and had my sticky fingers in nearly every book we’ve published since last September.

It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been reading since I could understand that the squiggles on pages corresponded to the garbled sounds coming out of our mouths. However, there’s a world of difference between reading for fun or information and reading for mistakes of various kinds, such as–but not limited to–punctuation, syntax, and formatting differences. It’s hard, folks. It’s like reading a contract. Your eyes sometimes start to glaze over. You realize that you’ve read the last three pages without really seeing them, and it’s your head if it goes to print with mistakes in it, so you go back to cover your butt–and the pages. I’ve learned that at some point you realize that you always are worried you missed something and you just need to pull the trigger to get the little bugger to the printer.

And it’s not just about the words on the pages. You have to coordinate what the author wants, the interior designer wants to do, what you want, and what you think the customers want or will appreciate. Sometimes you want to spend more on the design than the book’s price point will allow and have to make that painful decision between artistry and running a business. Because it is a business, and while making the books is artistic and creative, at the end of the day you have to pay the authors and artists and printer and all the other people involved or else what you do won’t matter because it won’t be produced.

In the end it’s really amazing when you get the book in your hot little hands and say, “I did this. I put this book together. People are going to read this!” I realize I’m biased, but SubPress puts out some beautiful books and being able to say I had a part in it is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling things in my life.

Tags: C E Murphy, Special Guest Stars by cemurphy
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Today’s my second book release day of the year.

I have, for the last three years, been publishing contemporary series: two urban fantasy series and one spy novel trilogy. Those series have been first-person (the Walker Papers), tight third-person with two viewpoints (the Negotiator Trilogy), and tight third-person with a single viewpoint (the Strongbox Chronicles). I regard them–particularly the Walker Papers and the Strongbox Chronicles–as being well within my typical writing style, which I consider to be efficient: get in, tell the story, get out. Hopefully leave ‘em wanting more. The Negotiator books linger a little more, with slower builds and more emotional resonance, but I still see them as essentially action-filled novels, no time to rest between one scene and the next.

These books have been doing pretty well; this is a niche I can fit into comfortably, and in which I love to write. There’s … a hell of a lot of conventional wisdom in saying, “Hey, stick with what’s working.”

I think my agent, as well as pretty much anybody else who knows me, would be fairly willing to say that I’m not all that inclined to run with conventional wisdom. In fact, if I was, the Walker Papers would be a book or two longer by now, and the Negotiator Trilogy wouldn’t be out at all, because the Walker Papers were (and are) *working*: people want to know what’s going to happen with Jo. But instead of telling them, I took a chance on the opportunity to tell a different kind of urban fantasy story with a new lead character and a whole different world. I did, though, stay in the UF sub-genre.

THE QUEEN’S BASTARD is my first foray outside the contemporary era, and my first fantasy novel that’s not urban fantasy. And it’s emphatically not: it’s set in an alternate Reformation-era Europe, and though told primarily from Belinda (the titular queen’s bastard)’s point of view, it has … five, I think, other viewpoint characters. At least five. It’s a completely different, lusher writing style for me, and the pacing of the book is unlike anything I’ve ever written. I love it.

And I’m both excited and nervous as hell. I think it’s a good book. I think, in fact, it’s the best thing I’ve had published so far. There are parts of it that make me want to fling my hands up in triumph because I got it right. But my readers are urban fantasy readers, and I’m giving them something *completely* different with this book. I don’t know how they’ll react. I hope they’ll love it too, obviously, though I’m sure some of them won’t. I don’t know if people who aren’t urban fantasy readers will pick this up because it’s visibly different. I hope they will, and I hope they might try some of my urban fantasy after reading it.

This is a balancing act, I think. Treading a line between making yourself happy as a writer (oh, *God* was I glad to write something non-contemporary, something in a different voice, something in a totally new style, and oh man was I nervous, too, because who knew if I could pull it off? Not even me, when I started.) and giving readers what they’re looking for; what they’ll keep coming *back* for.

It’s a lot more comfortable to stick with what’s working. It wouldn’t be personally satisfying for me to do that, and I think for many writers it’s not, which is why people often write more than one series at a time, if they can. I happen to be doing a lot of different things very early in my career (which probably speaks to my sanity, or lack thereof, if nothing else!), so it’s perhaps unusually visible, and I’m perhaps unusually aware of spreading wings that one might more reasonably be doing eight or ten years into a writing career instead of three. For me–because I write fast, because I had novels already finished or well-begun and waiting for possible publication before I got my first book published–I’ve been able to do this, and to my mind it’s at least partly worth the risk in order to be certain of never being pigeon-holed. I’d love my readers to be able to come to expect oh, anything from a C.E. Murphy book: anything, with the confidence that yeah, even if it’s different, it’s going to be a good story.

Arright. This is already a long entry, but I’m going to post an excerpt for THE QUEEN’S BASTARD behind the cut. Let’s astound my editor and send the book back to press before the month of May is out, shall we please?

[Read more →]

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Poster’s note: I met Alethea a couple of years ago at World Fantasy Con in Austin when we were both on a shuttlebus together, and she and her friends very kindly enveloped me into their group and invited me to lunch. We (all) hit it off splendidly, embarking on a weekend that involved people throwing themselves through hedges to greet one another and other such silliness, and it is my utter delight to have invited her to post about a day in the life of an Ingram Buyer.

Ingram Books, for the uninitiated, is the world’s largest wholesale distributor of books. As such, it is very, very important, and not a little mysterious, to those of us who write, and so we thought a back-door look at what the people who help bring our books from publisher to bookshelf actually do day-in and day-out might be interesting…and it is.

-Catie

–

A day in the life of Alethea Kontis, Incredible Whirlwind of Beauty and Dynamite — Ingram Buyer by day, New York Times best-selling author by night.

April 14, 2008

3-something a.m. — The rumble of thunder wakes me up. I stumble out of the bedroom in the dark, unplug the laptop, shut down the desktop, and stumble back to bed.

6:15 a.m. — Wake up before the alarm goes off. Check my email. Solaris got my copyedits yesterday, but they can’t open the attachments. Can I please resave them as .rtf and send them again? Sure. Walk down to the office to power the desktop back up.

6:22 a.m. — Walk back through the kitchen. Put bread in the toaster. Look out the window. Laugh hysterically. What woke me up at 3 a.m. wasn’t thunder.

6:25 a.m. — Grab my digital camera and walk barefoot through the cold grass (there’s a freeze warning tonight) to take pictures of the dead tree that has fallen from my next-door neighbor’s yard onto my back fence. I know to take pictures of the evidence before anyone has a chance to tamper with it. I watch CSI.

7:23 a.m. — Arrive at work. Turn on computer and multicoloured rope lights. Stop by International Department for chai tea. Stop by fellow buyer’s office and check out the thumb she broke while swordfighting. Assemble audio bestseller report for NY Times. Review orders that have come up for release. Check out what my weekly returns cycle looks like. Not too bad.

7:45 a.m. — Send an email to my supervisor reminding her that I’ll be working lunches and staying late this week, because I’m leaving work early Friday to catch the plane to NY Comic Con. I still have no idea what to pack.

(Poster’s note: All this before 8am. I don’t think I do that much in a *day*. And yet there’s more!)

[Read more →]

Tags: C E Murphy, Special Guest Stars by cemurphy
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I was, hrm, what was I doing. Participating, I think, in the “books I’ve written” meme (available here, if you want to read it) and someone asked me how I knew how long a book was going to be. (This question could’ve been put to me/us here, too, and I just can’t remember. But I thought it was a good one, so I’m addressing it!)

Your average SF/F novel that you pick up, not the ones that make you go “Damn! That’s a big book!”, but the average ones that are an inch or so thick, run anywhere from, say, 90,000 words up to around 135-150K. That’s (using Courier New 12pt font with 1″ margins, .3″ tabs, and 25pt exact spacing) 380-600 manuscript pages, which is quite a spread. How, indeed, do you know how long your book’s going to be?

Well, if you’re not under contract, you generally want to be aiming for about 100K, not 150K. (There are exceptions. There are *lots* of exceptions. But *generally*, publishers like 100K books better than 150K books, because you can put 4 100K books into a supermarket wire rack and only 3 150K books. And I’m talking about SF/F here, not mystery or romance or YA or thrillers or anything else.) So if it’s your first book, you’re *probably* better off aiming for 100K than 150K. This is a pretty decent rule of thumb, I think.

Me personally, my writing approach is by thirds: the first third of the book is setup, the second third (which often pushes through to the 3/4ths mark) is plot & character development, and then the final third is all hell breaking loose on our way to the climax. So for, say,the Walker Papers, which are 110K books, that means I’ve got about 36K per third. It does not work out that tidily. Ever. But it’s not a bad mental structure to approach it with.

There is almost always a point in any book where I have two *extremely* different panic attacks at the same time. One is: “Oh my GOD how am I ever going to get all this story into the wordcount space I have left?!” and the other is, “Oh my god there is no way I have enough story to reach the wordcount I’m supposed to deliver.”

This (for me) means everything is going according to plan, and the book will come out at the right length.

[Read more →]

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Just as I sat down to write my Magical Words blog this morning, my husband told me that at noon he was taking me out of the house and out to Fota Wildlife Park, because it was a beautiful day and he could tell from my mood lately that I wasn’t getting out of the house enough and that I needed some sunshine. So instead of writing my blog I went and wrote a bit more on my book, and then went out to be Not A Writer for an afternoon.

Like David, I do photography for fun. (I’ve even got a photoblog, at kitsnaps.com.) Like Faith, I’m … well. Heh. I don’t consider myself a workaholic. I set out to accomplish certain things when I started getting published, and one of those certain things was shelf space. The result looks a lot like workaholicism, but it’s my grim determination to slow down (and it does take a certain amount of grim determination, because it’s hard to not jump on new shiny ideas and pursue them!) and become significantly less of a workaholic. (It sounds so easy! Hah!) (And hey, like Misty, I like to dance. What we’re not telling you is that I am in fact _all the writers_ at this blog!)

Um. I think I got terribly off topic. The point was just going to be, sometimes when I’m not being a writer, I do something like this instead:

(…I *meant* take pictures, but I suppose making that face isn’t entirely inaccurate either…)

Do I get points for the most inane post ever?

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Guys, I got nothin’ today. (Heh. I typed ‘tosay’ first, and that seems appropriate too.)

I’m tired. I’m stressed. I’m more or less over a head cold that turned me into 100% Zombie Brain over the weekend. It upset me, too, because I’d done 15K or so in 2 days and the 3rd morning I was absolutely empty, couldn’t hold a thought to save my life, much less write fiction, and I thought I’d done it to myself by writing too much. Being actually sick by that evening was a relief, because it meant I wasn’t broken.

But today I’m well, and I’m still avoiding work. That usually means the book’s broken, not me. Realistically, I know what the problem is: the scene as I’m writing it sets up a direct conflict between my two main characters, and that’d be *great*…except I need a whole bunch more scenes before they can actually meet up. I need one more thing to go hugely, significantly wrong so that one character doesn’t just *kill* the other when they show up. And the scene as I’m writing it doesn’t allow for that. It just doesn’t. So I’ve got to throw it away, or find some way to make it work, and realistically, it’ll be thrown away. Unless I can twist the end of it somehow, which…what the scene is doing is good stuff, it just can’t push to this direct confrontation this fast. It needs to be interrupted some…

…*lightbulb*…

Crap. I should’ve written this post six hours ago. It would’ve made me own up to the problem I’m facing and maybe made me come up with this possible solution. God, I hate this part.

And this, see, this really is the real life of a writer. A while ago I was going through something very like this on another book, and came back to crow over having fixed a big problem after, er, literally years of struggling, and someone said, “Wow, I just kind of thought that somebody who did this professionally would just /know/ how to fix problems. Not that you’d have to struggle and work through it and grind away until it finally worked, like I have to do.” This is also why blogs are helpful: whether it’s here or on my personal journal or talking to somebody IRL, actually laying the problem out in so many words and making myself really look at it often shakes something loose in my tiny, tiny brain.

All right. I have to go look at this material again, and see how much more justification for my interruption I need to write in. The beginning of the justification is in place. I might need as little as a couple more sentences to make it work. And if it works, I can finish this chapter. And if it doesn’t, well, I’m going to have to grit my teeth and throw the chapter out. That’d be the third one I’ve dumped this book, some 15K worth of useless words, which is 10% of the book’s projected length. Grr.

So much for having nothing, I guess.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Happy Friday, everyone! Please join me in welcoming Joshua Palmatier to the blog today! *wild applause*

Hey, everyone! I first want to thank everyone here at Magical Words for the guest blogging invite. Hopefully I’ll have something important to say. Or at least something of interest.

First, an introduction: My name is Joshua Palmatier and I’m a fantasy author, with three books currently out from DAW Books. All three are part of the Throne of Amenkor series. The first is called The Skewed Throne and introduces my main character, Varis, an orphan who’s barely surviving in the slums of Amenkor, but who gets trained by one of the city’s Seekers to become an assassin. She comes to despise her talents and then is given the ultimate mark: the Mistress, ruler of the city, who sits on the Skewed Throne. Her only obstacle is the Skewed Throne itself. It knows Varis is coming . . . and it’s insane.

Bwahahahahahahahaha!

I couldn’t resist the evil laugh. *grin* John Scalzi said I write about disturbed furniture . . . and he’s right. *sigh* But there are plenty of other things going on as well—an invading sea force! blue people! an inexplicable White Fire! and of course, death and destruction! Pretty much everyone who had to sum up my novels in one word used “gritty”. The cover for the third novel:

gives you a pretty good vibe of what the series is all about. If you’d like to see more about the Throne of Amenkor series, including the two sequels The Cracked Throne and The Vacant Throne, check out my website at www.joshuapalmatier.com.

But enough about me and my books! I want to talk about something nearly every magical world needs, something completely non-controversial and guaranteed to create no waves: religion! Specifically, I’d like to talk about inventing a religion for you world. [Read more →]

Tags: C E Murphy, David B. Coe, Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, Special Guest Stars by Misty Massey
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I was Guest of Honor at Phoenix Con, a Dublin-based sf/f convention, this last weekend, and at one of the panels–the topic of which was “writing with a full time job” but which kind of just got off on “writing in general”, and in which we were discussing the daily slog of writing–a woman asked, “Does it ever get easier?”

All three of us on the panel said, resoundingly, “No!”

The poor woman looked utterly crushed.

The thing is, though, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t. Some years ago I was at the gym and there was a woman in her, oh, late sixties, who was in fantastically good shape and who I saw there every morning. She was discussing her gym habits with someone else, and said, “I’ve been getting up and going to the gym every morning for the last twenty years, and I still have to *make* myself get out of bed every day.”

Yeah. Like that. Only with the words.

I mean, sure, there are days where you’re on fire and you don’t want to do anything but write and it’s all coming along brilliantly and rah rah rah go team go! But there are a hell of a lot more days when you just have to get up and write whether you want to or not; days when every word is like pulling teeth; days when it is, yes, a *total* slog to get anything done, and it never gets any easier.

Today is one of those days, if you hadn’t guessed.

I’ve broken 100K on this book–the one I was hoping to have done by the beginning of March (which would’ve been only a month late :p) and which I was unable to work on for three weeks due to smashing my hand. I am, unsurprisingly, pretty much exactly 3 weeks further behind than I intended on being. Sigh. Anyway. Broke 100K, and left a scene hanging while I went off to the convention. I left it hanging for two reasons: one, I know what happens in it, so starting up again theoretically isn’t hard. This is always a good thing when faced with any kind of a break.

Reason #2, however, is that this scene is a slog, and finishing it /is/ hard, which is why I didn’t manage to get it done before going to the con. It’s pivotal. It has to work. And while I’m a great fan of “you can’t fix a blank page”, this is one of those bits that while it can be polished later, needs to work *now*, or I won’t be able to get past it. So I’m spending a lot of time staring at the computer screen, not actually writing because the idea of writing is intimidating. When I do write, it’s a sentence or two, and then I worry about whether they’re the right ones, and I sit there being uncertain of what to write next, and I try to see if the whole thing flows together, and…slog slog slog.

I need to write something on the order of 60K over the next 2 weeks to get this book done (and give it an edit pass) before the end of April, which is SO MUCH LATER than I want to turn it in it makes me very unhappy. I can’t really afford to indulge in the slog mindset. Which means, I suppose, that writing this post is my way of kicking myself in the butt, and that I had better go chew through the rest of this scene whether I like it or not.

*grinds teeth and slogs off*

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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