So this is another open mic week – chat, make announcements, complain about your writing, whatever.
I’ll start:
Finally, after 32+ years, we are getting an audiobook for Sorcery and Cecelia! Release date is October 20, from audible
So this is another open mic week – chat, make announcements, complain about your writing, whatever.
I’ll start:
Finally, after 32+ years, we are getting an audiobook for Sorcery and Cecelia! Release date is October 20, from audible
My latest novel is out, and the normally 99-cent ebook is free between September 3rd and 7th. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZPY491
(I find self-promotion impossibly difficult unless I make no money from it.)
Glad to hear about the audiobook! I’m kind of sorry it doesn’t have two readers, one for Cecy’s letters and one for Kate’s. Once when I was rereading The Mislaid Magician, I started imagining it as an audiobook with four narrators, so that when Thomas is enchanting Kate’s letters to Cecy against being read by outsiders, you would hear:
(Kate’s voice) 17 April 1828, Skeynes.
(Thomas’s voice) This letter faithfully enchanted by T.S., all his own work.
(Kate’s voice) Dear Cecy…
Why, yes, I have put an inordinate amount of thought into this, why do you ask?
Life goes on. I’m thinking about NaNoWriMo which may be possible this year, though that’s not certain. (I have to outline first. The year I rushed the outline for it was — unhappy.)
Congrats on the audiobook!
Theraputic Whining: I’m having pacing problems with my WIP. Too much is happening too quickly. It’s stretching (or snapping) plausibility and I find myself throwing in excuses for why events are progressing with such extraordinary speed. But I don’t see how I can slow things down.
I’ve had trouble with that. I found it easier to stretch things out in revision.
I think I’ll do the same. It looks like stretching things out will require major surgery whenever I do it.
Well, nothing happening around here. (Except that after entirely too many catless years, I now have a pair of five-month-old catlets, black as starless midnight with golden eyes; after the manner of cats, they dash around like mad mornings and evenings, and sleep the rest of the time.) But I sent out the second draft of my novel to several people who indicated that they wanted to read it — *including my agent,* who volunteered, saying that after all he knew the markets.
No answer from any of them. I did email my agent last month, and he said that he was swamped with Genuine Work, but he read the first couple chapters and thought they were rather slow-moving.
I spent, I think, five years on that thing, and it’s like shouting into an echoless void.
/grumble
I know that feeling for sure. One thing it’s like pulling teeth to get is feedback on my fiction. (Although my sweetie reliably will say either “It’s good” or “I liked it”–which is good and likeable, but doesn’t help me improve.)
Just don’t let it get you down. Keep it up and keep on going. The work itself is reward enough, if it comes to that.
I’m curious — Patricia or other folks — whether you think prologues are a non-starter. I’ve seen agents representing YA fiction say they won’t even look at a book if it has a prologue. Yet there sure seem to be a lot of very well-received books that have them, both YA and adult fiction (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s “Good Omens,” for example). Patricia, you don’t seem to use them. Any particular reason you don’t?
I don’t use them because I don’t need them for the kind of books I write. That’s the short answer; the long one is probably a post.
Someone offered to do an audiobook of _Salamander_, my second novel, in exchange for half the revenue. I wasn’t planning to do one, since the book never sold very well, so it was pure benefit for me. He’s done a good deal of it, and I like it. He manages to do some subtle things with accents that would never have occurred to me. Hopefully it will be finished and up in a month or two.
I recorded my first novel for the fun of it a long time ago, then discovered Audible and put it up, and I’ve done audiobooks of most of my nonfiction which sell pretty well. But he is doing a better job of _Salamander_ than I would, and all I have to do is listen to it and point out occasional problems.
Coming back for another spot of therapeutic whining, one recurring problem I have is steering character conversations. It’s not quite the Council Scene problem as described by Our Gracious Hostess, but it’s possibly akin.
I might have (for example) a scene where I need two or three of the characters to discuss ninja bookkeeping by ninja accountants, in order to forward the plot thread from last night’s ninja encounter. But the conversation veers off into a discussion of chocolate-covered potato chips, the history of potato-chip production, and finally the Columbian Exchange in general (or the not-Earth setting’s equivalent).
I can usually go back and brute-force the conversation to go where I want it to, but I’d feel better if I could employ less brute force and more steering skill.