Well, I’ve had feedback from my wonderful beta readers. One hasn’t finished yet (just got a new job, so I let him off), but the other two have, and the feedback is consistent.

Consistent not only with each other, but also with my own suspicions about what didn’t work and what could be stronger. Although they did relieve my concerns about a couple of things, such as whether I’d been descriptive enough.

All three of them (and my other reader who gave feedback on an early partial draft) disliked the parentheses. Having almost eliminated semicolons from my writing, I think parentheses may be next. They all felt the parenthetical explanations of background facts broke the flow, and I need to find a better way of communicating the worldbuilding aspects of the story.

I’m gearing up now for a major rewrite. I’ve not done this with my previous books, but they were less ambitious and not surrounded by dozens of other stories begging to be told. I need to streamline the story, focussing on Berry as the main character and viewpoint character. If Berry didn’t know about it directly or from someone who was there, it doesn’t go in this book.

It may well go in another book, though, or stand on its own as a short story. I don’t regret writing the backstories of so many characters. I think it was a good exercise, and they won’t be lost – except for one.

Tranquil the statistician defied my attempts to make him interesting, and he’s going to be cut altogether. I’m going to have a smaller, more focussed group of characters with a clearer purpose and better-thought-through character arcs. Some of the characters will drop into the background, while others will take on new significance. Originally, I thought this would be an ensemble-cast book, but it really is Berry’s story.

Most of this is subtraction, but there will be addition as well. I want to spend a bit more time on the three secondary characters (Rain the ex-gang enforcer, Breeze the werewolf and Vigilant the spiritually-inclined lawyer), and I’ve come up with a major change to one relatively minor character which gives her more depth and sets up for one of the other books. Here’s a hint: when you have a character who’s already kind of a badass, how can you make her even more so? Answer: take away her legs.

It’ll be a lot of work, but I think I’ll come out of it with a very marketable book. My betas think the same.

Well, I finally got my first draft done on The Gryphon Clerks.

I started writing at the beginning of November last year, so that’s eight and a half months – not bad. The manuscript is at 108,000 words, but that doesn’t count the more than 30,000 words I’ve chopped out and put into two other projects.

One of them doesn’t have a title yet. It’s all the political stuff that’s going on during the story of The Gryphon Clerks. I wanted to keep the focus on the clerks, and particularly Berry, and that whole secondary plot wasn’t really interacting much with the main story, so I pulled it out as a separate book. It’s 28,000 words, so that’s a good start on a novel in its own right.

The other story that I’ve hived off from the main one is called Agents of Victory at the moment. I realized near the end of the first draft that I had this secondary character who, again, wasn’t interacting with Berry at all, and so probably didn’t belong in the book. She’s Grace, the niece of the Countygold Patience, and she’s involved in a sting on a crooked charity fundraiser which goes so well that she achieves her ambition of being admitted to the Realmgold’s Agents.

The Realmgold’s Agents are kind of an FBI-style organization who, under Realmgold Victory’s predecessor, were instruments of state oppression. But Victory has purged the psychos and stormtroopers, staffed the Agents with Gryphon Clerks, and made them into an elite force who work to bring down organized crime and corruption. This sets them against the wealthy and powerful, with Victory’s full backing (it’s part of her program of social reform).

Rain, the former street fighter, is going to join the very aristocratic (and very smart) Grace, and they’ll be an odd-couple partnership going undercover as fluffy, flighty mistress and incompetent maid. I think it could be a lot of fun.

I’ve also been writing some short stories in the world of the Gryphon Clerks, a couple of which I’ve submitted for publication (haven’t heard back on either of them yet). One is a 5000-worder set on a skyfrigate, which I hope will form part of an eventual novel. I’m planning to have a plot point in the political-maneuverings novel where a skyfrigate is sent off to get more mercenaries from a free city to the south which specializes in providing them, and does a bit of a tour of the southern countries in the process. That book, if it eventuates, will probably be called Unconquerable, after the ship.

I’ve also written a 6000-word short story for a competition called “Gnome Day”, based off a single moment in a minor scene in The Gryphon Clerks. Since there were (if I recall right) over 1700 entries received for that competition and only six will get published, I’m not holding my breath, but you never know.

If it isn’t selected, I’ll submit it elsewhere. It’s a standalone, although I’ve also done another 3,400-word story also set around the events surrounding Gnome Day (when Victory frees the gnomes). I suppose I could do a few more and have my own little theme anthology.

So that’s about 154,000 words, by my count, in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. I have a couple more ideas, too, including an actual sequel (not just exploring the same time period from different viewpoints) called Underground Railroad. The dwarves, reacting to Victory’s emancipation of the gnomes, build underground tunnels between their holds and take their trade under the mountains to the south, so that they can continue their slaveholding ways. Victory’s response is to build airships to trade the products of free gnomes with the same southern realms. I have one character already, Amethyst, a dwarf woman who poses as a gnome in order to be able to leave the dwarf hold (which is forbidden to dwarf women normally), and works with the gnome underground to get enslaved gnomes to freedom.

Before all this, though, I need to get feedback from my beta readers to tell me if I’m totally missing the boat with The Gryphon Clerks. I’m sure the book has issues, I’m just not certain what they are yet. Hopefully my lovely beta readers will tell me.

If you want to join the beta readers, there are places available – just comment here. I’ll need feedback within a month, so that I can start looking for a publisher. Thanks!

I passed the milestone of 100,000 words for The Gryphon Clerks on the weekend.

That doesn’t count several spinoff short stories that I’m writing and submitting to various places, to practice my writing skills (and get my name out there, and develop some interesting bits of the world and the story that aren’t central enough to go in the novel).

I haven’t mentioned this here on the blog, but my thinking at the moment is that this is one big book rather than several smaller ones. That’s subject to revision, of course, like everything else. It neatly solves the title question, though. One thick book, The Gryphon Clerks.

I’ve reached a difficult point, in terms of motivation. About a third of the way through I did an outline, which I’m now working to. It has its plusses and minuses. On the plus side, it’s relatively easy to think of what to write about, because I already thought about that. I just have to sit down and do it.

On the downside, that isn’t as much fun as just wandering about discovering things.

Also, I’m now in the part of the book with a lot of conflict, and I don’t really like writing conflict that much. I’m very soft-hearted towards my characters, to the detriment of my writing. A character who I like quite a lot is about to go through some tough times, and even though it’s going to lead to good things for him, and I know that, he doesn’t know it and I hate to do that to him (and to other people who aren’t going to be as fortunate).

Another plus of the outline, though, is that when I’m stuck on one bit I can write another bit instead.

I do feel like I’m kind of ploughing through at the moment, not knowing if it’s any good, sometimes resorting to “rich outlining” (my term for telling the story rather than showing it – I’ll go back later and replace the bare narrative of events with dialogue and action). I estimate that I’ll probably hit about 150K by the time I’ve got through the whole outline and expanded it up.

That’s long for a novel, though I’m told that Patrick Rothfuss’s novels are about 400K (they don’t seem like it, they’re so involving). I may need to trim some stuff that doesn’t contribute to the main story. (It can potentially become short stories, of course, or a novella occurring parallel to the main novel.) Maybe even combine a couple of characters, because so far some of them haven’t done very much, though again they can have their own stories off to the side later on.

After I get through the whole outline, and expand my “rich outlines” into proper storytelling, comes revision. I think of this as the process of getting from the “pig draft” to the “goat draft”: it still stinks, but it’s not as ugly.

Somewhere either before or after the goat draft stage, I want to submit it to a small press I have my eye on. They ask for the first 15,000 words as a sample, which (I worked out) goes up to the end of Berry’s story, before anyone else tells their backstory. I’m already reasonably happy with that, so it may go out while a lot of the rest of the book is still in pig draft, or even before I finish expanding the rich outlines.

I suppose I could even do it now. I don’t think I will, though. Events later on will affect the characterization of Victory, who’s one of the first two characters we meet, and I want to loop back round and sow the seeds of continuity back in those early chapters once the end is written.

Plus I’m nervous about submitting, of course.

OK, fellow writers, let’s talk about swapping reviews.

I write a lot of reviews on both Goodreads and Amazon. I read a lot (I’ll talk about what I read in a minute), and I used to be a book editor years ago. I also have a couple of books up in the Kindle Store that could do with more reviews.

So my proposal, O Fellow Writer, is that we review each other’s books.

There are terms and conditions, of course, and they are these:

1. If one of us isn’t really interested in what the other one writes, then no deal. See below for what I read and write.
2. We each have a month to read the other’s book and write a review.
3. When we’ve each informed the other that we’ve written the review, we both publish on Amazon and Goodreads.
4. It doesn’t have to be a positive review, and neither one of us gets to see the other’s review before publication.
5. It does have to be substantial, and if one of us doesn’t like the other’s book we will say why (it may be someone else’s favourite thing ever).
6. If your book is poorly proofread, poorly punctuated or full of Inigo Montoya moments (“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means”), I will call you on it. Remember, I was a professional editor for a large publishing house.
7. I’ll do my best to read charitably and find things I like to mention, and so will you.
8. We’ll both disclose in our reviews that we did the swap.

What I read

I read mostly fantasy, urban and rural. But I’m not into:

• “dark” fantasy
• retread epics in which the Chosen One quests after the lost McGuffin of Whozis (while empires clash) in order to defeat the Dark Lord, and it’s basically a phone book – long, boring and full of names
• super-gritty urban fantasy, or erotica with a thin urban fantasy veneer (some contextual sex or violence is fine).

I much prefer werewolves to vampires, and I have a strong aversion to long descriptions of cruelty.

I do not zomb.

I read some SF if it’s about how technology affects people (individually or collectively) rather than being all cold and hard (with the people being there mainly to point at the tech).

Post-apocalyptic anything is a turn-off for me, and so is putting the apocalypse in partway through. I’ve abandoned two series which I was, up until then, enjoying when the nuclear bombs went off.

Space opera is absolutely fine and dandy, and I will happily accept genre tropes in place of actual science if you don’t push it too hard. 

I love superhero novels.

Lately, I’ve been reading more and more steampunk, too. What I’ve noticed is that some steampunk authors (I name no names here, but read my Goodreads reviews) think that a 1930s-style pulp plot, a veneer of Victoriana, and liberal use of the words “brass”, “steam”, “crystals”, “airships” and “punch cards” make a good steampunk novel. They do not.

What I write

My work in progress, which I’m not soliciting reviews for yet, is a steampunkish secondary-world fantasy with a sci-fi skeleton. It’s about heroic civil servants.

I have two (fiction) books up on Amazon at the moment. City of Masks is a nonmagical fantasy – it’s in a secondary world, but the spec-fic aspect is sociological, not magical or technological. It’s told in the form of diary entries, with a “period language” feel, though it’s not the language of any actual historical period. Here’s the teaser:

In the city-state of Bonvidaeo, by custom and law everyone must wear a mask and act in character with it, or face civil, social and religious penalties.

Gregorius Bass is sent to Bonvidaeo as the Envoy of Calaria, mainly to get him out from underfoot. Masked as the Innocent Man, and in the company of his radical young Bonvidaoan servant, Bass stumbles into mystery, intrigue, heresy and murder.

(Imagine if G.K. Chesterton and Alexandre Dumas adapted Pepys’ diary into a serial killer mystery set in a mad version of Shakespeare’s Italy. With wasps.)

Gu is an SF novella set on Earth in an unspecified part of the 21st century, but probably at least 30 years from now. It’s told in the second person, in the form of a documentary. (Yes, I do like to experiment, why do you ask?)

Teaser:

Gu is the last industrial product, the substance that can be anything – programmable matter for the masses. Fifteen years after its launch, follow documentary filmmaker Susan Halwaz as she interviews the creators, users and opponents of Gu about how it’s changed society.

A Charles Stross-esque novella of future technology and its discontents.  

How to proceed

If, having read all that, you want to participate in the review swap, get in touch with me and we can swap ebooks. Either leave a comment (which will give me your email address), contact me on Google+, or just email masks at csidemedia.com.

Excelsior!

I’ve just completed my second draft. By including the first bit of a subplot that will get a lot more airtime in volume 2, I’ve managed to just edge over 50,000 words. Hey, I write short. No epic fantasy phonebooks here.

I’m putting the invitation out now for beta readers. My first lot of betas have been very quiet, and I’m not sure why. The only one who’s got back to me didn’t like the first draft, but he had some constructive suggestions about why he didn’t like it, which I’ve tried to follow in Draft 2.

The clerks’ stories are now expanded and contain more showing and less telling, more dialog and description and less narrative. I think that’s a definite improvement, and one I can take into Vol 2.

Volume 2

I’ve started the second book (before I went back and revised the first one thanks to my friend’s feedback), and I have a list of things that can go wrong for the characters. The trick will be spacing them out, or as Jim Butcher puts it, setting up all the dominoes and then knocking them over. My besetting sin as a writer is to solve my characters’ problems for them instead of letting them struggle and triumph over their challenges.

More and more characters keep turning up. After 22 pages I have seven or eight new ones who are likely to recur, plus three minor ones who may or may not get speaking roles. In addition to the 10 major characters and their hangers-on, introduced in the first book. That may be a little out of hand.

It is very much an ensemble cast, though, even if Berry is the viewpoint character most of the time.

I know I don’t have many subscribers here yet, but I’ll say this anyway: Comment if you want to be a beta reader. But only if you’re going to read it and get back to me quickly!

OK, change of plan. Again.

Something’s been niggling at me, a memory of when I was on a forum that a guy I knew elsewhere online had set up for short fiction critiques.

I had put up one of my pieces, and he said to me, “I want to know the stories that are behind this story. You’re hinting at all of these things having gone on already. Tell me those stories.”

And I just decided that he’s right, again.

These great, wonderful characters deserve to have their stories told – not just summarized. With a full supporting cast and elaborate stage settings and props. I’ve been having them tell their summarized tales, one at a time, but what I want to do now is cut between them as they converge on that moment when Victory brings them all together in one room for the first time.

In other words, the scene that I started with in my first couple of attempts at writing The Gryphon Clerks isn’t the beginning of the book at all. It’s actually the end.

Before the big story of all of them together unfolds, we need – I need – the stories of each of them separately. Their struggles and heartbreaks and triumphs, everything that got them ready to be the elite of the Gryphon Clerks, the people Victory is going to turn to for help and advice as she sets out to create her legacy and transform her realm.

It was while I was writing Windknower’s story that I figured that out. I had already thought about telling his story this way, and it’s the right way to tell it.

This is a huge setting, and there are a lot of stories to tell. But I can still tell them at their own pace.

I feel relieved about that, so I know it’s the right decision.

(And I’m pretty sure that Thorn and Midnight don’t come into this book now. They get their own book, or their own series, after this.)

Mike Reeves-McMillan respectfully begs leave to announce… that, after a couple of false starts, I’ve begun a project that I’ve been turning over in my head for a long time: The Gryphon Clerks.

It’s a story of heroic civil servants in a fantasy-steampunk setting (if that doesn’t hook you I don’t know what will).

I’ll be posting excerpts, bits of character and setting description and the like here. If I can get enough subscribers, I’ll go interactive and ask you for suggestions and contributions which may (no guarantees) make it into the finished book.

So subscribe to updates here. You’ll get whatever goes on this blog, plus occasional additional snippets that only go to the list. And, of course, a chance for a discount on the finished book when and if.

See you on the other side!