Spaniel chat

Hello. This blogpost (we don’t believe that’s a word) is a collaborative effort. It is being written by us four spaniels (stop doing that, Chewie). We are doing this to tell you what life is like while the human with the hairy face (daddy) taps and tuts and taps some more.

Life is hard here. We are forced to endure periods of time when he ignores us (stop doing that, Chewie). It isn’t fair that he taps and tuts and taps some more almost non-stop (CHEWIE!) from when he starts until when he finishes. We would tell you when that is but we can’t tell the time, sorry.

He does stop for lunch, which is good. And he does make sure we get our lunch, which is how it should be (Pugsley, stop trying to eat Mavis’ face). But five days a week he sits and taps and tuts and taps some more and he only takes us out into the garden twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon. Yes, he does take us all for a big walk around the village before he starts tapping, tutting, and tapping some more. And he does take us all for a big walk around the village after he has finished tapping, tutting, and tapping.

(Mavis, have you farted again?)

And he talks to us which is lovely but he doesn’t give us enough treats which is not lovely. He tells us things. Things about what he’s tapping, tutting, and tapping some more about. He tells us people’s names. And he tells us what they’re doing. There’s this one person called Kim Mi-cha who sounds like she needs a dog in her life. Her first name is Mi-cha and her family name is Kim and none of us dogs here can understand why it’s that way round but it’s probably not important.

There’s this other person who kissed this other person (you know what I mean) and then hurt them and we don’t understand that because we’re only dogs but we do like kissing and we don’t do hurting, except for Robyn when she sits on you because she’s a very heavy girldog even if she is an actual princess.

Anyway, that’s the news from here from us four. We would love to have some choklit but daddy says we can’t have any because it’s bad for us and then he eats it all and that just seems unfair. He says he’s nearly finished tapping and tutting and tapping some more on this book, whatever a book is. But he also says he’s planning to do more tapping and tutting and tapping on another book when this one’s finished and all we want to do is play and sleep and eat. If you could tell daddy that, we would all be very grateful. Thank you (stop doing that, Chewie).

The spaniels

Storming in!

I’m very pleased to be able to let you know that Storm has finally arrived. The second book in the Tempest series is available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

Or you can get it from your favourite bookshop (just order it with Storm’s ISBN (978-1738440900) or ask the assistant to search the catalogue on my name because that ISBN just trips off the tongue, eh?

You can find the series details on Amazon here. Or you can read the series details on this website right here.

Difficult passage

I’m working on Chapter 36 in the third novel in the Tempest series. The last third of the previous chapter has a rapid build to an ‘Oh My God!’ climax. That chapter leaves the reader on a cliff-hanger.

For precisely those two reasons, the writing of Chapter 36 delivers a series of changes:

  1. There’s a change of narrator, which necessitates
  2. A change of voice. And that means
  3. A change of style, because this narrator isn’t just a different person, she has
  4. A different perspective of the world, and in turn this gives her
  5. Contrasting values which means
  6. She moves through life at a different pace and
  7. Sees everything through a distinctive lens, her world’s-eye-view is wholly different.

I have been working on Chapter 36 (fluctuates between 1,200 – 1,400 words) for five hours. I’m finally at the point where I think it’s right. But I want a second opinion. I need to know whether the voice change, the pace change, the different view, have been successful.

However, I know I can’t share it with anyone, to ask for their views, because of what occurs in the preceding chapter. And to make Chapter 35 relevant, they’d have to have read Chapter 34. And so on, back to Chapter 1.

This is today’s writing dilemma. This is today’s difficult passage.

Challenge!

This sounds really simple, but a lot of challenges sound (or look) really simple when they’re thrown down. But here it is.

If I write 5,000 words a week, 48 weeks a year (because, in this challenge, I’m allowing myself four weeks holiday a year), I would be able to produce two 100,000-word novels a year.

The unuttered part of the challenge is what will I write about, in those two novels a year? I’m going to give myself the next week to get my head around that.

Video nasty

In my quest to produce a video ‘commercial’ for Tempest, I discovered it’s possible to save a whizzy PowerPoint deck as a video file. So that’s what I did. Actually… it’s not whizzy at all, but as an experiment it’s a first run at something I want to take further. Let me know what you think:

Update time

It’s all been happening in the last few months (and straight away, if you know me and if you know what I usually get up to, you’re probably being cynical and thinking ‘Yeah, I bet it hasn’t’, but you’d be wrong).

When I haven’t been walking the dogs (and believe me, there has been a lot of dogwalking going on) I have been scheming, plotting, writing, and planning.

First of all the scheming. In a few weeks’ time, early January 2024, I am going to unpublish Tempest (this is a thing you can do these days). A couple of days later, when all the unpublishing dust has settled, I will republish the book. The reason for this in- and outing is I’m changing Tempest’s ISBN. I’m switching from Amazon’s free (but generic) ISBN to one of a series that I own, an ISBN that is registered to, and identifies, brennigjones.com as the publisher.

A few days after these two Tempest changes, the second novel in the series (titled: Storm) will be published in paperback and Kindle. Storm will be published under another ISBN registered to me. I’m planning the audiobook edition of Storm for mid-summer, but getting the narration logistics right is challenging.

Now the plotting and writing. Over the last few months I’ve been working on the outline, plot devices, and characters for the third novel in the series. A fortnight ago I started writing it for real. I reckon it’s going to take about five more months to finish the third novel. This will take me up to the end of May 2024, if I don’t hit any bumps in the road. If the normal production timelines don’t shift, the third novel in the series could be ready for publication around August 2024. But… I may hang on to it and opt for a January 2025 publication date. This would keep the publication schedule consistent with the two previous books in the series.

When I began planning this project, I knew it was going to be a trilogy. But now I’m thinking it might be a Douglas Adams trilogy (if you know the story behind the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books, you’ll know what I mean). I’m going to stop at four books in this trilogy. I really am. Four. Definitely.

Adding quality/value to writing

Half a dozen prolific writers of various genres recently had an interesting Teams conversation about edits and the editing process, and I was fortunate to be involved. We discussed what that process looked like in our worlds. Most in the group subscribed to a simple (but incorrectly-labelled) process:

  • write
  • self-edit
  • write
  • self-edit (continue ad nauseam until…)
  • send manuscript to editor
  • discuss/agree/make changes as appropriate
  • manuscript to the typesetter/formatting
  • publish

I confessed to the group that I am a serial editor (this isn’t much of a confession to anyone who knows me). I am never happy with my manuscript, no matter how many hands it has passed through. I can’t ever view my writing as ‘finished’. My take on it is my writing is so poor it can always be improved and, as a serial editor, I’m always looking to achieve that improvement, even if it’s just removing or adding a comma. Surprisingly, I was the only one who felt this overriding compulsion to the level of approaching a psychosis.

I said I felt the editing process wasn’t as linear as they made out (and this is probably because of the internal driver that keeps me in peak serial editor mode). I also felt that the editing process doesn’t begin when everyone else said it did. I tried to put together a timeline to show what I mean.

  • write
  • self-review
  • write
  • self-review (etc, until completion)
  • whole manuscript review, make corrections, updates, and rewrites
  • whole manuscript read aloud, make corrections, updates, and rewrites
  • manuscript to editor
  • discuss/agree/make changes as appropriate (or not make changes!)
  • whole manuscript review
  • send manuscript to Kindle
  • read, photograph Kindle pieces that need changing
  • self-edit and rewrite as required
  • manuscript to the typesetter/formatting
  • publish

For me, there are two take-aways here. The first is that although every step adds value, the two most fundamental steps are to send the manuscript to my Kindle, and then to conduct a full author self-edit/rewrite. I am not able to explain it fully, but reading my (draft) manuscript on the Kindle adds another dimension that reading a Word document doesn’t.

The second point is that I don’t consider anything to be an edit until I have sent the manuscript to my editor (edit point #1 in my world), and when I conduct the post-Kindle edit/rewrite (edit point #2). Everything before edit point #1 is no more than a self-review; they’re just tweaks on the page, and shouldn’t be seen as an edit.

Of course, other views are available on this, and I’ll continue to listen to writers who have those other views. Except, of course, I know I’m right on this and they probably aren’t.

Tracking

The second most common question I get asked is ‘How do you keep track of everything when you’re writing your book?’, and that’s a really good question. My neighbour asked this, just a couple of months ago.

I’m going to answer it by asking a slightly different question, and there’s a good reason for this. ‘What things do I want to track as I’m writing the book?’ In no particular order the answer is:

  • Word count (cumulative)
  • Word count (by chapter)
  • Word count (projected to completion)
  • Primary characters
  • Secondary characters
  • Plot items (and their triggers)
  • Timeline against the story arc
  • Versions

All of these enable me to answer the first question (How do you keep track of everything when you’re writing your book?). Without these, frankly, I couldn’t keep track. I’d get lost down a rabbit hole, or I’d veer off track. Or I’d just sit here all day watching bad films on the TV.

So to keep me on the straight and narrow I have a tool I refer to every single day I’m writing. It’s a little database I wrote. It has some date triggers and some activity-based alerts, but I key in the data and it monitors things for me. I could use a native spreadsheet, but then I’d lose the trigger and alerting capability and, frankly, that would not be helpful.

So, on a writing day, I fire up my little database, I deal with any alerts, I input the day’s progress and, if the day’s progress causes anything to pop up, I deal with the time-based triggers.

I took an export of some of the data for you. That export dumped the data into a spreadsheet. I tidied up the spreadsheet with some colours and a few other formatting tweaks, to make it easier to read. And then I took a screenshot of the spreadsheet.

You can see (below) the cols and rows, and the tabs of the export. This is my database. This is what keeps me on track. Let me explain some of the details.

The columns headed ‘V’ are version. I only switch to a new version when there has been a major rewrite, as in the case below. When the wordcount is green, it’s been edited three times, twice by me and once by my editor. You can see how the wordcount changed in the rewrite.

The Identifier column contains my primary characters and a breakdown of what they’re up to/where they’re up to it. In the database these are distinct fields, but this output concatenates them. This ‘running together’ is only an inconvenience in the export, so I’ll live with it.

The total column is my cumulative wordcount, the WordCount column relates to each chapter. And the two Timeline tabs at the foot, monitor the original timeline I set, and monitor progress against that timeline/time left to run. My plot items (and their triggers) are in the second Timeline tab, which is a report of progress to date and items outstanding.

And that’s it. That’s the answer to the second most common question I get asked. Has this been helpful?

Lazy writing

The topic I’m going to talk (see also: ‘moan’) about today has got me fired up and riled, and, and, and… a tad annoyed.

The Internet is a place of great goodness, and terrible harm. It allows the best, and the worst of us, to move, digitally, around the planet as if we are all equals which, in obvious ways, is exactly what we are not. But we all put effort into this thing called life, so that’s a point of equality in itself, yes?

This equality might be effort to achieve things. Or it might be effort avoiding achieving things. Not looking at any teenagers at this point. But that doesn’t matter. It’s still effort. I don’t believe anybody does nothing in life, and I don’t think that’s just an over-optimistic thought.

To pick up a pen or bang away at a keyboard and write a sentence, well, that takes effort. Heck, mentally composing the sentence in the first place takes effort. And there was probably some thinking effort put in to it, even before the general structure of that sentence was determined.

So why would anyone pick up a device and compose a badly thought-out and incomplete sentence, then read it, think that it’s good enough, approve it, and post it on the Internet? I’ve seen a lot of this lately and it seems to be a growing trend. Let me explain.

I hang around on some writing/writers forums. I’m chiefly there to learn, rather than participate, because there are people in these places who are brighter, and considerably more experienced, than I.

As is the custom in these places, new arrivals announce themselves to the group, with a few self-directed words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Early last week a new arrival announced he was a starting-out writer from the Bay Area. I was on to him like an enthusiastic puppy. ‘Oh, I love Sydney. I’ve sailed with the RANSA at Darling Point. Do you live anywhere near Milk Beach?’ The starting-out writer came back and said he meant the San Francisco, California, Bay Area.

OK, so there’s two things here. Firstly his introduction was constructed on the egregiously false assumption that everyone, in a global readership on the Internet, would know which Bay Area on the entire planet he was talking about. Secondly this enthusiastic puppy immediately leapt to one of the Bay Areas in which he’s spent pleasurable time.

It could be argued that I should have immediately homed in on Cardiff Bay, Conwy Bay, Cardigan Bay, or even the Bay of Biscay, all of which I also have experience. But it was a cold and miserable UK summer’s day, and even in midwinter, Sydney is a great (and warm) place.

In defence of this enthusiastic puppy, though, I wouldn’t have made such a geographical boo-boo if the sloppy introduction hadn’t been constructed with the care and attention to detail of a toddler feeding themselves soup. Care and attention to detail being implements the starting-out writer should already have in their toolset.

I’m not singling out this person (well, I am really). But this mindset of ‘the readership really should know what I’m on about, without me having to make it clear to them’ seems to be a growing trend, particularly amongst Americans.

Yesterday, on another forum, a writer said they were from the Midwest. Because I’m not a complete dunce, I deduced that the Midwest this person was highlighting was likely to be the one in the United States of America.

But why would this person assume that everyone on the planet, who reads that forum (the majority of whom are neither American, nor likely to be native English/American speakers) can intuitively understand what the writer is trying to say? Is it a lack of awareness? Or is it laziness?

I’m with Deadpool on this.