(a) science fiction and fantasy site not quite like any you’ve seen before, mixing news, commentary, original stories and art, your own comments and conversations, and more.

They’ve also been offering free downloads of titles from their backlist to anyone who registers.

This week’s title is, indeed, my novel Spirit Gate.

Seriously, if you haven’t read the book, you can go hence, register, and get the download.

It’s kind of like living in the 21st century.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/02/RVHDVM6J8.DTL&type=books

The reviewer professes to be bewildered by Chabon’s aggressive defense of genre because after all, Chabon himself is highly regarded, so why is he “fighting stale battles” ? Not so stale to the rest of us . . . Three cheers for Michael Chabon, say I, and let’s hope this reviewer eventually gets a clue from someone nicer than I.

Since conversations, chats, discussions, exchanges between friends, are part of what keep writers writing, we thought maybe people who check in with DeepGenre would enjoy seeing this in action. For people who have not read the book, this is a discussion that might be deemed spoiler-ish, although we tried to stay away from recounting specific events and outcomes; however, if you are the kind of reader who hates knowing anything at all about a novel before you head in, be forewarned.

For an interview with Kate Elliott, or a review of her new novel, Shadow Gate, you can click the links at the end of this DeepGenre entry.

CA: The heart of story telling is conflict: external and internal, and how these conflicts are resolved. The potential scope of a novel provides a stage for more than one kind of conflict, just as it provides room for more than one character and even point of view. Constant subjects of the conversations we’ve shared are the effects of war and slavery upon women and children. So here we’re at it again, with Shadow Gate, talking about the conflicts brought by war, slavery and economics, and women plus children. In 2000, when Child of Flame was published in the U.K., I wrote a customer review that began like this:

“In Child of Flame, the fourth volume in Kate Elliott’s projected five-book epic [which ended up as seven books], CROWN OF STARS, the principal characters are caught up by war: prisoners of war; suffering from war; traveling to war; getting ready to go to war; denying that war is about to snare them with its implacable maw. Civil wars, cultural wars, wars of immigration, wars of religion. Everyone’s on the move: as part of an army, as a refugee, as a slave (part of the booty of war), leading an invasion.”

One of the elements of your books that have always interested me is how much you deal with war, which for some reason so many people still seem to think women who write Fantasy do not do.

Now, in 2008, would you agree that the reader almost can expect war to be a prime motivator of action in a Kate Elliott work?

KE: Hmm. I think that is true. The Labyrinth Gate and The Golden Key do not have wars in them, but they do have other forms of social conflict that involve significant social upheaval or change. Everything else has war and/or revolution.

CA: How is the war we’re seeing in Crossroads differing from that war in Crown? At least, it feels like a different kind of war to me.

KE: I started in on a glib answer but now I find it’s more complex than at first thought.

Yeah - it is different in terms of where war is coming from. The endless familiar jockeying for power and position among elites, movements of tribal peoples due to resource scarcity, cultural conflicts, defense of home, and so on all figure into the CoS wars.

In Crossroads there’s more of a sense that specific individuals greedy for more of what benefits them are willing to inflict misery on the many in order to achieve goals that specifically benefit them. It’s my disaster capitalism book! (I’m only being half facetious, I suppose, even if I can’t really style it that way as it’s not a good analogy culturally or economically). Obviously the economic system of the Crossroads world is not capitalism as we know it, nor is it manorialism. There are elements of merchant capitalism. That’s as far as I can go.

Anyway, I have always been interested in how war breaks down social systems. In how its repercussions spread over a larger area than the ground covered by the actual military units doing the fighting.

Obviously there’s a deliberate contrast in Shadow Gate between the destruction and social breakdown furthered by the Star of Life army and the social reconstruction being done by Mai elsewhere. As obviously (to me, anyway), the activities going on in much of the Mai sections are activities often overlooked or denigrated because they are deemed trivial or not exciting or not as deep and meaningful and profound as the activities we tend to valorize in our society.

Hers is a story about re-building, about setting up households and creating continuity. Now, I’m not trying to suggest that women ought to want to get married (any more than I am suggesting that men ought to want to get married); what I was trying to do is look at the reality of lives lived, both today and in the past, when the decision about setting up a household, the choice or accident of one’s partner, might perhaps become the biggest indicator of quality of adult life, especially for women in many traditional societies because of the way those societies are set up. Mostly, women married in those societies. Mostly, men married, too, if they could.

I can personally hold a modern view that women shouldn’t have to marry if they don’t want to or have children if they don’t want to (and time and again we see that women’s lives improve when they are given access to a measure of economic independence and if they can control the timing and spacing and number of children they give birth to) while at the same time I can want to show respect for all the lives lived and being lived in places where people did not (and do not) have the same amount of choice as we take for granted in our lives. I don’t want to forget those women and their struggles and triumphs and the immense amount of work done day in and day out, year in and year out. That’s the foundation on which we have all lived over the years. . I wanted to acknowledge those women’s lives, not erase them. I’ve written my share of kick-ass female characters, and in Crossroads I felt it was time to write a female lead who could speak to some degree to the lives so many women have lived historically.

CA: That’s Mai. She’s a fascinating character to find in a Big Fantasy series. You’ve got many interesting women in Shadow Gate. They’re all different from each other, they all face different personal challenges and have different roles to play in the larger scene of war, politics and money.

It’s quite a list, just starting with secondary female characters: the literate slave, Priya; Sheyshi, an insecure slave; pretty Avisha, who needs the right husband; her young stepmother, angry Nallo — who was so vivid, in the sense of having the most impact in fewer scenes - she gets chosen by an eagle and tries to run away from it - an angry woman who knows she’s angry; Eridit, a performer, who needs to exercise her erotic power as much as her other skills.

The female principals are all different too: Marit, a Guardian; Cornflower-Kirya, an unwilling Guardian; Zubaidit, a kick-ass fighter; Miravia of the Ri Amarah, who does not believe in slavery.  Most of all, the universally well-liked Mai, beautiful, kind, curious, a skilled mercantilist, loves her husband, loved in return, profoundly a family woman — and a slave owner.

KE: I wanted to suggest a cross section of roles, to show that women aren’t only one thing or another. I have heard a few criticisms of Mai as a “traditional fantasy female character” which surprises me (especially if at the same time it is suggested I am somehow not a feminist because I wrote her) because I think of Mai as a very strong character struggling to make a life for herself coming out of a situation in which she had no power or authority.

I think it’s funny that Nallo is so vivid–precisely because she is so bad-tempered! I also used her behavior, and her expectations of what is appropriate, to contrast with Mai’s expectations. Mai was raised in a culture where to be obedient and compliant was a woman’s chief virtue; it’s a lesson she learned young. Nallo may be cranky and difficult, but there is never any suggestion in the Hundred that women ought not to be allowed to express anger. Whatever other problems there are in the Hundred, it is assumed that women, as well as men, have full access to emotion, to sexuality, to ownership (even if that ownership is slaves), and I hope that this series of contrasts about women’s roles (also touched on with the Ri Amarah and the empire) is of interest to readers.

CA: A staple of sex slavery is the ‘exotic.’ It’s certainly a favorite of historical fiction and movies. The eternal paradox of sex and slavery: the ‘other’ is a category of who is permitted to be slaved, and the ‘other’ is also an attractive erotic category. Both are fundamental to slavery and the sex industry, whether the sex worker is a slave or free.  (The psychic culmination of this has always seemed to me to have come out of the slave states of the U.S. South into the all pervasive culture fetish of power-sex-slavery, where women raped in slavery by white owners through the generations produced the glory of the slave trade, the ultimate ‘fancy market’ of blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white-skinned sex slaves.)  Rape is fundamental to both slavery and the sex industry.

KE: I poured a lot of my frustration and anger about the plight of women and our societal blind spots in dealing with slavery as it particularly affects females and the use of rape as a weapon in war/conflict. Then I had to tone it down in the revisions. Does that make this the bowdlerized version? I’m not sure. Overall I think it was better to tone it down because I think it was too grim in the wrong way. Certainly I worked as hard as I could to avoid writing the sexual violence in any kind of “sexy” carnographic way.

As for exotic and erotic and “the other”, which I totally agree with your assessment of “the eternal paradox of sex and slavery.” I don’t think I’m dealing with racism in Shadow Gate. The societies described may be a bit xenophobic, but they’re not racist as I think we would use the term in our society. I did try to portray Cornflower as an “other”– that is, that because of her pale skin and pale hair she is considered non-normative while people with black hair and dark skin are considered normative.

CA: I read Part Four last night. Is this a section the editors felt needing some softening?

As it is, it’s not soft. There is no way for a reader not to understand that what is happening to Cornflower is terrible, and there is no way for the reader not to wonder, “How can these people not know this, not care?” But in that world, as in ours, they do not care. How was it for you, writing this section?

When I wrote about the capture, and subsequent, nightly marriage-rape of one my characters in Stallion Queen it was as though I wasn’t even there — I was witnessing this endless succession of terrible days filled with hard work and drudgery, ending each night in rape, happen in real time, though from outside of myself. I also didn’t make it nearly as awful as it so easily could have been, only referencing the worse things happening to others off-stage, so to speak. But I wanted the character’s abortion to be seen entirely in the light of her experience. Plus, she gets rescued by women. Though her lover charges after her, and plays somewhat of a role, the strategy and most of the implementation is performed by women, and they are the ones in charge. Nevertheless it rolled out of me easily, though I felt feverish, as when you’re sick, during the period composing those chapters.

KE: It was probably the most emotionally grueling thing I have ever written, but I wanted to try to get at what actually happens to women. I’m so tired of the glamorization of brothels and sex work, the real conditions most girls and women work under and especially the phenomenon of girls going to the city thinking they are going to get other work and being forced into sex work. Not to mention the conditions under which their bodies are disposable and their personhood does not matter. You know.

I did not change this section at all; my editor asked if I could make it shorter and less graphic. I pointed out that it was not in fact graphic at all, moving parts are never mentioned, and that the worst part is very short, only a few pages. I think it’s because it’s written inside her head; I guess I wanted to try to get across how she loses her personhood, her conscious sense of who she is, because it is the only viable mechanism she has to survive: to obliterate herself. Some readers who are not aware of the conditions within sexual slavery work will maybe not be able to read between the lines as much as you do.

The section I softened comes later. You’ll know it when you get there, and it’s grim, too. Dang, what a grim book! Boy was I pissed off at the state of the world when I wrote it. Not that I’m not still pissed off, but I tried to say something, to give a voice to the kinds of people whose situation is often ignored or considered insignificant in the greater scheme of things. I tried to show how people survive–and they do survive. Human beings can be remarkably, astoundingly, courageously resilient.

Oh, and yes — the words of Part Four rolled out easily even as it was emotionally difficult, once I let myself go there.

In light of this, I worried that some readers would complain that the Avisha subplot did not “matter.” Of course I see that subplot as standing in clear counterpoint to the other stories–the greater story–of how women survive, adapt to or are destroyed by war and slavery, because their bodies are part of the landscape which is trampled over. So far I’ve had no complaints on Avisha’s score. My readers, as always, are better than I am!

CA: Serendipitously, re Avisha, I noted some places in Shadow Gate where we see Mai at work, using her abilities, in charge, making the arrangements according to her judgment, nobody else’s.  If her choices are wrong, the consequences will be as disasterous as general’s bad strategy.  She’s central to the parallel importance of women’s networks and women’s work without which you cannot create a whole society. In Mai’s case the work includes, as it does for so many women in cultures around the world, the mercantile foundation of wealth for her family, clan. Trained into this at home, she’s importing it to another society.

And the contrasts of the character pairings: brother-sister pairings, romantic ones, spousal pairings, that’s interesting. Some are successful despite the pair’s dissimilarities, some are not successful. So much conflict and so much potential for healing, for resolution, for making whole, in this story you are telling. Which is why it’s interesting. Sometimes, I kind of crowed, going, “Oh, she’s doing this!” with - well so many of the characters, things I wasn’t expecting, but worked because of who they are.

KE: I’ve reflected on how Mai’s work of building networks contrasts with how war and civil disruption tears down networks. The actions of the army in the north are continually being set against the work she is doing — as you have already noticed. Readers will tend to concentrate on Anji and Joss and Zubaidit as those who are fighting as soldiers against the enemy–and obviously in this context that is necessary– but the thematic contrast is not between the good fighting the evil, as you point out, but between those who build and those who destroy. So often we privilege the one and call the other unimportant, when it is the the work of countless toiling women and men that is the foundation on which we live our daily lives in what peace and comfort we have.

Late in the book there is an aside I threw in for you and Kit [Katharine Kerr, author of the Deverry novels among others], in which everyone in town is at a celebration–except for the women who are cooking. . .! It reminded me of stories both of you have told about big family get togethers or other celebrations, and the women who spend most of the celebration cooking so others can eat.

CA: Slavery pervades the book, the world. What about the characters who are not slaves, who take slavery for granted, and in one way or another benefit from it? How about the characters who begin to feel some soul prickings that slavery is spiritually wrong, while not violating the rules of the game as slavery operates in the world you’ve created?

KE: I’ve discussed elsewhere that if I’m going to write a story set in another world, I want to try to write characters who live in their world, not in our world; that is, that they see the world through the lens of their own understanding of the cosmos, not as a reflection of mine. That said, obviously as a writer I also wrestle with issues that trouble and vex me, as well as ones that amuse me (in different contexts), and so I try to strike a balance between not putting my words into my characters’ mouths while also trying to examine the effects different institutional structures have on societies and individuals based on a perspective that is very different than theirs.

I found that one way to examine slavery as an accepted and unexamined institution in a society was to unfold it as a series of contradictions.

For instance, in Spirit Gate I introduce different concepts of slavery. There are forms of slavery in which the individual loses his or her person-hood and identity. To quote from Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, “Slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”

In Kartu Town, for example, the slave owners give their slaves new names, ignoring that these individuals already have names (this practice was, I believe, common in chattel slavery as practiced in the USA). I deliberately contrast Mai to everyone else in her family because even though she accepts the existence of slavery as a given in society and does not question its legitimacy or morality, she personally continues to address slaves by the personal names they had before they were enslaved. She sees the individual as a person even if no one else does, even if–legally–that personhood has been erased.

Debt slavery is practiced in the Hundred, although I must note that total slavery (the ownership of personhood) is also practiced in the Hundred with outlanders (primarily female) brought in to be slaves; only local people are subject to the marginally less onerous practice of debt slavery. In debt slavery you are selling your labor for a specified period of time, but while the legal codes (reflecting the “jubilee year” described in the Hebrew Bible) put limits on length of service, over time those who own debt slaves have figured out artificial and technically illegal but socially accepted ways to prolong the service of debtors, sometimes indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the character of Keshad buys his way out of debt slavery (as people in some circumstances have been able to do historically) by selling outlanders into an even worse form of slavery than the one he suffers under. Do people automatically learn better and change their way of thinking because of what they have endured? No.

Finally, the Ri Amarah (”the Silvers”) are entirely and morally opposed to all forms of slavery, and yet some of their customary practices regarding the status of women are similar to the markedly patriarchal and deeply sexist practices prevailing within the southern empire bordering the Hundred. These sit in sharp contrast to the looser and more casual (if still somewhat patriarchally defined) customary practices and rights (sexual and economic) of women in the Hundred.

In Shadow Gate I deal again specifically with slavery as a obliteration of person-hood (”natally alienated and generally dishonored”), how it can destroy a person’s identity and cast them adrift as a creature who is now “socially dead” (Patterson again). If we really face what that means, it’s monstrous.

CA: It’s another way of reflecting that no single culture ever gets all of it right, certainly not all the time.

So, some of the secondary characters introduced in this volume won’t be coming back?

KE: Some of the secondary characters do not come back in volume three. In one case it is because the character’s continuing story no longer specifically intersects with the larger narrative and so it was necessary to “draw the veil” and allow readers to imagine their own working out of the rest of the story. I learned by doing with Crown of Stars that as a writer I have be tough with myself and close off some paths, however attractive, if I want to write a wieldy multi-volume novel! Anyway, I still have so many fish to fry! And I introduce a few new point of view characters in volume three, because of the exigencies of the plot.

Your opinion of dropping characters met earlier in a trilogy or series, for later books?

CA: Well, I did exactly that in my one and only trilogy. In Book 3 we never see Glennys’s mad mother, who perhaps is even a shaman. But she’s referred to constantly by her daughters and the settlers, and so are her actions. Characters from Book 2 are referred to but don’t appear in Book 3, except the Queen-Mother, who comes on stage toward the end, who is about to be tortured — and then rescued and fallen in love with by Glennys’s brother, who is more than her right hand in the Company. Jonathan, from Book 2, the single true love and romance of Glennys’s life, is referred to in Book 3. She asks someone who knows Jonathan about him, once. Her great love seems to have become a primary comfort to that poor Queen-Mother, back when she was still in civilization. Moran, the tutor-historian, wasn’t in Book 2, but was a primary in Book 1 and returns as a significant character in Book 3.

I did that with each book — some characters return, others disappear from the primary character’s life. It ‘felt’ right to me. But it wasn’t until I was reading this second Crossroads book, and you telling me that you’re leaving some characters behind, that I thought about it as a technique. It seemed natural. We know who the primary characters are, and it is their stories that are opening up this greater world for us as the readers.

I also feel the writer can get lost, and lose the Big Story, if the writer persists in telling each character’s whole tale. That’s not good for the book. So that means the writer needs to be ruthless about every walk-on, because if the writer begins to let that walk-on’s backstory and future intrude into the Big Story, it becomes a tangle, not a labyrinth. May I say I learned this the hardest way possible. I had to cut entire sections of a novel because I’d gotten too interested in some new characters. I had to cut them out.

KE: But you know how it is these days: everyone wants to see their favorite characters again and again. As a reader, I do, too! And then characters are spun off into their own series. And etc. I’ve got nothing against this as a writing technique; in the case of Crossroads, I’m just already wrassling a huge story and am ruthlessly severing side stories that don’t add to the main plot threads.

CA: As long as you are faithful to the book, to the story that is being told, which you decided at the beginning was to be told primarily through following the cast of the principal characters, it will work just fine. Well, that’s my opinion, anyway, but I stand by it.

KE: Presumably we learn from what has gone before, make our mistakes, and hope to correct them if we can see our way through the morass. I think that’s one of the great and important elements in writing, too: that our conversations with other writers and people thinking about the same issues we each struggle with helps illuminate both issues of craft but also on the larger scale the human condition that is the subject of all novels. So much of what I write about now has been influenced by my discussions over the years with you and Kit and so many others, as well as what I’ve read both in books and magazines and now of course on the web. I can’t even keep track of it all, or how things wash together in my brain or settle into my unconscious to be fished out later. None of this is accomplished in isolation. And maybe that’s the story I’m trying to tell with Mai.

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS, PURCHASE POINTS

Fantasy Book Critic:

Interview with Kate Elliott

Review of Shadow Gate

“The Big Idea” post for Scalzi’s blog

Kate Elliott’s “Manifesto”

Shadow Gate, the middle volume of Crossroads. It was preceded by Spirit Gate, and will be followed by Traitors’ Gate. Published yesterday, and can be ordered from these sites:

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Gate-Crossroads-Book-2/dp/0765310562

http://us.macmillan.com/shadowgate This site also provides an excerpt.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadow-Gate-Crossroads-Kate-Elliott/dp/1841496251

KE: I haven’t been a good record-keeper, so I can’t trace the many many articles in magazines and online I’ve read over the years that have informed my thinking. However, here (in no particular order) are several references I’ve used and read that deal with some of the issues discussed above:

Orlando Patterson: Slavery and Social Death (Harvard University Press, 1982)

Seymour Drescher & Stanley L. Engerman, eds: A Historical Guide to World Slavery (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Walter Johnson: Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999) [I'm pretty sure Constance told me about this book]

Zainab Salbi: The Other Side of War: Woman’s Stories of Survival and Hope (National Geographic) [This book highlights the lives of women who have survived war, as well as the work of NGO Women for Women International]

Kamala Kempadoo & Jo Doezema: Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (Routledge, 1998)

Caroline Moorehead: Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Henry Holt & Co, 2005)

Kevin Bales: Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2nd edition 2004)

My first four books were written between 1976 and 1981; book number five took another two years to write (I went to the Clarion SF Writing Workshop; I moved from Boston to New York; I worked part time and then full time, I fell in love, I fell out of love.  Life, right?).  I also started writing SF and fantasy short stories.   When I turned in my last romance (in 1984) I kept writing short stories and started noodling around with a story which grew into a book.  It took me more than ten years to finish that book (worked freelance, picked up my acting career again, fell in love, got married, started working at Tor Books, had a baby, went back to work again, left Tor, left the job after that, edited comics for three years, had another baby).  I sold the book on a partial manuscript while I was still working at Tor, and was more than half-way through it–but it still took what seemed like forever to finish.  After I turned in The Stone War I got a chance to do a work-for-hire novel based on a Marvel Comics superhero–Daredevil.  I wrote that book in about six weeks, from a fiendishly tight outline (remind me sometime and I’ll tell you the hoops you jump through to write tie-in novels) and it was fun.  Then I wrote Point of Honour, and almost immediately afterward, Petty Treason.

Then, two weeks after I turned Petty Treason in in 2002, we moved to California.  My writing path since then has been, um, erratic.  And with the benefit of hindsight and a several-decades-long career, I now realize that my writing history is punctuated by gaps.  Some of them very significant gaps.  I am not, nor do I ever expect to be, one of those 2000-words-a-day-year-in-and-year-out, writers.  But there have been times when I wrote consistently, turning out a book a year or so.  And times when I didn’t, when I felt guilty because I wasn’t writing, or because I wasn’t finishing a book.  Guilt, needless to say, butters no parsnips and is the enemy of the creative process.

But a time has come, at the end of each of these hiatuses, to jumpstart my process and get back to work.  What to do?

Here, in no specific order, are some of the tricks that have worked for me:

• Retyping the stalled manuscript.  Yes, even at book length.  Maybe especially at book length.  Retyping immerses me in the book in a way that merely re-reading and line-editing doesn’t.  I often find myself adding, branching out, finding the places where I went astray, cutting out wholesale chunks.
• Writing “cover copy” for the story.  Nothing focuses what you believe are the salient points of a story like trying to convey it in a punchy, convincing two paragraphs.
• Following The Artist’s Way or some similar program.  The Artist’s Way requires, among other things, that you write three pages, longhand, every morning before you do anything else.  When I was stalled on The Stone War this was one of the things that helped get me moving again.  And you don’t have to follow all the rules the Way suggests: Julia Cameron isn’t going to show up at your house at 6am to make sure that you’re writing before you feed the kids, or that you’re making all your “artist dates.”  The right way to do this is the way that helps you.
• Participating in a writers’ workshop–one where I have to show up in person (nothing against online crit groups; I just found that having to show up was useful to me) and one in which I focus as much on the critiques I’m giving other people as I do on their critiques of my work.
• Reading stuff that makes me want to write.  What is that going to be?  Sometimes it’s fiction that, in some way, approaches what I’m trying to do.  When I was working on Point of Honour I was reading The Maltese Falcon, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Name of the Rose.  If another writer has pulled off a particular technical trick, I may want to read that work for awe and inspiration.

I am reasonably certain that, however long my writing career continues (until they prise my laptop from my fingers, no doubt) there will be lulls in my creative process.  That means I’m always looking for new ways to jumpstart that process.  Got any you want to share?

The matter seemed resolved, but in the newest issue, No. 12 — written by Drew Goddard, the screenwriter of “Cloverfield” — Buffy and Satsu are in bed, naked under the sheets. “It puts the reader in this ‘Oh my God’ moment,” Mr. Whedon said during a telephone interview. “And it puts Buffy in an ‘Oh my God, what did I just do?’ moment.”

But before fans start blogging frantically, they should know that Mr. Whedon is clear where this is headed. “We’re not going to make her gay, nor are we going to take the next 50 issues explaining that she’s not. She’s young and experimenting, and did I mention open-minded?” ]

 More here.

 Love, C.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Publication is a group exercise.

First, there’s your editor, who will read your text and perhaps have questions or problems, and want you to address them. There are as many ways to edit a book as there are editors; some closely line edit, others look at the big picture, some have quirks, even as you have quirks (c’mon, you know you do). Working with an editor is a negotiation: Editor may want to change something you don’t want to change, and if that happens, you need to be able to explain the why of it. Standing up and saying “It’s my story and I don’t wanna” won’t cut it. Besides, the editor is trying to help you clarify your ideas and make the story easier for the reader to get into. This is a good thing. A good editor is a gift above rubies.

That’s one. Then, when you and the Editor are happy with the text, it goes to the copyeditor. If a good editor is above rubies, a good copyeditor is a gift above…I dunno. Enriched plutonium, maybe? A copyeditor finds all the potentially embarrassing misspellings, grammatical flaws, errors of fact, inconsistencies in the text, and points them out so that you can fix them. If your character had green hair on page 7 and red hair on page 52, and no visit to the Beauty Parlor in between, the copyeditor will query it. There are copyeditors who are intrusive (I have heard tales of horror about a copyeditor who, not understanding the tropes of science fiction, changed things around because there was no such thing as faster-than-light travel) and copyeditors who are inflexible, but there are many good copyeditors, and some are truly brilliant. Copyediting is an immensely complicated dance between absolute correction (it’s “accommodate”, not “acommodate”), flexibility (you can use “gray” or “grey,” but it has to be consistent) and eidetic memory (Query: on page 17 Flaviola is princess; on page 38 she’s a baroness. ??), and it helps if the copyeditor has a real devotion to language and story. Not everyone can be a copywriter.

So you get your copyedit back, you grimace a little at some things, you make corrections, explain why you really meant Faster-than-Light and stet those corrections, and return the manuscript to your editor. In the olden days there would be a typesetter who keystroked the book; these days, in most cases, things are done via computer, and you may be asked for a textfile, which can then be formatted.

That’s another thing, the formatting. In the early days of POD books rolled off the press looking pretty much like a Xerox of a page printed from Microsoft Word–clean, perhaps, but without art. When your book is copyedited, or perhaps while it’s being copyedited, it’s also being designed by a person who can balance the complicated issues of type size, readability, page count, unit cost, and still–one hopes–come up with a look that somehow reflects the content and mood of the book. There’s a certain amount of juju in book design–I’ve seen a really good designer pick up a manuscript, heft it, and predict the page count on the basis of weight alone. So there’s another collaborator you didn’t even think about.

So your work has been designed and typeset. Now you and a proofreader each get a copy of the galley (that’s the typeset text) to go over for errors that might have occurred in the inputting of the copyediting corrections or in the setting of the type. A copyeditor may still find things to query (I’ve done so) but at this point it’s mostly a matter of cleaning things up and making sure that the computer hasn’t dumped a bunch of weird code in the middle of your pivotal battle scene. Like copyeditors, proofreaders have an eye–and a passion–for language and its rules, and a memory like sprung steel.

Those are the text wranglers, your collaborators who help turn your work from words on a page to a book or story. You may not love it when one of them questions what you’ve done, but they’re working for the good of your words.

Robert Legault, sometime Managing Editor at Tor Books and lifelong text wrangler, died last week. The world of writing and publishing and words is poorer.  Those of us who will never have him work on a book of ours have lost out.  So my point is, no one does this publishing alone, and if you’re lucky enough to find a good Text Wrangler, cherish him or her. Tell your editor if you get a good copyedit, or if you love the design of your book. Your collaborators in the process don’t get a lot of feedback, and they truly appreciate it when someone notices their part.

First of all, the publishing world has altered significantly since I sold the first book in the Crown of Stars series. The winds of change have howled through, and the paperback rack in the front of the store looks markedly different than it did five years ago much less than it did in 1995 when I sold the partially-written King’s Dragon (then with the working title of Dragon’s Heart) to DAW Books.

I believe I may have sold the Crown of Stars series as a potential trilogy on the basis of a five page synopsis. Which I doubt, after multiple computer changes, I even possess any longer. Nor would that synopsis bear much relationship to the books as they were finally written, although certain plot elements would stand out as unchanged. However, I was able to do that because I already had a track record with DAW Books, having published four Novels of the Jaran with them. In addition, I made the deal for Crown of Stars in the wake of signing a contract to collaborate with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson on The Golden Key, also for DAW Books.

In this case we’re talking about a multi-volume series by a new author, in today’s market.

It’s an entirely different kettle of worms now. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance are hot. Young Adult remains very strong. Second world fantasy in a series still sells, and I am pretty sure can sell well, and publishers are still looking for new voices, but it isn’t as wild as it might have been ten years ago as people scrambled to find the next Robert Jordan. Laurel K Hamilton is the new Jordan in terms of marketing strength and coat-tails, if one must use that analogy.

Also–and this is important–I’m neither a publisher or an agent. Publishers and agents will have different perspectives than mine, so anything I say must be understood as filtered through my limited understanding and experience and my own biases. Booksellers will have a valuable perspective on this also; seek out their opinions, if you can.

In general, however, and in a simplistic form, this is what I would say:

1) publishers like series.

A strong series generates reader loyalty. There is absolutely nothing wrong with standalone novels, but in marketing terms a standalone novel is a new sell every time even though there may be other compelling angles (reader investment in a particular writer, forex). A series is a known quantity, a story-line or characters or world the reader is already invested in.

I don’t say this to suggest you should write a series over a standalone novel (publishers like standalone novels, too). Or that standalone novels are morally superior to series. Me, personally, I read both with equal pleasure (as long as I like what I’m reading).

2) Think about how you want to structure the volumes and the story within each volume.

You can write a true multi-volume novel (or trilogy) in which each volume is incomplete, a part of a larger whole (think Crown of Stars), or you can write installments in which each individual novel stands more or less alone with some form of a complete plot which is resolved by the end of the book while also advancing a larger overall plot (the earlier Harry Potter books are examples of this method).

To market to market to buy a fat pig?

Have a complete first novel.

In these days where you want a strong follow-up close upon your first publication (no big gaps between books), I personally think you’re better off with a second novel in hand as well, but it isn’t required.

If you have a complete first novel, I suppose you should include a synopsis of that novel, but you absolutely (I think–more knowledgeable folk may know better) must include a synopsis of the rest of the larger story 1) to show that you know where you’re going with this and 2) so the publisher can see you have a colorful journey and a firm destination in mind and larger plot on which they will judge how well the material will hold up to being extended over multiple volumes (you want a fat narrative not a thin one).

If, for instance, your plot consists mostly of “and then there was another encounter” - you’ll have more trouble selling a publisher on the idea of a multi-volume novel. If your plot shows significant chance of twisting turning layering and depth, they’ll be more interested. I’m not actually sure how detailed the synopsis needs to be. I have written few synopses, all of which were pretty sketchy, and even then I’ve never followed those outlines. But you must show you have a long, large plot in mind that can sustain multiple volumes. That doesn’t necessarily mean a detailed 50 page outline; a sketchier outline can show off the big plot questions as well, but you have to be sure to highlight the Bigness and Epic-ness of your plot if you’re going sketchy.

Your strongest selling point remains a well written and exciting first volume, that shows off your capabilities. Show them two well written and exciting volumes, and it’s likely an even better sell because they’ll see volume one isn’t a fluke or the result of ten years of painstaking labor that suggests volume two won’t follow for another ten years.

Beyond that? I’m not sure there is more to do except to start sending material to publishers. Again, as much as the market has seen an explosion in urban fantasy, there are still plenty of new secondary world fantasy writers breaking in and getting a great deal of attention. The market is open. Good luck.

Meanwhile, if any of you all out there have specific insights into the synopsis, I’d love to see your comments here or as posts in your own spaces (if you do that, please flag them here–thanks!) because it’s not a subject I can really say much about on as I am a notoriously poor synopsis/outline writer.

Point-of-View, or POV.

For a quick overview, here are some definitions

First Person

This is the “I” story.

The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning. I flung myself across the table, covering as best I could my neat piles of papers, as a draft of cold wind scoured into the room…

The benefit of first person is its immediacy. You are really inside the head of the person telling the story. This is good for character stories, but not as good for certain kinds of tension stories. You can therefore say that first person’s focus might not be on what happens so much as how it happens. In other words, we know a first person protagonist lives; we just don’t know what that means.

A first person narrator can therefore be what is called an Unreliable Narrator. This means that what the person says about a situation, character, or action, might not be true. Readers can sometimes enjoy discovering that the narrator is unreliable–discovering, for example, that in spite of the fervent dislike of the narrator for a character, the reader comes to the conclusion that he’s really not the bad guy.

More notes on First Person under Omniscient– sometimes these distinctions are not as easy as they look.

Second Person

This one is fairly easy to describe, and you rarely see it, except maybe in very short horror tales, and in more experimental stories:

You walk down the stairs. You turn to the right, glancing in the window, where you see your neighbor eating his dinner. You bend and pick up a rock, hefting it in your hand, before you cock your arm back, and…

Karin Lowachee used it very effectively at the beginning of her science fiction novel Warchild. This one is almost always in present tense, as well. Present tense is currently very, very fashionable—when done well, readers like the immediacy.

Third Person

Now we’re getting to some complications. Simple third person is, of course, something like this:

Tom and Lisa walked down the street.

That’s clear enough, right? But if one of them acts, or sees the act, then we start getting into distinctions. Different critics, teachers, and writers have all kinds of labels for variations on third, and you can find them in writing books. Here are mine:

Tight Third

Tom and Mary walked down the street. Tom watched the swing of Mary’s hair against her back, and smiled when she caught him gazing at her. She took his hand. They gazed into each other’s faces, Tom thinking happily about the movie they were about to enjoy together. He was only vaguely aware of the squeal of brakes coming round the corner . . .

What ‘tight’ means is, we are tightly locked inside Ton’s skull. We cannot hear, see, smell, taste, or touch anything that Tom can’t. Therefore we do not see what Tom looks like, unless he’s thinking about his own appearance.

Now, you will find plenty of books in which a tight third POV is being used, yet the author does this:

Dark-haired Tom watched the swing of Mary’s blond tresses against her back, and his wide, curved lips smiled when she caught him gazing at her. She grinned back at his deep blue eyes with her azure orbs, and took his long strong hand into her delicate one…

I’ve found that most often in romance novels, where the reader expects a high degree of enforced intimacy, and constant awareness of physical attributes that emphasize the characters’ overriding attraction to one another. In a romance novel, the romance is more important than subsidiary action, so word choices and scene setup is going to demonstrate this.

NOTE: Some writers will slide quietly into omniscient just briefly with:

Tom was so wrapped up in Mary he was unaware of the squeal of brakes . . .

More on that later. Meanwhile, if we’re using tight third, how do we get across what Tom looks like?

The easiest solution is for him to look into a mirror. This has been overused a lot, but it’s still useful if you’re not obvious about it. In other words, it’s boring if a character stands in front of a mirror staring at him or herself. But if they react, then it’s more realistic, and thus more interesting. So, instead of:

Tom stopped to look in the mirror before leaving for his date with Mary. He studied his blue eyes, his wide, curved mouth, his dark hair, his excellent cheekbones, the carefully tended two-day stubble on his chin, that looked just like the guys in the Matrix movies . . .

Bor-ring! Do we believe in Tom? Except for the bit about Matrix, which might raise a faint laugh, he’s dull and rather arrogant-seeming. So:

Tom raced down the stairs, knowing he was late. Mary might not wait–she felt it disrespected her, if people kept her waiting, but she couldn’t know about his flat tire, and the extra work his boss had stuck on him, and the fact that Tom’s watch had fallen off when he changed the tire, so he lost track of time. He glanced in the mirror as he ran by, and caught sight of a young guy with tousled dark hair, a wide mouth that reminded him suddenly of his dad, worried blue eyes, and, oh no, oh no, was that a big old honking zit forming right on his stubbly chin? Oh, great, Mary would never notice the expensive haircut he got just for her, the new silk shirt, the flowers–she’d be staring all night at that zit…

Tom becomes a little more real here, yet we still get plenty of details on his appearance.

Another way to get his appearance in is to slide in details as the story progresses.

This takes more time, obviously, but it doesn’t draw attention to itself quite as much as a one-shot description. Such as:

Tom closed his hand around Mary’s, intensely aware of how thin her fingers were, the fragility of the bones. He hoped she wasn’t disgusted by the calluses on his palms from all his weightlifting. He admired the swing of her pale hair against her back. Funny, until now he’d always been attracted to dark-haired girls, he’d always thought because that was what he was used to, coming from a family of dark-haired people, but as soon as he met Mary…

So we’ve got Tom. How do we get into Mary’s mind? We can’t in tight third. That’s called head-hopping–jumping from one person’s thoughts to the next. If we want Mary’s POV we’ve got to end the scene from Tom’s POV, and continue the story with a scene from Mary’s. Now, if you switch too often, the reader gets too distracted, like watching too many MTV jump-cuts. Many authors restrict themselves to one POV per short story, or per chapter; some writers successfully handle more.

Okay, one last observation on third, what I think of as Camera View.

This is where we stay outside of anybody’s head. Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett used this one, many years ago. In this POV we see the characters as if a camera is watching them, but we never hear anyone’s thoughts. Like:

A hand reached for the door, which opened. Out stepped Tom. He looked up the street. He stiffened when he spied Mary waiting at the corner, her blond hair blowing in the breeze. Soon they were striding down the street together, their gazes locked. Then around the corner sped an SUV moving far too fast, just as Tom and Mary stepped off the curb . . .

Camera-eye tight third is sometimes called “dramatic third”—it’s a kind of long-distance shot, and thus can be very close to Omniscient as it views without access to any thoughts, leading the reader to winnow out clues to the characters’ inner lives from the description of their actions.

This variety of approaches within third person indicates there are various degrees of depth available within each point-of-view. A writer’s voice emerges not just through word choice and type of story, but how he or she slides from long-distance reportage to close-in, claustrophobic stream of consciousness. Many readers love the enforced intimacy of romance novels, wherein the reader is told who the hero and heroine are, how they felt, etc; other readers prefer a neutral voice talking mainly about ideas, the characters only sketchily described. Some writers preferred never to share the inner lives of the characters, but provide painstakingly recorded clues, like Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. A close look at the most enduring classics (ones people read for pleasure) seems to indicate that most readers prefer a dramatic change in distance between the reader and the characters: sometimes intimate, sometimes from a distant vantage that permits readers to come to their own intellectual, moral, and even emotional conclusions.

Omniscient

Or the God’s-Eye view. This one is the way most 19th century novels were written. In this view, which we can call omni for short, the narrator can get into anyone’s head, or follow anyone.

The first thing to realize is that there is a narrator present, telling all stories. That includes third person. In tight third, it’s easy to forget this, or to mix the narrative presence with the actual author. In some cases they are indeed indistinguishable. In the example I put under third person, Tom did not hear the squeal of brakes, that is the voice of the narrator, popping in just for a second to give you an important fact for dramatic urgency.

Some people might mix the narrative presence with First Person. But here are two differences. The narrator can see into everyone’s head, and a first person protagonist can’t. Second, the narrator is not who the story is about. A first person story is usually some semblance of fictional autobiography.

In Jane Austen’s novels, the narrator almost never emerges from the background, but just once is a while she will sum up the action, or make an observation: here, from Mansfield Park, opening chapter 27, “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can. . “. Conversely in Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s narrator strides out on stage, and lectures the reader directly about the story. He stops the actors in the middle of action ([an approximation] We shall halt here, before Mrs. Fussbudget sips her tea, and the motes of dust are still in the air, to consider now what we have learned about the wicked Mr. Nogoodnik) so the narrator can emerge once again and talk directly to the reader about the story, in order to really hammer in that point.

Sometimes the narrator was shrouded in what we call ‘frames’ to create a sense of reality, as if the story were true. Modern readers sometimes find the layers of letters at the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tedious and pointless, but at the time the book came out, with its scary cutting edge scientific experiments and extrapolations, the frame tale–as if the story was told in letters–made it seem as if it really had happened. Thus it functioned both as a science fiction novel, and as a horror novel.

Knowing who is telling your story and why is crucial in using Omni. The writer also needs to pay attention to transitions from one person’s thoughts to another’s, or there can be a confusion of pronouns. The successful omniscient authors do not try to get inside everyone’s heads, but choose the viewpoints that add the most dramatic tension; most often the dramatic viewpoints are those engaged in the action, but sometimes it’s from an observer’s point of view. For example, many fans of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings scarcely notice a two sentence shift into the point of view of a fox passing through the wood when Frodo and Company leave the shire, but that quick outsider viewpoint serves to add dramatic tension to the story, reminding readers without coming right out and telling them that the hobbits are indeed now out in the wide and wild world, far from the comfortable home they know.