The How to Revise Your Novel online workshop is open to new students again. You may remember it opened for only a very brief window in January. This is probably a more relevant course to more advanced writers than How to Think Sideways.

Update: The How to Think Sideways Writing Career Development course has also been opened to new students. This is a comprehensive writing course suitable for beginning and intermediate writers, advanced writers who are thoroughly stuck in a rut, or those after indepth examples of queries and proposals that have sold.

Both classes can be taken in your own time and commense as soon as you’ve signed up.

I’ve set myself a ridiculously easy daily writing goal. I’m a little ashamed to admit what it is: 100 words. Yes, I know. I’m a breastfeeding mum; give me a break.

But it’s working. I can do 100 words even on a really busy day. I can squeeze it in somehow. And I’ve thrashed that goal almost every day this week. When I finish one thought I wanted to get down and see I’ve reached 180 words it’s only 20 more to 200. Perhaps the next thought takes me to 240. Oh, another easy ten words. But now 300 is within reach.

Perhaps next week I’ll make it to 500. But that’s not a goal; it’s just five easy bursts of 100 words.

Since I made the decision to turn my trilogy into a stand alone novel I’ve been trying to choose between the options of interweaving the three related stories or running them separately as Parts 1, 2, and 3.

My heart likes the former. It will make for a fuller, rounder story, and it will take more writing skill. My head likes the latter option. It’s easier and means all I need to do is shorten book one and tag books two and three on the end.

The other issue my head has with interweaving the three stories is that I don’t get to write swathes of the book from one point of view at a time. This is something I really love about my draft of the first third of the book; there is only one viewpoint throughout and it makes for a very personal and intense ride. I’m reluctant to lose that. But my original trilogy idea involved three characters each with his or her own book told entirely from a single viewpoint. Now the three story strands are tied together with a theme that makes them far stronger and with that comes three different viewpoints.

So, subconsciously, I went looking for examples of stories told from multiple viewpoints. First I was reminded of Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders Trilogy, which I found rich with the layers of characters each thinking theirs was the life that was important and worth fighting for. But I also remember the frustration of having to leave a character at a crucial moment in order to ride with the next character. I felt taken against my will until I settled again into the story. But Liveship used many characters’ viewpoints; with only three I will be able to treat my readers to a number of chapters in one viewpoint at a time.

That was in the back of my mind yesterday when I picked up Inkspell* by Cornelia Funke; a much simpler book and one that has the same reader age range as my story. It was much easier to see my dilemma tackled in a book like this, and handled satisfactorily. Inkspell’s viewpoint characters have as many chapters as necessary to follow a plot strand until there is a logical segue to the next character. There is no rigidity to locking the characters into a single chapter at a time because the next chapter must switch point of view. It’s fluid, and I think that comes from the way it was written: Funke says that she free wrote this book so quickly she could barely type fast enough to keep up with the story.

Another trilogy told from alternate viewpoints is Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy*. Although there are only two viewpoint characters in the first book, and three in the second and third, the viewpoint character’s name appears in the header of every page of the chapters he or she owns so the reader always knows whose story is being told. So this is another way of presenting it. However, what I did find slightly off putting is that the author relies on this to alert the reader so that he doesn’t have to start the chapter with the viewpoint character’s name. But the header doesn’t appear on the first page of a chapter so occasionally it requires turning the page to check which character we’re on in order to imagine the scene properly. I think I would rather just use the character’s name in the first line.

So my plan of attack is to continue writing the rest of this story from whichever point of view is required, preferably several chapters per character though. Then when I have a rough first draft completed I will redo my synopsis and fit in parts of the second book (which I’d already started before deciding to consolidate), and then work out where I need to write scenes from the point of view of the second and third characters to slot into the first part. And sand and varnish.

I think it’s doable.

*Book Depository is a better option for non-US book buyers.

So this is what I have in mind for HearWriteNow: I’ve ditched the idea of the email newsletter / ezine that was “Lateral Ezine” and instead I want to turn HearWriteNow itself into an online writers’ magazine.

Lateral was really just an email to let people know that a new article was up; I wanted it to be more, so I was toying with the idea of launching it as a full zine with its own content that would be downloaded from HearWriteNow. But that split my focus: what would I publish on HearWriteNow and what would I save for Lateral?

Then Zinester changed hands and shut down the mailing list operation. And before I even had a chance to suss out Aweber we all sat in horror as we learnt that their systems had been compromised and spammers now had access to email addresses previously guarded like gold dust. Who hasn’t subscribed to a newsletter delivered through Aweber?

I think the days of the newsletter are numbered. Right now I have 6300 unread newsletters in my inbox. I don’t think I’m alone. So I don’t think I’ll add to that problem. You can visit me whenever you like. Hopefully there’ll be enough here to keep you busy each time you pop over. I’ve still got plenty of articles to publish. Plus I have something quite exciting up my sleeve that involves fiction. (But I’m not going to have a chance to roll up my sleeves just yet, so I’l just have to sit on my hands and jiggle in frustration.)

And I have a teeny-tiny budget adding up, thanks mainly to the little bit of advertising on this site. So sometime in the near future I will be able to pay another writer or two to contribute to HearWriteNow. Now that is something I’m really looking forward to.

I broke something on my website. I really liked the way My Fictional Life worked on WordPress and love this theme by Sayontan Sinha. So I was attempting to merge My Fictional Life with the rest of HearWriteNow and do a slow migration of the whole site onto WordPress, but too much code got stuck together and I moved one too many files and couldn’t Undo. So I decided to do what many writers find extremely satisfying – I hit the delete button. This is usually only safely satisfying if you back up to the nines the way I tend to do which allows you the pleasure of vindictive, masochistic deletion coupled with the knowledge that you can Undo if you really need to.

I’m now slowly moving all 300 of the pages that used to be on HearWriteNow into the new WordPress powered site. And this is deeply satisfying too – paring down all that bloated FrontPage code and simplifying and reorganising my site. It’s like starting a spring clean and finishing by tearing down the house and rebuilding. But it’s not as drastic as it sounds if the place needed rewiring and a plumbing upgrade and a little poking around revealed termites and borer lurking in the walls…

It works in fiction too. Try deleting a character. Go ahead; run some scenes through your head without him and watch your brain begin to sew up the holes that have appeared in the plot. Sometimes you can come up with a better story this way. Give it a try next time you feel stuck. If you back up you can always press Undo.

Following on from my post about The Book Depository, I’ve found two options based in Australia that offer free shipping within Aus. These are Emporium Books and Borders. I haven’t tried either, so I can’t comment further than that, but they might be worth a comparison if you’re on the hunt for a particular title.

Speaking of comparisons, here is a nice little Aussie site that does a handy price comparison across numerous online booksellers, including shipping costs to Australia, and conversion into Aussie dollars: Booko.

If you’re looking for rare or out of print books, try AntiQBook or Alibris. This is going outside Aus again, though, so watch those shipping costs.

Meanwhile I remain delighted that Book Depository accepts PayPal – so handy. I’ve placed three separate orders with them so far, including over the notorious holiday season, and I’m still very impressed.

Another site to add to the list:

CD Wow! – This site sells books, CDs, DVDs, and some cosmetics, and also offers free worldwide shipping, plus they accept PayPal. I have no personal experience with this site as yet, though.

I’m now doing a Novel Revision course in parallel to the Writing Career Course. While the Writing Career course is helping in places, the novel I need to fix is completed so this makes much more sense.

The other novel (now that I have been able to see how to convert this into the first part of a standalone novel), although complete in itself, now needs some editing to allow the other two story strands to fit into this book. So, for this project, I’m using both the revision process and the writing process. I can also see how this revision process could be helpful for restarting my stalled science fiction novel.

I’ve discovered an excellent alternative to Amazon.com for those of us who live outside the US and have to cop the massive shipping charges and lengthy waits for our purchases (at time of writing: $5 per shipment plus $5 per item from Amazon, and $12.50 per item for Marketplace purchases; up to 3 months delay in receipt of items between November and January, three to four weeks at other times of the year).

The Book Depository offers free shipping worldwide (beat that Amazon). I ordered some books last Thursday evening and they arrived on my doorstep on Tuesday afternoon. While their prices are a little higher than Amazon’s (about a dollar on average), it certainly makes up for it if you are saving $10 to $12.50 on postage, and I have to say that the prices are far, far cheaper than books in Australia at the moment (I am a traitor, I know).

I’m finally a quarter of the way through the writing career course I’m taking. Yes, only.

The course is huge. I’ve now downloaded everything and have been able to hop around a bit and look at what is coming up. Potentially the most interesting and useful part of the course for me is the bonus course at the end, which I have naturally already skipped to. This is a three-part additional course (6 videos) called How Not to Write a Series and Why You Don’t Want To. This is exactly what I needed to learn and has made me rethink my two series’ I had on the cards and made me realise that I can do both, better, as stand-alone books. Strangely enough, this is an exciting, motivating realisation.

The beginning sections of the course that I have done were quite interesting but really just a recap of stuff I already know, already do, or have already tried and tossed out as methods that don’t work well for me. But though I am happy with my established methods it is good to revisit these issues once in a while. This is ideal for a beginner/intermediate writer as it is in depth stuff that can really help you set your writing up to produce results early on and avoid a lot of frustration. I know two people who pulled out of the course because it was too much “how to write” and not enough “how to get published”.

I really took the course more for the later sections on pitching to agents and publishers and how to work with the publishing industry, and to see what an author had done that worked or didn’t work and why. So far I’ve seen one of the in depth agent pitches with the agent’s extensive comments and I do think it will be useful for me to see the others together with the “trial and error” analyses. It is very handy to see what someone has done wrong, and this part is good for intermediate/advanced writers who can study another writer’s approach with understanding of the process involved.

If you’re thinking of taking this course yourself, there are two things you need to know:

Firstly, the 2009 intake for the course is closing on Friday 9 October 2009. The next intake will open sometime in 2010 – we haven’t been given dates yet. The “backdoor” option I was able to offer through HearWriteNow has also been shelved. So, if you want to have access to this course before next year you’re obliged to sign up now. (I don’t know why, since it’s a self-study course, and, yes, it’s a nuisance.)

Secondly, don’t sign up for the twelve month course; take the six month course. I spent extra money for no reason at all. I would have been just as far behind in the six month course as I am now. Spacing the lessons out gives you no advantage; you can space your own lessons out and take as long as you like to complete the course. If I keep going at the pace I’ve set so far, it will take me four years to finish (but I do have more time coming up to devote to this course).

Writing Career Development
How to Revise Your Novel

My dear friend Lauri over at Thoughts From Botswana wrote an interesting post on Literary Fiction versus Popular Fiction. These are my thoughts in response:

For me plot is art. Characterisation and character relationships are art. There is a real art to constructing a work of fiction that both shows and tells a compelling story with characters the reader can feel, but without the reader being aware of the scaffolding involved in such construction. I agree with John Grisham’s points that you don’t want to distract the reader; you want him to become absorbed in your book.

That said, there is poetry and beautiful writing that also stands as art, and stands out because it is beautiful. It does tend to be distracting, in a good way. There is a limit, I think, on what type of story one can tell entirely with writing that is meant to be savoured for itself. Certainly not a fast-paced or suspenseful story.

I haven’t read Dan Brown’s book, but I suspect if Pullman has noticed the writing style, this means one or both of two things: either Brown’s writing construction is too obvious, or Pullman reads like a writer and is overly sensitive to scaffolding.