The Heroine’s Journey

I think many people are familiar with the idea of “The Hero’s Journey” (by Joseph Campbell), but what about “The Heroine’s Journey”?

If I ever heard of it, I assumed the phrase simply meant the Hero’s Journey applied equally well to women.

Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell, came to believe it did not. She developed a model of a heroine’s journey based on her work with women in therapy. But when she showed it to Campbell in 1983, he reportedly dismissed the idea, telling her:

“Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

How passive is that, eh?

Yeah, I agree with Murdock, not Campbell, but it was only from Sacha Black, on The Rebel Podcast episode in which she interviewed Gail Carriger on The Heroine’s Journey that my eyes were opened. So Murdock in the 90s wrote her book, for people to use as a model for their own behaviour, to improve their own lives.

Carriger is the author of The Parasol Protectorate series, starting with Soulless, a whimsical steampunkish paranormal romance thriller. (I love the whole series.)

Most of what I know about this topic I learned from listening to the Gail Carriger interview, who has just published her first (and she quips, hopefully her only) non-fiction book, The Heroine’s Journey. She said she’d been waiting for someone else to write about The Heroine’s Journey for fiction writers, but eventually realised if she didn’t write it, no one might, so she rolled up her sleeves and set to work. Also, because Murdock’s book was from a Jungian Archetype standpoint, that concerned Carriger because she felt such analysis often conflates biological sex and gender, whereas the two journey types are really genderless.

In the interview, they start discussing the topic at around the 24 minute mark. It’s worth listening to. In it, Carriger explains that in The Heroine’s Journey, there are big differences in purpose, approach, strength, motivation, and ending.

Key differences:

Carriger says (after warning that what she’s about to say will cause a ‘psychological break’ in people’s minds!), that a heroine’s strength is the ability to ask for help from others. Western culture has real trouble in seeing the ability to ask for help as a strength. But that ability lies at the heart of networking, and making connections.

A heroine’s goal isn’t Power, but Networking, Connection: reuniting with someone taken from her.

A heroine’s motivation is not revenge or to right a wrong, but restoration or connection.

Her approach isn’t to take the offensive, but through communication and information gathering. She’s a builder and a general, self-aware enough to know when to ask for help.

A hero’s end is usually poignant isolation, in power. The heroine’s is usually happy, surrounded by family and friends.

The hero’s power comes from his innate abilities and strengths, but the heroine is strengthened by her network of allies and her connections. I think I’m struggling with this concept too, since I had to remind myself of the truth that one twig is easily broken, but a tightly bound bunch of them is super strong. Or that ‘old boys’ networks’ can form powerful groups. The more you look at it, the more obviously true it is.

Carriger noted that a heroine is weakened by isolation from her network, and that often, a Heroine’s Journey story ends with the restoration of connections.

In her book, she gives pithy but flippant definitions of each type of Journey in the Introduction:

The Hero’s:

Increasingly isolated protagonist stomps around prodding evil with pointy bits, eventually fatally prods baddie, gains glory and honour.

The Heroine’s:

Increasingly networked protagonist strides around with good friends, prodding them and others on to victory, together.

Note: neither Journey is gendered: e.g. Harry Potter is a Heroine’s Journey. Carriger noted that if as an author your heroine is struggling and the plot is stalling it may be because you keep putting the heroine in isolation, cutting her off from her network. That’s what you do in the Hero’s Journey to force him to draw on his core strength, but for the heroine it cuts her off from her core strength. So if this is happening it may be because you’re trying to force your heroine’s story into a Hero’s Journey structure.

Three beats: Descent, Search, Ascent

The Descent (involuntary withdrawal)

1. Broken network (something taken away)

2. Pleas ignored

3. Abdication of Power

4. Family Offers Aid

– Isolation and Danger –

The Search (aided by companions)

5. (Goes into) Disguise, Subversion (Hiding)

6. Surrogate Family

7. Visit to the Underworld

8. Delegation, Networking, Information Gathering

The Ascent (structured reunion)

– The Compromise –

9. Negotiation for Reunification

10. Revenge & Glory Irrelevant

11. Network Established or Rebuilt

Of course, as I listened, I was asking myself “Is Leeth’s journey a Hero’s one, or a Heroine’s?”, and realised (yeah, a bit of an epiphany): it’s both. Individually each book is a Hero’s Journey, but the series as a whole will be a Heroine’s Journey. That feels both correct and good to me. I’m writing the series by the seat of my pants, but this structure flows from Leeth’s deepest motivations: her need to belong and her hunger for acceptance and love. So of course that’s going to play out across the series as a whole.

Further reading

Some good references I found while writing this were Carriger’s book (The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers,and Fans of Pop Culture or the book description page on her web site), and for writers I think that’s the most helpful reference.

A much shorter look at the topic for storytellers is Why Screenwriters Should Embrace The Heroine’s Journey, aimed especially at screenwriters. It uses the film Wonder Woman as an example of its ten stages of the Heroine’s Journey – with nifty chart.

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroine%27s_journey gives a reasonable overview, pointing out Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s version of the heroine’s journey (which is set up as The Heroine Journeys Project, “Exploring and Documenting Life-Affirming Alternatives to the Hero’s Journey”.

Another article good article is Julia Blair’s The Heroine’s Journey: Examples, Archetypes, and Infographic. In it, she notes that the Hero’s Journey is rooted in ancient myths that no longer completely fit the modern world. Her article looks at the topic from several angles, including Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, noting that the heroine typically faces challenges from higher up that pyramid of needs. (Also interesting is that she sees the film Wonder Woman as following the basic shape of the Hero’s Journey, just with a female protagonist. I don’t agree.)

Maureen Murdock breaks her version of the Heroine’s Journey (for self-improvement differently):

1. Separation from the Feminine

2. Identification with the Masculine and Gathering of Allies

3. Road or Trials and Meeting the Ogres and Dragons

4. Experiencing the Boon of Success. (The Hero’s Journey normally ends here.)

5. Heroine Awakens to Feelings of Spiritual Aridity/Death.

6. Initiation and Descent to the Goddess.

7. Heroine Urgently Yearns to Reconnect with the Feminine.

8. Heroine Heals the Mother/Daughter Split.

9. Heroine Heals the Wounded Masculine Within.

10. Heroine Integrates the Masculine and Feminine.

A Novel Ending

A funny thing happened on the way to the ending…

I’m loving my new being-an-author career, despite my inability to earn a living from it. (Yet?)

One of the things I enjoy is that each book feels like it comes with its own unique challenges.  I hope that means I’m learning as I go along.

For the current book in my Leeth Dossier series, Lost Girl (#5), there were two challenges.  The first was my feeling that on the subject of plot, I fly too much by the seat of my pants, so the whole journey from start to end is like a billy-cart racing downhill out of control.  Exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking.

Looking back through my revision control files, I deduce I started writing the Lost Girl segment of the story back in Apr/May 2009.  I wrote a chunk more in Jan 2015 before posting the chapters for review on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror over a few months and receiving valuable feedback.  By Oct 2015 it had grown to about 25,000 words.  I think that was when I set it aside to devote all my energy to completing the earlier books in the series.

That took five years.

So, for book #5 I was starting with a broad idea of the story, 25,000 words of draft, and thanks to a discussion with Jon Marshall one night, a good feeling for the theme of the novel.  I also wanted to try a hybrid approach to plotting.

Pantser or Plotter?

I love the organic surprises and creativity that comes from flying by the seat of my pants, but at the same time, having watched his video Misconceptions About Rewriting, and from my own experience in algorithmic development, I deeply understood the value in at least high-level planning.  So I hoped that creating the bones of a plot might work well, since it would only be a sketchy outline and thus pretty painless to change it if the story started going in a different direction.

I started reading John Truby’s “The Anatomy of Story” in early 2019, reaching a quarter of the way through before getting distracted. (I see there’s also a video interview here.)  The book and advice is fine, but it wasn’t sparking any flames for me and I set it aside.  (I do intend to return to it and finish reading it though.)

I’d downloaded a free writing book from Daniel David Wallace titled “How to Write Better Sentences”, and watched some of his videos, and liked them, so when he offered a course on his character-driven plotting course in December 2019 I decided to sign up for it.  I did that diligently from mid Dec 2019 to end of Jan 2020, and was very happy with the outcome.  I had lots of ideas for how the plot would unfold, all of course driven by the characters, which is how I have to write.

The problem that remained was that I only had a satisfying end.  I think you also need the ending to be unpredictable.  I (still) don’t know how you plan that.  For me it’s just happened by luck or inspiration, and I was still in the same position, lacking that final piece of the puzzle.

As I’ve written on several occasions now, I’ve really come to trust Unconscious Thought Theory.  It’s an excellent way to use the full power of your mind and surprise yourself.  So I carried on writing, always with the lightly-plotted ending in mind, and things flowed along pretty well.

Now, because the World Science Fiction Convention was to be held in New Zealand in July/Aug 2020, a place I’d wanted to visit and a convention that seems exciting, I planned to attend.  I booked my travel and accommodation, with the goal of publishing the book late July and maybe even launching it or promoting it in some way at the WorldCon.  To do that I needed to send the MS to Dave at ThEditors.com by E/April.

So I was trying hard to meet a deadline of E/March to have a good 1^st draft of the MS.  I was extremely lucky to be little affected by the unprecedented Australian bushfires of 2019, but no one could remain unmoved by those events - from the heroism of our fireys and communities ( (even this Aussie speculative fiction anthology put together for fire charities: Stories of Hope), to the jaw-dropping failures of our so-called political leader to actually lead.

There was also the ongoing drama of the Democratic run-up toward the 2020 US presidential election, which I had grown addicted to (since the US has an inordinate impact on world affairs, and I could see what a turning point the 2020 election could be, with luck).  Then of course, the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, making the insignificance of my own efforts even clearer.  Now, I may not be as stubborn as Leeth, but I am stubborn, so I carried on.

Like the period after the death of my wife Stella in Dec 2014, my writing sustained me and kept me positive. So for that reason as much as any I stuck to my plans.

Which brings me to the part of the story which most surprised me — and in the end delighted me.

How did it go in the end?

Approaching my deadline, I had set myself a (120,000) word count limit to try to hold myself to, to keep the book a manageable size for all concerned.  And as the days fell away and March 31 approached, it looked like I might just do it.  But when the days dropped from three to two to one and I arrived at the cusp of the ending, I’d run out of time and still didn’t know fully what the ending would be.

Partly this was just having confidence in my unconscious to pull a rabbit out of the hat; partly it was the belief that if I didn’t know what the ending would be, it might mean that when (if?) it did arrive it would also surprise a reader; and partly it was having faith in my characters.  I also had an interesting mix of actors there at the ending.  There was the potential to have… (counting…) seven major players in the scene at the end.  Unfortunately that meant there was a huge range of ways the ending could play out.

So I think there was a certain amount of choice-paralysis at work, although it’s also possible my unconscious was simply beavering away at the complex problem I’d set it.  Of course I was also worried I might not be able to pull it off at all.  Would the ending be good enough?  I didn’t want just an exciting one, I wanted it to have emotional depth too.  So the stakes felt high to me.

And still I couldn’t seem to make much progress.  Here’s how the last several days went:

March 29: Had reached the climactic scene — I mean, all the players were on stage together.
March 30: Wrote 3700 words of the scene.
March 31: Day off, visiting Mum.
April 1: (astute readers will see this is after E/Mar) Strangely blocked, until I forced myself to design the physical location. Then: +600 words.
April 2: Wrote 3,600 words and halfway through the “action” part of the ending.
April 3: Finished the “action” part (wrote 1000 words).
April 4: Still didn’t know how it would end. I simply considered each actor and let them do their thing. Various agendas in play, conflicting, and stage fully set and conducive to just letting the movie roll. Each one being clever and true to themselves, a dramatic race to the finish with real challenges and emotional drama. At the very end of the day (11:50pm), I felt delighted. My characters had thrilled me and moved me. I’d been biting my nails more than once, and in tears more than once. 5,100 words and the MS was basically complete.

I’ve never experienced anything like that last day.  My feeling was one of excitement and satisfaction.  I made some small additions while cooking dinner (9pm), and when I sat down with it I realised I didn’t want to watch any TV as I ate, I instead wanted to dwell on those final scenes, to savour and digest it all.  I suppose it felt a bit like I’d just stepped off an emotional roller-coaster!

I still have thirty one small gaps to fill or issues to check, and then lots of work to polish it up enough to be ready to send to my editor, so I can’t really relax much yet.  But the weight on my shoulders of finishing that critical 1^st draft, and perhaps as importantly, writing a ‘good’ ending, is over.  So a lot of unacknowledged stress has fallen away, and I must say I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

I’ve written this because the experience felt really special, and I wanted to capture it. It was nothing like I’d had for the previous books.  Once again, I feel I learned a lot.  My fingers are crossed in the hope that readers will have the same opinion!

Overcoming Obstructions to Writing

(Photo by Travis Saylor from Pexels)

Just a quick post to share something small I learned about how my mind works when it comes to writing.  For the last week I’ve made no progress on Lost Girl (Leeth Dossier #5).  There were everyday tasks which I felt needed to be done (like coffee: harvest time won’t wait), but that wasn’t enough to explain it all.  Those tasks only took up the time and energy for a portion of each day.

I’ve written about the Unconscious Thought Theory several times now, and I know for certain it’s heavily involved in my own creative process.  (I strongly suspect it’s true for everyone, but I don’t know that.)  So I know a lot of the work happens in the unconscious.  I also noticed previously that I was blocked when my conscious plan for how a story would unfold didn’t agree with what was developing in my unconscious.  In hindsight, I felt my unconscious threw up obstacles to stop me heading down that wrong path I had consciously planned.

I also know the neuroscience says the unconscious parts of the brain have something like fifty ‘processing units’ running in parallel. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a finite number.

Anyway, what happened was that tonight I tackled a task that had been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now.  (Selecting and booking a hotel for the world SF convention next year in Wellington, New Zealand, to be precise.)  I felt some relief as soon as I’d done so.

What I realised later however was that when I started to think about the next scene in Lost Girl, my mind didn’t instantly shy away and offer up a distraction.  Then I recognised that mental shying away was something I’d learned to do a long time ago to protect myself from worry about a situation I had no control over.  At that point I finally put two and two together and realised my unconscious was trying to solve the hotel booking problem and didn’t want to spare time for book creation.  Each time I tried it distracted me in a non-creative direction.  Sneaky, wise unconscious!

So, if you’re finding yourself blocked, go looking for a cause and then tackle that.  There’s probably a lot of different things that could be the issue.  Two I’ve discovered are 1) your plan is wrong, and 2) you have something else that needs your unconscious attention first.  The unconscious is great at making patterns and weighing up combinations of possibilities, but it has limits!

Writing, Editing, Creating

I wasn't planning to write a blog article, but felt after yesterday I wanted to make some notes while the recent events were fresh in my mind. I'm not sure what this piece will be about, but I guess it's going to touch on creativity (also see The Creative Process and the Unconscious, Where Ideas Come From) and An update on Creativity and the Unconscious), blocks, editing, and book 4 progress.

Yesterday was one of those wonderful writing days that sometimes happen, so this is partly about what led up to that.

I haven't written any articles for a while because I feel I'm way behind schedule on where I wanted to be for this fourth book. I had felt pretty comfortable that I could have it ready about mid-2018, but that turned out to be wildly optimistic. I'll lay out the reasons why, and let you see what you think of them.

I think I started writing the MS in 1991, and completed that 1^st draft near the end of 1993. I just realised that might be a fun image to share… here's a photo of the MS.

I used mostly used sheets of paper that had been printed. In fact, on the left you can find a draft of a page from my wife Stella's PhD thesis on the Percy Folio.

In my first draft of the start of Leeth's story, it opened on the scene where Dr Harmon is in the office of the Mother Superior of the orphanage, looking for a suitable subject to adopt.

Anyway, the MS went through many stages — the next one being typing it up on the computer, in the troff/MM markup. I worked on it and polished and edited it, sending it off to little or no response to publishers, and then about ten years later realised the whole second half was full of story — but no plot. So I bit the bullet and cut it in half. Then it seemed a little short, and I still felt it was lacking something. The Godsson-Disten idea came from somewhere to fill the gap, and I developed that and wove it in to the story. At the end, the MS was back to its original, pre-halved size.

I still kept editing and polishing, improving my craft. I fed that whole MS, chapter by chapter, through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, and learned so much from the many very helpful reviews I received, and equally, from writing reviews of other writers' submissions there.

Learning your craft by writing a long novel is a hard way to do it — you need to fix stylistic errors through a much larger mass than a short story — but I rarely enjoy reading or writing short fiction. So I kept at it.

The point of this historical digression is to explain the first couple of special problems I faced with book 4. The first was that I hadn't touched (even read) this half of the original MS in about 15 years, so there was a reasonable amount of work just to apply what I'd learned in the meantime. A bigger problem was the lack of plot. Now, the large anti-emotion plot arc definitely helped, and tied nicely into what was already there — but even so, it needed more. There was also the fear that maybe the old MS simply might not be good enough? I had little idea what to expect when I sat down to read it again, but found myself pleasantly surprised: it was kind of nice, I felt. Leeth had grown and changed more, however, thanks to all the additional trials I'd put her through while developing the 1^st three books, so stretches had to be rewritten: what was there was more the Leeth you saw straight out of the Institute: no d'Artelle spirit confrontation, nothing with Disten, and, a really huge difference — no Marcie in her life.

Due to the need to write a short piece for my local writers' group, the Marrickville Writers Corner, I thought that one incident briefly passed over in the MS deserved some expansion: the heartbreaking Luiz assassination. And while writing that piece, while Leeth crept through the dark apartment in shock at what had just happened, she heard a creepy scratching coming from a drawer in Luiz's desk. I had no idea what was coming, just that it connected to Luiz's nasty past, but that led to the black dagger. That tiny seed germinated into the other major plot element for book 4.

The title came surprisingly easily: Violent Causes having several meanings, all of which were applicable for this book, so that was one element that I didn't have a big struggle with. But with all the things that needed addressing, and my desire to keep as much as I could of what was there, somehow even getting to the stage of the MS ready to send off to Dave at ThEditors.com) seemed harder. I'd arranged a slot, and as the deadline approached I found I was struggling to meet it. In the end I sent it off before I'd done my usual 2^nd polish, which was stupid. I'd told myself it would make it easier for me to cut things if I hadn't made over-polished them. Instead, it just made more work for poor Dave.

And when I received his detailed critique, he had some big issues with some of the early sections, and lots of the early chapters had a lot of small issues, too. (Oops: note to self: never skip the polishing!) After some very fruitful discussions back and forth, we got a handle on them and a plan for what I should adjust, and I carried on. And after a month of hard work, I was halfway through Dave's comments, and it was the end of July. Sigh.

The Marcie Problem

There was also one major extra piece of plot to work in, involving Marcie, and a key point in that was to be Marcie's inclusion into one scene. The problem was, that scene was kind of tightly scripted, dramatic, and I could see no way to work Marcie in without disrupting a sequence I'd been looking forward to making concrete, for at least fifteen years. In fact, I let this scene block my writing for at least a year, because I wanted to work it out so I could move on to the next piece of the story. This was long before I understood the role of the unconscious, and the simple trick of just writing it down, or skipping past the block. Instead, I'd sit down, and try to work out the scene in my head… and eventually fall asleep, and have used up all the time I'd set aside for writing, with visible results of zero.

Yet here I was, in 2018, with that scene looking and working like a dream — I think it would make a great piece in a movie — and now I needed to add Marcie, in a significant way. So I worked my way closer to this with, not exactly a growing fear, since I had confidence in UTT and my unconscious… but some trepidation, let's say.

And then on Monday I was at the brink: the next thing to do was what I had begun thinking of as The Marcie Problem. Tuesday I visited Mum, and saw the Equalizer 2 with her and a friend (hi Jacqui!), and then had afternoon tea and dinner with Mum, and watched an episode of The Avengers (courtesy of my brother Jonathan: B&W, John Steed and Honor Blackman as Dr Cathy King, not the Marvel Avengers), followed by the Hammer Horror film The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. (He seemed tall. I looked him up: he was: 1.96m, 6'5"!)

So, no writing on Tuesday. A whole day with ‘no progress'. But I wasn't too worried, since panic and fear are your enemies and I knew I was just giving my unconscious more time to come up with something good. And it's always a great day, visiting Mum; not to mention, relaxing and having a great meal to boot!

So, Wednesday arrives, and still no breakthrough. I could also tell I wasn't going to get it without a bit more positive action. And now we come to the nub of this article, and what drove me to write it. Because this time, I was more sensitive to what was going on in my own mind.

I remembered my own advice, of using pencil and paper to write stuff down so you're not wasting mental energy juggling ideas in your mind while trying to create new ones. So I took my little hand-made A6-sized notepad with its 4-leaf folded ‘pages' clipped to it, and my trusty propelling pencil. There are some nuances there: that style of pencil, using 2B leads, means your letters are crisp and sharp and the physical act is effortless; and the hand-sized pad means it's not flexing and flopping and you're fighting to support it. It just fits in your hand, you can lie back on the sofa, comfy and warm, and think, and write as ideas spring to mind.

All trying to make it as frictionless as possible when the ideas start flowing, you see?

But I still didn't have my idea. What I did have was some issues. So I started writing down stuff, and also thinking. Not rushing myself. Not stressing myself because I wasn't actually writing the story. Just trying to make the solution coalesce out of whatever soup of ideas was floating around in my head.

What started happening was somehow like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces of the picture didn't exist until I thought of them, and it wasn't two dimensional but three. The depth part is not especially important, but the time dimension was critical. I started with asking "How would Marcie plausibly end up in this scene?"

(By the way, I'm going to avoid talking about this in a way that gives any spoilers.)

Marcie's appearance needed to fit in with a major plot strand we'd agreed on, that involved Harmon. But how would he know? So, that meant Nelson gave him the info. And then Harmon needed to persuade someone else. And that was kind of interesting. And then Marcie herself needed to find out enough to wind up in the scene. So I wrote that little sequence, which worked very plausibly and nicely I felt, and did good things for the plot, tension, and pacing. I now had the background of my jigsaw, in the sense of both the chain of events that led up to it, and of course I already had the tightly-written scene where Marcie would appear.

Her appearance also had to be significant: it'd be pretty weak if she just waved from the sidelines. Dave had suggested Marcie's appearance should cause problems for Leeth, so that was kind of the ‘shape' of one piece. But I still didn't see how to fit her in.

Now, I'd had one thought, too, that disturbed me: "if Marcie is here, and X is here too, then Scary-Y could easily result, and blow everything to pieces." But at the same time, they say you're supposed to place your characters at risk. Yikes! So that was percolating in the back of my mind.

1^st Wednesday of the month was my MWC meetup, so I gave a quick polish to a scene I'd written the week before, and headed off for a very convivial and inspiring evening at Where's Nick. But I still didn't have the Marcie Problem solved.

Thursday arrived, and I kept feeling, for some reason, that Marcie wasn't going to go alone into this scene. I kept imagining someone with her. Which just complicated things, I felt, and I didn't want to do it. But in the end, since I was just lying on the sofa and not exactly making massive progress, I shrugged and decided to explore that. I asked myself "How does Marcie go from where she is, to here?" and just started imagining and jotting down some points. That all seemed pretty natural, and that would put Marcie at the required place, with this other person. And their reaction to my smoothly-scripted scene would definitely fit into new-Harmon-plot-item-Z, and advance that.

Then Scary-Y idea popped back in my head.

And I suddenly saw that Scary-Y could easily unfold after the smoothly-scripted scene. And with that, the problem was solved. The solution wasn't to force Marcie and her scene to meld into the existing scene: it was to let that follow on and develop from the scene!

This definitely felt a Eureka moment.

So then I just let the characters do their stuff. All the different parties with their own agendas, colliding and reacting. Let me just have a count ([Spoilers stripped out]): total of 9 parties. And so events flowed, and the drama climbed, and Leeth pushed back, and things started spiralling into dangerous areas. Maybe half of it was just in my head, the other half the occasional explanatory note written down so I wouldn't forget, or a line or two of dialogue. My notes occupied less than two A6 pages of my tiny writing, but I had enough to set off and I was eager to do so. I broke for dinner, but basically wrote from 4pm till 1am, a bit over 4k words. Sitting back, I summarised it in the flush of excitement as "very plausible, didn't change the existing scene much at all, upped the tension, fulfilled more expectations, causes more troubles down the track, and also has some laughs and more character development, all while advancing the plot!"

And it was time for bed. Looking at the page, I saw that I just needed to write the emotional aftermath, and in due course explore the repercussions of what happened. "I'll just write a little bit, to start that," I thought. Then sat back and saw it was 2am. I'd summarise that effort as taking what had happened to a whole new level. Leeth once again surprised me; but this time, herself, too, and even scared herself.

So I ended the day feeling high, extremely pleased with how it all worked out, and of course relieved to have the Marcie Problem solved and the pressure/stress removed.

I won't have a chance to do any editing or writing today, and I'll be taking a day off tomorrow, so no progress then, either. And I still have the other half of the MS critique to work through. But I'm feeling much more relaxed now. Hopefully, there should only be small bumps in the road ahead.

So, what's next? I hope to have my editing and polishing done by around the end of August. Hopefully I'll find a slot in Dave's schedule for a 2^nd round critique, and then with any luck a much easier job for both him and myself following that. Mirella is on the job with the cover design (again, with another idea mainly from Dave), and then I need to try to do some proper marketing for a month or two before releasing this one. So my guess is it will be ready near the end of the year.

Better late than half-baked.

An update on Creativity and the Unconscious

Why have I written this article now? Well, I've been reading and reviewing and doing small fixes to the half of the Leeth Dossier MS I'd set aside in… (goes away and checks some file dates…) yikes: it may have been 2008, 2004, or even 2003!

Anyway, back then, whenever it was, I'd just re-read a print out of the whole MS and been horrified to realise the whole 2^nd half had plenty of story and action — but no plot!

So I cut it in half; then realised the 1^st half was now a bit short and could also do with some strengthening, and came up with the Godsson/Disten plot. From that point I left the 2^nd half lying there, collecting electronic dust.

Anyway, with Books 1 — 3 published, it seemed sensible to go back to the half of the original MS I'd set aside, that followed straight on. So in October 2017 I think, I brushed off the dusty electrons and poured the MS into the word processor and started reading and reviewing. It went very slowly for a while, as I carefully polished as I went, before I realised that was silly: if I did decide I had to throw away some or all of it, such loving attention and effort would only make it harder for me to ‘kill my darlings'.

Excuses, excuses. So I just corrected minor stuff and made notes about issues that would require more effort to deal with. What with suddenly needing to prepare for Christmas — not to mention a years-overdue de-cluttering of my house — as well as allowing myself a holiday and time to spend on some other non-writing projects, progress was slow. I eventually finished my read-through on Feb 21^st, 2018.

At the end, I realised my assessment from 10-15 years earlier had been correct. On top of that I found other structural flaws, all of which I felt might be corrected through ‘the right' plot adjustments. I mean, the 1^st three books did lead smoothly to #4 (in particular by continuing a major plot arc from them), but overall I felt the plot was weak, with several strands that felt disconnected. It also had pacing problems too, I thought.

Overall though I still liked it, and despite the flaws, felt this could be knocked into a pretty nice shape. In particular, my gut was telling me that the right modifications to the plot would fix most of the issues I saw.

UTT to the rescue. So, with the need for some creative thinking, and having had good success with the Unconscious Thought Theory in the past (see my older blog article: Where Ideas Come From), I turned to it again.

For the UTT, the first step is to steep your rational mind in all the facts. That was what I'd just accomplished by re-reading the old MS.

But the subconscious is hungry for relevant ideas, so as different thoughts about the story and plot occurred to me — during the embarrassingly long period I spent re-reading the MS — I'd made notes I could refer to later.

Write stuff down. That's a key point: don't rely on your memory. If you don't record the ideas, you'll waste mental energy remembering them or worrying about them. Just write them down instead so you can re-read them when you find yourself in a hole.

Clear the decks of clutter. For the intense parts of the creative thinking process — the parts where you make the act of creation your top priority and give yourself time exclusively for that — you need clear mental space for a problem requiring a creative solution.

So because you need to some clear mental space, write down the problem and all the issues you can think of: like constraints, goals, characters involved, what's at stake… etc. etc. — everything you need to take into account. If you think of more problems, simply note them down as you think of them. These are all grist for your unconscious mill.

Don't get daunted. The funny thing is, that although the number of problems might look scary, each issue is just another piece of the puzzle. In a way, it adds to the richness of the solution; it adds to the stuff your unconscious can use to create an arrangement that makes them all fit.

Give yourself space. Get rid of distractions as far as you can: set them aside and give yourself time. Do this as often as you need to, in each attempt to solve the problem or come up with the needed idea(s). In other words: you can solve these problems a little bit at a time.

Try and try again. You don't need to solve the problem in a single session: you can decide, "Hmm, this might help", or "That might be part of the answer" — so, note those ideas down, too. Sometimes the solution will turn out to be a jigsaw that needs to be assembled. Sooner or later though you'll probably start sensing the big picture: and then the pieces of the jigsaw will start appearing in short order.

Trust your gut. Your gut will often tell you "This idea feels right" — trust it. Think about it, and around it. ‘Your gut' is your Unconscious talking to you. Don't ignore it!

Don't doubt yourself. At this stage, where you're not sure how much of the MS should remain for the final book (since it depends on how big a plot change or other correction is), it can be scary. You could easily spend time thinking about worst case scenarios — like tossing the whole MS! — instead of trusting your gut instincts and the hard work you put in.

Focus on what needs to be cut or added to turn your rough diamond into a fascinating piece of jewellery. At this point, negative thoughts are just distractions. So treat them like everything else: boil them down to their essence and add them to the list of Problems To Be Solved by your creative thinking.

Recording ideas and thinking. For me in this process of creation, some of the time I'll do parts of it on the computer. I'll type up notes, grouping related ideas near each other so I'll tend to reread them all when I revisit one; I'll draw up little timelines (maybe with gaps and question marks: "How does the Department discover this?" or "How do the bad guys learn that?"); I'll sometimes make mindmaps so the connections are graphical and not just linear/textual — and I'll include the holes and question marks, and maybe even colour-code stuff.

But some of the thinking I'll do on paper with pencil, lying down on the sofa. Because for some of it, the computer becomes a distraction. But the pencil and paper is important, because as soon as I have even part of an idea, I can write it down to free up my attention from remembering stuff so I can concentrate on creating stuff.

My review/read-through: While I had been (too slowly!) doing my read-through/review, I'd been:

• Making notes of ideas that might help;
• For my local writers' group (the Marrickville Writers' Corner — hi everyone!) I'd also written a few pieces that I felt might fit into Book 4 (Violent Causes), or might just be background events not to be included;
• Making notes of problems;
• Forming my overall semi-objective assessment of the MS as a whole.

So I used all these things, plus I re-read my quite large file of random ideas and notes, and the fresh ideas I'd had over the last few months. Lo and behold: a couple of months earlier I'd had a key idea which fitted very well with what I needed! It still wasn't quite right, but it felt like it could form the backbone of the plot strengthening, and so it was back to the Unconscious Thought Theory.

There you have it. With all that fresh in my mind, I thought I'd capture some of the process and get off my backside and write this combined UTT update and status report.

Ah… I suppose that means I should probably write a little status report, shouldn't I? Well, the MS now has 90k words, which at this stage I think I'll be keeping. I'm not sure how many extra scenes I need, or how much editing is needed to fix the other issues I've identified, but my feeling is that it might need as little as 10k words of new scenes (maybe 20k?). So I think it won't be too much longer before I can start trying to book an editing time-slot with Dave at ThEditors.com! I should know in a week or two.

Double book launch for The Leeth Dossier sf/f series

Well, Saturday was the big day, and my sister made a little video of the people speaking at the launch.  I hadn't done the whole "artistic release" business or gained approval in advance from attendees to film them, so it's a video of just the emceee, Jon Marshall, the guest speaker, Sandra Wigzell of Book Expo Australia, and myself, with a short reading from Wild Thing, at the end.  (From the scene that introduces Sara/Leeth, in which Dr Alex Harmon "acquires" her for his research.)

Considering that I hadn't explained how to operate the camera, I think my big sister did a fantastic job (thanks, Lisa!).  The little Canon Ixus170 did a pretty good job, too: it went from completely out of focus to nicely in-focus within 20 seconds, all on its own we think.  For the first 20 seconds, Lisa was getting it framed correctly, so I've replaced that portion of the video with a still shot taken by Alfred Bellanti (thank you, Alfred!) who came along with Lama Jabr (of Xana Publishing & Marketing), who has been very helpful to me, and Gabriella Kovac, Ehssan, and I think perhaps Andrew A., and others too.

Apologies also for missing the first few seconds of Jon's intro, in which he thanked everyone, and went on to say that because I dreamed up Leeth for an RPG campaign that we played for about five years in the early 90s, he'd known Leeth for a long time: longer than her age of around eighteen (by the end of Vol 2).

I've hesitated to admit the detailed genesis for Leeth, since my own experience of reading novelisations of role-playing game campaigns is that they've been uniformly pretty awful.  I feel that this (turning an RPG campaign into a novel) is what lay behind the only failure(s) - to my mind - of my literary hero, Roger Zelazny.  But some things from an RPG and a novel are in complete agreement - and that's the characters, first and foremost. And secondly, the world.  Or at least, the feel of the world: I completely replaced the RPG world with one of my own creation.

These fictional worlds shared the same blending of magic and science, and were set in similar time periods in our future; there's even some similarities in the mix of races, and how magic works. (Which is based on real world ideas of the hermetic and shamanic forms of magic, with interesting bits and pieces of Carlos Castaneda's curious experiences stirred in to spice things up.)  I think Shadowrun was a bit more dystopian than my own near-future world: for me, there are lots of good bits, too.  I think of it as a "mixtopian" future.

Some games really spark, and work brilliantly; our Shadowrun campaign was like that.  The character I played for some years was my most fun character ever; and his ending was as traumatic as it was dramatic.  Thinking about it now, I rather suspect that Leeth was my way of coping with that loss: I set myself the goal of inventing a character who would be even more fun and original and challenging to play than Mike d'Angelo - a big ask!

I took along some "show and tell" for the launch:

• My original hand-written MS (of about 400 sheets of closely-written, mostly-A4 sheets of paper, each carefully numbered).
• A fake scientific (sociological) paper about the disenfranchised people, the cast-offs of the advanced and successful society only a few miles away, who lived in the shattered and now undesirable parts of the city.  I did this half for fun, and half to clarify in my own mind how this second society functioned.
• Leeth's original character notes, and the formal "character sheet" which included an illustration of what Leeth looked like, in the persona she was operating under for the campaign.  When you eventually see "Bonnie" turn up, you'll know I've finally started to delve into some of the actual experiences from the campaign!  I think some of the conversations may well appear in the books.  You'll then be able to judge whether or not I succeed in my approach to novelising a few parts from the game.
• Notes on the personnel and purpose of the Institute for Paranormal Dysfunction, along with a map of the building and grounds.
• Notes on the personnel and purpose of the Bureau for Internal Development (or at least, the ultra-secret Department concealed within it).
• A kind of graph or time-line which I titled "The Genesis of Leeth", in discussion with my step-daughter Leonie ("Do you think it should have a title, Luke?") at about 2pm on the day of the launch.  It showed the thousands of hours of work put in to the creation of Leeth across the years, with significant events and milestones marked.

Anyway, I doubt that anyone really wants to know that much about all this.  And I've probably also put this on the wrong blog: it should be over on All About Leeth, not here on my blog on self-publishing

So let's leave it at that.  Thanks once again to everyone who was able to come along to the launch in person, and who made it such a happy event for me.  And best wishes to those who wanted to come along, but for whom circumstances or obligations conspired against them.

Wild Thing Book Launch!

I had planned to organise a book launch for Wild Thing, early in May, 2016. But after some discussion with Elizabeth Allen, the events organiser for Gleebooks, I've altered my plans significantly.

It's now pencilled in for the afternoon of Saturday 9th of July, upstairs at Gleebooks (49, Glebe Pt Rd, Glebe, NSW). So that's half the change. The other half of the change is that instead of being a launch for Wild Thing alone, it's now going to be a launch for the series(The Leeth Dossier), with a double launch for Wild Thing, and the sequel, Shadow Hunt, which will be available at the end of June: barring disasters!

So I thought I'd better update this post with the new information (as of 4pm, April 14th). I will update this again with information about how to RSVP. If 50-80 people can attend, that would be ideal. Books will be available; Wild Thing will be $20 (5"x8" pbk). But by then I should have the 4"x7" edition available, too. I don't know how long Shadow Hunt will be, but both Dave and I are worried that the current 547pp is probably too long! Because I don't yet know the length, I don't yet know how to price vol. 2.

The poll, over on the right here, was to try to estimate how many people might attend if it were held in May. Since that's now been substantially re-scheduled, I'd just like to thank those who voted, but I'll need to take it down, since the RSVPs will have to be directed to Gleebooks so they can estimate food and drink amounts (and advise me of the number of copies they'd wish to have available on the day). I'll update this blog post with information about how to do that, when I have the info.

The idea of the launch is that I'll have some printed copies for sale (enough to go around for those who want to buy one, at A$20 a pop), and sign them if wanted, and to have some sort of little talk, and nibbles like wine and cheese. Just something low key.

The Wild Thing launch was delayed because I'd been concentrating the great majority of my energy on preparing the manuscript for Book 2, Shadow Hunt, to send to my editor Dave at ThEditors in the 2nd week of April. I sent the MS off to ThEditors.com in two parts: the 1st half at 9:30am (UK time), and I finished and sent the 2nd half at 4pm, UK time, April 14th. So I claim that means I met my deadline!

I've updated my notes here about what I call the "Oomph analysis" I did along the way. This is my now-being-invented analytical tool to try to distance myself from my own writing, to see if I can see where problems or weaknesses occur, standing back from it a bit. The idea grew from a question my brother Matthew asked me recently, when I mentioned that Dave, in his original critique around this time in 2015, said the pace had slowed in one section (of what was then the second half of a single novel). Matthew asked: "Do you ever graph the pacing of the book?"

That seemed an excellent question, and it instantly made me wonder "Why just pacing? Why not consider how moving a chapter is, or how funny, or how much it advances the plot, or ...?" My idea was to invent a bunch of categories I felt were important for my book, and then give each chapter a score out of five, in each category. Then colour code them and graph them all in parallel, across the entire novel. I discussed the idea with a couple of people, including Dave at ThEditors and Barbara of Amorina Rose and the world of writing, who each thought the idea seemed at least plausible. I'm about halfway through, and it seems to be working.

But how do you use the numbers? Well, I'm still experimenting. It seems like the "oomph" of a passage should drop as it got longer and longer, right; as it keeps going on and on? So therefore you need to reduce the "oomph" rating according to the length. On the other hand, doing that might unfairly weight short passages: if you just divided by the number of pages (N, say), then a 1-page chapter isn't automatically going to have N times the punch. You might even argue that the more beauty, or humour, or whatever, the higher the punch, so it should grow with the length! You see my dilemma. But I can play with different models or formulae once I've done the heavy work of rating it in each category.

Incidentally, for my book, the categories I decided on were: Pace (action), World building, Character development, Plot development, Emotion (moving), Humour, and Tension. I'm also making a one-line summary of each chapter in the spreadsheet I'm tossing all the numbers into. It's partly objective, despite being subjectively-based. Analysing a piece of my own writing to evaluate how funny it is, or how moving, is not that hard. I know there'll be stuff I think is snort-with-laughter funny, but which others won't "get"; and bits that I find terribly sad, but for which others will just shrug; but the fact that I think it varies means there is some variation there to be seen. (I hope!)

The value of the tool obviously depends on how brutally honest you can be with your own writing. A dishonest writer wouldn't gain much from the technique, though, for sure! ("Wow, look at that: 5s across the board, in every category I wanted a 5, for every chapter!")

I think someone else using the technique on my work would almost certainly give more objective ratings than I will be able to. But as long as I'm closer to an objective rating than to a just-plain-wrong rating, it should work as an analytical tool.

If anyone's interested, here's what the Oomph Analysis looked like at the end of the 2nd read through and revision:

I should say, by around Chapter 60, I was biting my nails, wondering whether the final chapters would be climaxy enough - but I didn't fudge my scoring system, and it came out looking good. (I basically gave myself a 5 for humour if I had several laugh-out-loud moments in the chapter, or on where I really cracked up; similarly, if I cried a fair bit, I gave that chapter a 5 for emotion; and so on.)

Here's what the graph looked like about half-way through my 1st read-through:

The graph above sets the "Oomph" number to set the sum of the seven category scores, divided by square_root(square_root(4+N)), where N is the number of pages and 4 is a fudge factor to prevent over-weighting short chapters as being more "oomph-y". I'm still wondering things like: should I do something that scales up the scores (to give greater weight to high scores); and the idea that the overall oomph perhaps should not jump if you just arbitrarily split a chapter in two (maybe the Oomph of each half-chapter should drop by half)?

At about the two-thirds point, it seemed very hard to see what was happening. I rather suspect that what's happening is that there's a sort of averaging effect going on, that's obscuring things. (Imagine you had a hundred categories: if you just added them up, it'd sort of blur out into a muddy brown, since only a few categories would likely be strongest, as those categories would presumably capture the essence of what you were trying to achieve in that passage.) I wanted to emphasise the high scores, to make them more visible. I did a mental calculation, considering squaring each score before adding them all together, but if I cubed them, then if say a chapter got a rating of 5 (yippee!) in one category, and a 4 in another, and 3s in the others, then the top two categories would total almost 200, and all the rest combined, just 135. That seemed about the right balance, to me. So I added an Oomph^N and set N to 3, and here's what the graph turned into with the scores now exaggerated:

The pattern is nicely emphasised so it's now quite visible: it's easy to see a difference between a 4-rating and a 5-rating, and an overall pattern stands out. I'm encouraged to see that it's rising and falling, and there are rises and falls in different categories too. I can't tell you what it means, but it somehow looks healthy, to me!

Anyway, stay tuned, if you think you may attend my little book launch in Sydney (hopefully upstairs in Gleebooks, on Sat 9th July, in the afternoon), as I'll update this blog post with information about how to RSVP: there will be a link to the launch on their website, where you will be able to RSVP. It will also be possible to RSVP by email to events@gleebooks.com.au, but I'd wait a little before trying that, as it's probably not yet been entered into their system

It was a busy day today: as well as completing the 2nd read through and revision of Shadow Hunt, and sending it off to ThEditors at 2am Sydney time, I got a haircut, organised a date for the book launch for the series, did the weekly shopping, and investigated the cover image issues caused by the winding-up of the site where I'd DollarPhotoClub. Which may be an interesting little extra bit of information to share...

I had licensed a further 91 images that I could choose from, to download, and as part of their closing down, the images have been transferred into Adobe Stock. Today (the final day) was the first day I'd had time available to do this. As part of the transfer, they offered a deal for signing up to Adobe Stock for a year, at a reduced rate. Unfortunately, when I checked the license conditions, they clearly state that you while you do have the right to use the image in printed material, you do not have permission to use the images for Print On Demand. Since I am producing the paperbacks through IngramSpark POD, that sounded like it was a deal-breaker as far as my needs. But I contacted Adobe, and a consultant checked. Unfortunately, it's correct: if you wish to use their images for Print On Demand, you need to purchase an Extended License (as it's considered High Volume), and when I had a little poke about, that meant each image's license costs US$99. So, no, not suitable.

Strangely, too, the owner of the images in Adobe Stock didn't seem to link to the copyright holder for the images, the photographer Pindurin Vasily (the images now claim the "author" is "chesterF"), so I may poke about further and see what's going on there.

Brief status report

A nice lady (Amorina Rose and the world of writing with help from friends) was kind enough to enquire if everything was okay, since I'd gone quiet on this blog. And since I'd publicly declared my intention of publishing in mid-November, I needed to 'fess up and admit that I'd slipped yet another deadline. :-(

So, yes, everything is going very well, in fact. I have a few blog articles I need to write (soon), but my absolute top priority now is getting my book ready for publishing. And that's what I've been doing, and why I haven't blogged for a while. (Strewth: for three weeks!)

In some ways, I've found this round of editing and revising to be harder than the last one. That surprised me. I thought it couldn't very well be more challenging than inventing a major new plot element that fit seamlessly while turning the 1st half of the story into a properly-satisfying novel in its own right - and then writing the 60k words to Make It So. Right?

But Dave at thEditors did another amazing job of critiquing the new version of the 1st-half of the story, now a book-in-itself. Once again, at every level. Which meant I needed not just a bunch of new scenes (about 30k wds, probably more than Dave intended), and having to come to grips with cutting a lot (about 18k wds, probably less than Dave intended!), too; but also addressing I guess somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 line-comments in the MS itself. Covering the range from "dead easy, a few seconds work", to "Hmm, yeah... several hours later...". Along with some major shuffling of scenes and even chapters, which left me in a tangled mess at one point, that took a whole day to straighten out.

From which I've come to suspect that each external-edit will be unique, and bring its own unique challenges. But I'm going to take that as a sign that I'm learning, actually: that I'm finding new mistakes to make, and beginning to see things that were invisible to me before - with Dave's help. (The new things, that is: not the mistakes!)

So I've taken forty minutes to post this quick update. I've addressed all Dave's comments, as best I can, though there are now a bunch of return questions for him. And I'm about 25% of the way through my first polish of all the new (first draft) scenes and snippets I've added. Then will come a day or two of proofreading/polishing, then I'll see what Dave thinks about my remaining questions.

While doing that (and reporting bugs in LibreOffice: none catastrophic), and getting the new (final) cover from Mirella (yay!), and changing my author name from "Luke J. Kendall" to "L. J. Kendall", I realised I couldn't meet my mid-November deadline. But when I sat down and roughly scheduled the next few weeks, I saw that if I aimed to publish now on the anniversary of my wife's death last year, the 11th of December, that would be nicely fitting - as well as giving me a couple of extra days just-in-case.

So that's the new plan, and I really, really don't want to miss that one. But I have a good feeling about this deadline.

Oh, and in the end, despite the more fiery cover with the more vicious dog being better artistically and probably a better choice from the marketing viewpoint, in the end I chose the truer cover which better reflects the story. After all, since I'm self-publishing, I can hardly claim "Sorry, guv'nor. That's the Marketing Department: nothing to do with me, guv'nor!"

Here they are - front:

Grr, Blogger bug? What about if I insert that in a smaller size?...

Okay, no go. How about if I upload it directly...?

and back:

Now: back to work!

Emily Craven's brilliant idea for indie-published authors

I recently connected with Barbara Strickland and had a look around, and a read of, her blog Amorina Rose and the world of writing. There's useful stuff there, and I recommend the site; one link for example lead me to Emily Craven's e-Book Revolution blog, which again has lots and lots of useful information for Indie and self-publishers.

One item for example, happened just as I was discovering the world of book tubers, and found me in an especially receptive frame of mind. So, with that little intro, here is me explaining Emily's brilliant idea, from my point of view:

And just to highlight what people say about video, after I uploaded that to Youtube and shared it to Facebook and so on, I got more comments on the video at Facebook than I've received to any of the drier blog articles here. Which in my mind reinforces the idea that video is more engaging. It reinforced something which Lama Jabr of Xana Publishing & Marketing pointed out in one of her workshops: that Amazon make it easy for authors to include some videos on their Amazon author page.

I think video and text serve very different ends, though there can be a large overlap in the middle (depending on the content, naturally), and each has their pros and cons, but certainly for many kinds of communication, video is far more engaging.

Oh, I should probably add a tip, courtesy of film maker and copywriter Tim Lea (who I met at Book Expo Australia 2015): Google (the Youtube part) and Facebook are very much at war for mindshare in the video space (see his blog: "The Bloody Battle between Facebook and YouTube Part 2"). I think he had figures showing that more video was watched on Facebook than Youtube this year (though he observed that the picture is more complicated than that).

Anyway, Tim Lea's tip, if you want to maximise your brownie points with Facebook and Youtube, is to upload your video directly to each, independently. Don't just upload to Youtube and then link to it from FB: FB won't reward you for doing that. That was just one tip in an interesting talk he presented on some commercial opportunities for writers, related to video. He points out that if the video has dialogue, then it's probably going to benefit from having a writer involved! He shared his presentation with me, and I've made it available here:

(Incidentally, I found how to embed the PDF from here: How to Embed a PDF or Other Document Files in Blogger post. If you see advice where the html code ends with "view?usp=sharing", replace that by "preview" if you want it to work!)

Professional vs Amateur Editing

Control.  One of the pluses of self-publishing is that you have very close to total control of the whole publishing process for your book.  It's also one of the biggest minuses.  No one can be good at everything, and so I think one of the key things the self-publisher needs to learn is the limits of their own ability, in all the areas required for successful publication.  If you're open and receptive, then you can go a long way to addressing the gaps in your own skills, provided you can find people who can fill in those gaps for you, and you take their advice.

If you don't take heed of their advice, people will stop giving it: you'll find their support or interest rapidly waning.  Of course, sometimes you should do what you think is best, even if this runs counter to the advice you've received – so how do you decide when to trust your advisors, and when to trust your own instincts?  The approach I took boiled down to understanding: if on some point of disagreement, I was sure I understood the advice and the reasoning behind it, yet also properly understood the rationale and consequences of my own opinion, then I'd go with whichever option made the most sense.  In areas where I knew my skills were weaker than my advisors, or knew that my understanding was poor, then I would simply follow their advice (while also doing my best to understand the reasoning behind it, to improve myself in that area).

So, professional editing.

I'm an extremely good proof-reader4, and I'm also good at picking up continuity errors, errors in flows and rhythms, awkwardness in dialogue, and many other aspects of writing.  So although the accepted wisdom is to get a professional editor, I thought I could go it alone.

Let me tell you a little story..

I'd put my whole book through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, chapter by chapter, a few years earlier, and received lots of valuable feedback that improved the story (and my writing skills) over the year or so that that took.  I can heartily recommend the site, the team, and the community.  They're wonderful.

And life went on, and the years rolled by, and I'd find time to work a little more on it, polishing and so on, while thinking I should finish it off and send it into that great slush pile in the sky to see if anyone was interested.  One day though, I looked up and noticed that the publishing landscape had changed so much that it looked like I was in a whole new country: one in which self-publishing was really perfectly viable.  And after a couple of life-changing events, I found myself with both the time and the opportunity to seriously try the self-publishing route.  I knew there'd be a lot to learn, so I started studying, and sharing what I learned on this blog: about the various self-publishing platforms, and the writing tools, and the marketing tools, and the publishing tools.  And then one day in my Twitter feed, I noticed a mention of a professional editing group that offered to review and critique the first few thousand words of your manuscript, for free.  If they think a manuscript (MS) has potential, they'll send you a quote for their services for the whole MS.

“Well,” I thought, “it's as perfect as I can make it – I've been polishing it for years – so why not submit my work, just as a final sanity check?  I doubt they'll have much to say.”

Famous last words.

But it turned out to be a brilliant decision on my part (and dead lucky, too).  Because the advice contained in the detailed review – both the overall, “big picture” comments as well as the nitty-gritty line-by-line notes – was full of wisdom, frankly.  (The group I found and used are http://www.theditors.com/, and Dave handled my case.)  Just the advice from that initial critique was invaluable to me.  So I was pretty certain I'd get similar value from having the whole MS given the same careful review.

So, what did I get for my money?

A critique that spanned every level: proof-reading, line-by-line details, character-level stuff, plot thoughts, POV consistency, time-skipping, as well as emotional angles, psychological angles, and the biggie: the suggestion that there were two, maybe three books here, not just one.  What Dave basically saw, and pushed me to see, was that the characters and the 1st half (or maybe 1st third) of the story was sufficiently engaging that he (and other readers) would welcome more of it.  (This is the part where the main character is growing up: the story starts when she's just four.)

The big question, and the big problem, was: of course I had written the novel with a big climax at the end. There's a big change near the middle, certainly, but would it be enough to make a satisfying experience if the book ended there?  The answer, fundamentally, was “No” – but the potential was there.

So I decided I'd try as hard as I could to invent something extra to make that first part strong enough to stand on its own.

Two books, not one?

The disheartening thing about the whole affair for me, was that it was eerily similar to what I had realised myself, back in 1999 or 2000: that the whole second half of the book back then had plenty of action and story: but no plot!  (Even so, it was one of the ten finalists in the 1998 George Turner contest, so it wasn't all bad.)  After that epiphany, I cut the book in half, eventually dreamed up a plot that fully satisfied me; and then worked to develop and write the plot, weaving it seamlessly through the novel.  I think it took me about ten years to do that, in the little bits and pieces of spare time and energy that I had available.

I really couldn't face another ten year hiatus.  So I further decided I'd limit my time: I'd give myself just one month to work out a fully satisfying addition, otherwise I'd leave it as a single book.

Tough challenge.  I think this was the toughest creative challenge I've ever faced.  Part of the reason for the tough deadline was my understanding of some of my own weaknesses: I'm quite prone to tinkering endlessly, and worse still, after solving the hardest part of a problem, prone to losing interest in finishing the task.

Strangely, I felt I owed it to Leeth (my main character) to finally and properly bring her to life: I felt I'd be failing her if I didn't finish the book and get it published.

Dave and I discussed various ideas for a new plot element: he had good ideas, but I realised that most of them couldn't work (for me), because they didn't fit into the world or the future I had roughly sketched out for the books ahead.  (I hadn't shared any of the 22,000 words of additional background material I had with Dave, so he couldn't know.)  In the end, I was on my own for this part, though some aspects of the ideas we discussed certainly helped.

The spark.  The key moment was discovering a note I'd made back in about 1998.  I only stumbled over it after realising that Dave couldn't solve my problem for me, because I had all this extra context he'd never seen.  And while looking through that, and re-reading it (for the first time in over ten years), I saw this throw-away line about something which had happened deep in the background, which had a whole lot of scary resonance to it: an idea I could pursue one day...

Today was that day.

The note was just twelve words long, but I saw that it contained the essence of the threat from which everything would flow.  The more I thought about it, the better the idea worked: it fitted in seamlessly, it would trigger all sort of neat incidents (given the characters involved), and it even led to a powerful climax at the midpoint – all while actually reinforcing and strengthening the plot for the second half.  I think it took me about ten days – out of my allotted month – to reach that epiphany.

The process. So then I sat and thought, and made a list of the extra scenes I'd need to write to develop that plot: there were 22.  I kicked the ideas around a little with Dave and a friend of mine who is familiar with the book (hi, Jon!), and their refinements and suggestions strengthened it further.  The 22 scenes grew just a little (to 25, or 27 depending on how you counted), and that seemed feasible.  I thought each scene would probably average out to one or two thousand words.  So, with some indispensable tools for the big plotting and writing work involved in the Book Split:

Writing sprint.  I set to work.  I worked hard.  I worked very hard.  Fortunately, I had a whole world that I'd already worked out, and understood deeply. Especially the characters. Basically, I just imagined the characters in the appropriate scenes, and then just wrote down what they said and did.  The tiny pad meant I could do my writing or plotting anywhere at all; and I don't think you can beat pencil and paper for that mode of writing.  It's also completely distraction free.  Maybe two thirds of the scenes I first drafted that way (the tougher and trickier scenes); at other times, I'd just sit at the PC and write.  That was where LibreOffice and Workrave shone.  Anyway, I tweeted my results at the end of each day as I worked, and felt very satisfied: although I didn't complete the first drafts in the five days I'd hoped (yeah, right!), I did complete them in 9 days, and found I'd written 39,000 words.  Some of the scenes, I found myself crying as I wrote them; one or two, laughing.  One of them still cracks me up when I think of it.  They felt right; they felt good.

They all went into the file (Book-1-Split.odt) which held my outline of the work.  So, next, I switched from that task to Dave's detailed line-by-line comments in the MS (which I received on Aug 4th), addressing them each in turn.  I took a day off today (saw a movie, visited a friend, wrote this blog item), but apart from that I've been working hard.  Some of the problems Dave has pointed out are easy to fix; some harder.  E.g. I spent three hours yesterday fixing the problems he saw in just two pages (doing so also required me to write a thousand words), but after that, I managed 25 pages in five hours.  I seem to be managing 20-25 pages per day, and there are 180 pages in total.  (As of yesterday, I was on p109 of the 180 pages; though p109 in the old MS is now p175 in the new.)

Finding a good editor – step 1.  So that was the process for the creative parts, and the tough parts.  But how do you find an editor?  There are predators out there: people who will encourage you to pay them, to edit your work, ostensibly to do the job that Dave did so well, but who really are just leading people on.  I think the first thing you need to do, is to hone your writing skills and practice them enough so that what you've written is genuinely good.  Because anyone can self-publish, the quality of self-published work varies enormously.  An editor can only tell you how to improve your work: they can't make the improvements for you (I suppose, that's what a ghostwriter would do).  So: get other people to review it and critique it.  Listen well: take criticism and use it.  Build up your skills.  When other writers think your work is okay, and you've done the best job you can, at that point a good and honest editor can help you.  If you try to use an editor before that point, it'll be an expensive way to be taught how to write.

Finding a good editor – step 2.  Okay, so given that your work is of a basically sound standard, how do you find a good and reliable editor?  Obviously I can recommend Dave and his team – but they can't support the entire self-publishing industry on their own!  I think the same method that works for all aspects of the self-publishing “industry” applies here too: rely on word of mouth.  “thEditors” let you actually try them out, so you can decide for yourself: the “mouth” you're relying on is your own!  I'd suggest, though, asking other writers whose work you like, what they do.  That's how I found my cover designer (yay, Mirella!) – which will be the subject of another blog in the next few weeks, I'd say.

Self-publishing.  This whole experience has crystallised in my mind how the self-publishing industry works, and how it has the strong potential to out-perform the traditional publishing industry.  I'll write about that soon, too, I think.  Basically, we're not alone: there are other people with the talents needed to support the lonely writer working in her garret, and the new digital world and social media provide the tools to put all those various people in contact.  It lets you find the people you need to find, and to collaborate with them, and to pay them or to be paid in turn for your work.  The same thing applies for the readers, too.  I'm enormously excited by what I see ahead.

It's been hugely challenging, enjoyable, tough, and satisfying.  I have high hopes my readers will enjoy it as much as I did in writing it, and feel I've done Leeth proud.  And none of it would have happened (I would never have “learned” about all this new exciting stuff that had happened while she was growing up), if Dave had not pushed me to flesh out what he saw as almost a complete book in its own right, in the first half.

So, Dave, I think I'll finish this blog simply by saying: thank you; thank you deeply.

Amazon and reviews

Getting reviews for your book is one of the things which I think everyone agrees is crucial for indie authors. Of course, the subtext is you need to get good reviews, but for that to be even possible you need to get reviews in the first place. So, because all indie authors need reviews, the obvious thing to do is to offer to review someone else's book in return for a review of your own; and since most people are fundamentally good, most people are quite happy to do that.

To state the obvious, there are problems in this: given how many new books are published each year, what's really needed is honest reviews, but a review will hurt if the review is basically negative (or even, just ordinary?). People only have time to read a tiny percentage of those new books, so readers naturally want to just pick the cream of the crop. And if you get a good review, but feel you can't give a good review in return, anyone would feel some pressure to soften their review, and boost the rating, right? So that's one issue.

I would argue, however, that if the book wasn't to your taste, it's fine to say that. Everyone's taste is different. If you say “this book was too violent” - well, for some readers, that's actually a point in the book's favour. Likewise if it was too sexy (or too chaste) – these are very much matters of personal taste, and you're probably helping the author since you're helping readers get an accurate idea of what to expect, so if they do buy the book they're more likely to enjoy it.

If, though, you see actual problems with the book which you feel the author should and could address, that feedback is extremely valuable to the author personally – yet is likely to be quite damaging to their sales. I'd say, at the very least, you should absolutely provide that feedback to the author so they have a chance to fix the problem and release an improved version of their book. For self-publishers, a quick updated-edition is a really simple and effective option. (And not something that can be easily or cheaply done in the traditional publishing model.) But should you post your negative review publicly? Well, if people are reading it, whether or not you post your review, there's a good chance they'll spot the same problems you did, and their enjoyment will suffer. They may even wind up with negative feelings towards the author, and possibly refuse to consider later and improved books. So should you post the review, to set readers' expectations correctly?

Probably not: your review is much shorter than the book, right? So it's much more likely to be read by a lot of people than the book is. So it's likely to sow that negative feeling more widely than would the book itself. In addition, are you going to even notice, if the author fixes all the problems and re-releases? Yet if you don't notice and take the trouble to re-read the book, and then put in the effort to alter your review accordingly, then your review (of the poor version) will remain, standing there as a black mark against the later version, which may have turned into a masterpiece in the meantime. So that's why I say, don't post damaging reviews: just pass the feedback on to the author if humanly possible.

Note that if your objection is to the writing subject, or the beliefs of the author, or to the behaviour of the characters, I do think they're all fair enough to state publicly.

Okay, so that's the easy part of the topic, I feel. What I'm more interested in exploring here is Amazon's policies and processes related to reviews.

Amazon's nuclear option

Amazon do provide information about their policy in their Customer Review Creation Guidelines and their Anti-Manipulation Policy for Customer Reviews.

I think Amazon have to care deeply about the honesty of reviews because reviews form a crucial part of their business model. In my view it's a fundamentally great idea, too: let word of mouth give people honest assessments of the products so potential buyers can make an informed choice. In a way, it almost bypasses the whole advertising industry (that stronghold of honesty renowned for its unwillingness to manipulate, trick, or influence the buying public, right?), and instead give people the truth.

Provided the reviews are honest.

Now my own personal experience indicates that 90-95% of people are honest and good. (I don't think human society would be viable, if the percentage was much higher.) And the majority have developed ways of dealing with the minority who try to trick and deceive and harm the rest of us (with punishment, and payback, and exposure, and so forth). But since there's money to be made, of course that means that 5-10% of people out there will be actively trying to deceive people. And it's a critical issue for Amazon: if people lose confidence in the reviews on Amazon, that would do massive damage to Amazon financially. So it's in their interest, and that of its customers, that Amazon work hard to make sure the reviews are fair and honest. I started thinking about this topic after reading of one person's awful experience with Amazon (see ‘HELLO’ FROM AMAZON – Big Brother style review censorship, which started with a letter that said

“We are writing to inform you that we have removed your review privileges and suppressed all of your reviews. Any new reviews written will automatically be suppressed. We took this action because you have failed to comply with our review guidelines and manipulated product reviews.”

Christoph says he tried to find out more(see here), because he honestly had no idea what they were talking about. But Amazon provided just a link to their general policies, which didn't help. And Amazon has no process for discussing this heavy response; they have no way for you to appeal. So Christoph had 1700 reviews removed, and was banned from posting any more. He's not the only one – I've heard that others have had the same experience. For me, the issue is that Amazon's process is opaque: honest people can't find out what line they've crossed, and if there was an error made by Amazon, there's no means to correct it.

What really happened in Christoph's case? Without Amazon stepping up and providing more information, we can never know.

What we do know, though, is that Amazon receives too many reviews for them to be checked by human beings; yet it is essential for their business to check the reviews. So they have algorithms that do the checking for them.

Now, much like the people who create software to fight spam or viruses, Amazon are effectively fighting a war against the people trying to provide dishonest reviews for their own gain. This means Amazon is in a difficult position: if they reveal the algorithms they use, that may help the people who are trying to defeat those checks. And if Amazon don't explain why they do what they do to the 'offenders', then they run a serious risk of making errors and treating people unfairly, and also run a risk of damaging their brand by appearing as a bully.

A possible solution?

To me, one solution would be if Amazon were to at least internally investigate people who appear to genuinely deserve to have their case heard, and if necessary, even enter into discussion with them. In that way, Amazon can keep their algorithms secret, yet offer some real justice to people who are wrongly accused or mis-detected. It's likely that if it relates to mis-detections, the information they discover through their discussion and investigation would even allow them to improve their algorithms.

So, what actually happened in Christoph's case, and the other similar cases? We can never know, though my guess (in fact my fear), is that Amazon's algorithms simply detect review swaps, or even review chains: if they find Adam, author of book A, has reviewed Bob's book B, and Bob has reviewed book A, then Amazon assume (they perhaps have to assume), that the reviews are dishonest and flag both Adam and Bob as breaking their policies, and ban both and pull their reviews. For the 90-95% of authors giving genuine and honest reviews, this is unfair and wrong, yet Amazon are simply acting to try to maintain the quality and integrity of their reviews overall, protecting both their customers and their business.

They may have other rules in their algorithms, too: too much similarity between reviews, too frequent reviews, reviews that are too short… we can't know. And without action from Amazon, it would require a concerted effort of analysis by many of the honest reviewers affected, to try to spot the patterns and reverse engineer the logic involved.

One technicality I noticed in the Amazon policy which might catch reviewers out: if someone gives you a free copy of their book in return for your review, you must declare that fact in your review (see Why was my review rejected or removed?)

“The sole exception to this rule [No paid reviews] is when a free or discounted copy of a physical product is provided to a customer up front. In this case, if you offer a free or discounted product in exchange for a review, you must clearly state that you welcome both positive and negative feedback. If you receive a free or discounted product in exchange for your review, you must clearly and conspicuously disclose that fact.”

[emphasis is mine]

So perhaps the algorithms could also discover that you've received a free copy and not stated that, and maybe that would trigger the Amazon response? That seems less likely to me, but I think it's something worth knowing.

Oh, and if anyone is still reading this probably too-long blog post, and wonders why the delay since my last entry – it's simply that I'm hard at work revising my book to meet my July 6th deadline to provide it to the professional editor to start work. I did think I could spare a couple of hours, though, to put my thoughts on this topic together.

As always, comments are very welcome.

Update, 2015/7/17. I contacted Amazon and voiced my concern. I wrote:

“As a soon-to-be self-published author via KDP, I would like to know if there is a safe or recommended way to give honest reviews of other self-published authors' work?

“I have heard of Amazon deleting all reviews and banning all further reviews of some people.  Is there a safe way, a way that Amazon recommends, for authors like myself to be able to provide honest reviews of others' books?  I have blogged my thoughts and concerns about this issue here: http://toeinthebookocean.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/amazon-and-reviews.html

“I ask, because as far as I know, Amazon has no process to examine cases where an author feels they have given honest reviews but been banned anyway.  So I'm wondering whether I should simply stop reviewing self-published authors, in case one day one of them reviews my work and Amazon's algorithms decide that mutual review means there's been a violation of the terms of service for providing reviews.”

The first response from Amazon appeared not to have understood my concern, and simply pointed me at the Amazon page that describes their review policy. I wrote back, explaining that I understood that, but asked if they could perhaps answer this simpler question instead:

“in the event that Amazon decides someone has not followed the review guidelines, yet the reviewer thinks they have followed them, does Amazon have some process for resolving the difference of opinion, or for explaining the problem?”

Amazon replied that they encourage reviews but remove reviews that don't comply with the guidelines. They also added this more useful info:

“We know reviews are important to both customers and authors. If your review was removed, you can write to community-help@amazon.com. We can help you understand exactly why your review was removed, and provide suggestions on how to share feedback while staying within our guidelines.”

Of course, the proof would be in the pudding. If the email address is simply answered with a “you violated the guidelines; see [Amazon's review-policy URL] for details” then it's just an attempt at engineering perceptions, not dealing with the issue. I hope I never have to find out the answer for myself!