Muse News #11: Audio Beta Recording Resumes, OneNote Migration and Beta Reader Questionnaire

It's been a funny old week full of lots of positives despite the feeling of not actually achieving very much.

It's strange how sometimes, there can be weeks like that, where you may feel like you're running to keep-up, but afterwards, when you look back and reflect on what you've actually accomplished, you find it's actually a surprising amount.

But look!  Muse News is being posted early...or at the very least earlier than normal.  Surprised? No? Flipping-heck! I am!

Audio Beta Recording Resumes

[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

I've all but shifted the annoying summer cold that afflicted me for most of last two weeks and I no longer sound like Barry White, or Darth Vader.  My voice got really deep.  That's great news for the recording audio beta schedule, which suffered as a result, but it's a shame that I can no longer go around saying things like "Simba, I am your father..." with silky-smooth resonance like James Earl Jones.

You'll only get that joke if you've watched both The Lion King and The Empire Strikes Back. Sorry.

I have, however, had a couple of comments from friends expressing their disappointment that I didn't record at least a snippet, or two, of the audio beta while I had the deeper than normal voice.

If I succumb to the lurgy again, I'll see what I can do.  The characters voices will be all messed-up, but the general narration might sound rather cool.

Anyway, with the head-cold gone, I've resumed recording of the audio beta and I'm managing to get half a dozen scenes recorded each night.  There are still over two hundred to record, so there is still a long way to go.  But, like writing, it's a matter of getting into the routine and maintaining it.

I'm good at doing that, so I will get there eventually!

OneNote Migration

Following my decision to move my digital notes from Evernote to OneNote (or "succumb to the Dark Side" as one friend put it), I've now moved the bulk of my notes to OneNote.  Microsoft provide a handy Windows application for former Evernote users to import all their notebooks, notes and tags into OneNote.

The app looks appears to faithfully transfer all the required notes into OneNote, but having said that, I haven't actually used it, so I can't vouch that it is 100% accurate.

I wanted to review my "back catalogue" of notes as I went, so I'm migrating my notes manually.  I've discovered some corkers in among the tidal wave of words and ideas and I've also discovered quite a few half-thoughts, or duplicates, so some pruning and reorganisation has ensued.

It can be quite cathartic having a clear-out every now-and-then, digital or otherwise.

I should be fully migrated by the time the two device limit comes into effect in a week, or so.

Beta Reader Questionnaire

Most of my trusty and loyal army of beta readers are now engaged in reading the fourth draft of 360 (no pressure, beta readers...I've only told the rest of the world) and I've thrown myself into the new challenge of compiling a questionnaire for them to fill-in so I can analyse their feedback.

I've not designed a questionnaire before, so I've been doing lots of reading around on the Internet to see what other writers, editors and professional questionnaire designers do.  I hope that my efforts will be clear and helpful, but I may find myself in the ridiculous position of requiring feedback on my feedback form.  I won't go beyond that (a feedback form for the feedback-form feedback-form) because I'm sure that could break reality and irreversibly warp the fabric of the universe!

Or maybe it'll just really confuse everyone.

Perhaps that's a good place to finish for this post.  I think space and time will be warped enough if I post this on time!

Muse News #5: 360 Audio Book Beta & Kiranan's Crucible "Pantsing Strategy"

There's not much to report this week, but that limited news in itself is quite exciting nonetheless  - well, from my perspective it is!

Audio Edition

My humble recording setup
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

With the fourth draft of 360 now in the hands of most of my wonderful beta-readers, I've turned my attention to working on the audio book version.  It isn't meant as a serious attempt at a commercially available audio book.  Recording an audio edition simply allows another two beta-readers (or should that be beta-listeners?) access to it and it provides me with the opportunity to review the story from a new angle.

Reading with the inner-voice my head, I'm prone to skip missing words, miss grammatical errors and gloss over badly constructed sentences.  Reading aloud helps me spot those errors and iron out the difficult, or clumsy dialogue.

And trust me, there's plenty of clumsy dialogue.  I've managed three recording sessions so far this week and almost driven myself mad recording some sections more than a dozen times.  I fear that by the time I finish recording the whole thing, if I'd kept the bloopers they'd be longer than the book itself!

Having said that, I have already recorded 20 of the 170 scenes, so I envisage that the remainder will take another three weeks if I continue at the current pace.

Kiranan's Crucible

As indicated in other posts on this blog, I've returned to the fantasy project that I started last year, but shelved in favour of preparing 360 for publication.  I need something to keep me occupied while 360 is being read.

Kiranan's Crucible is planned be the first of a series of an as-yet unknown number of books (or it might be the title of the whole series).  What had appeared initially to the plot of the first of the series, has - following further planning - rapidly turned it into the plot for the second book and an entirely new first book has emerged along with ideas for a third (and possibly more)

I'm still only at the planning stage, and by that I mean planning of the major plot points.  I'm not a natural "pantser" and prefer to plan my plots to quite detailed levels, but I often find myself going off-piste when I actually start writing, liking what I've then written and scrambling to rejig the remaining plot to absorb the new ideas from the new sections.

I imagine that's going to be a nightmare with a series, so instead of plot planning I'm going to world build as much as I can in advance and assemble with plot of each book as I go with only major plot points in place to guide me.  It might work, or it might all go horribly wrong.  Either way the, results should be entertaining...

This week promises much of the same as this week, but you never know.  I may have driven myself insane recording and listening to my own voice for hours on end and the planner in me may have quelled the pantser in me.

Find out in the next Muse News!

Muse News #4: Beta Copies, Old WIP is the New WIP and Audio Book

With the completion of the fourth draft of 360, this week has felt distinctly less productive than previous weeks.  Having said that, it's not been a week devoid of activity!

As reported in NITM #3, I printed a hard copy of 360 for my remaining beta readers who don't own ebook readers.  My printer isn't the fastest and, having learnt from past experience, I refrained from printing in draft quality.  Draft quality may be the fastest way to produce a manuscript, but it certainly doesn't give the most readable results.  Some beta readers found the grey lettering lacking definition, hard to read and tiring on the eyes.  So this time I used standard quality, which is much clearer, but also took much longer.

Consequently, that filled almost an entire evening.

Producing the ebook version wasn't all plain sailing either.  Formatting a document of the length and complexity of a novel has its own challenges and pitfalls.  I'm afraid I cheated and took out all-but-one of the chapter headings for the beta-edition.

Officially, I've told everyone that it's because I'm reviewing where the chapters should start and end in the new draft, but in all honesty it's because I wrestled (and lost) with the formatting and contents tables on the different ebook versions.  I'll get them to work, I'm sure...eventually.  It's something I do need to master.

Five beta-readers now have their copies and another four will receive theirs this week, so there's no going back now!

As work finishes on one phase of one work-in-progress, so work on another starts again. In the absence of 24/7 editing in my life, I've resumed work on Kiranan's Crucible, a novel that had previously been put on the developmental back-burner.

The original plan for Kiranan's Crucible was for it to be a standalone story, my first and experimental foray into the fantasy genre.  As I began gathering the ideas into a coherent plot, it became apparent that there was enough material for more than one novel, especially if I were to keep to the target length of eighty thousand words.  It lends itself to being a series of books rather than just one, so I decided to work on 360 ahead of that as my first effort into self-publishing.  With 360 out for beta-reading, now seems like a good time to revisit KC.

It's still very early days, but I've been having fun this past week brainstorming plot ideas, characters and backstories.  It's been good to be really creative again.  I've missed that side of writing.

And finally, this weekend will see the start of work on the audio book version of 360 for my two beta-listeners.  I've been working on my character voices and I think they're very nearly ready.  The neighbours have been warned!

More news on that and everything else next week in Muse News!

Notes In The Margin #3 - The Thrill of Paper

I had intended to post a completely different NITM today, but the events of the last two hours changed my mind.

What marvelous occurrence overwhelmed me?  What startling epiphany descended?  What glorious joy overtook my soul?

The Fourth Draft in all its papery glory!
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

I printed out the fourth draft of 360.  That may not seem like an earth-shattering event to most people, but for me it was somewhat enlightening, and I'm hoping that the writers among you will empathise.   Today saw the fruits of the last five month's labours transform from ethereal and digital scrawlings on a computer screen into words on a physical page, in order, together and whole.

It's not the first time I've printed out an entire manuscript.  This is the third time 360 had been manifested in paper form (the second draft was quickly superseded by the third and consequently was not printed) and every time holding a thick, stack of paper bearing tens of thousands of words all neatly arranged into a story that started as nothing more than scant ideas flashing through my imagination just blows my mind.

In 360's case, those same 120,000 words have existed in the same order on my laptop's hard drive (and in various back-up copies) for months now, but somehow holding them in my hand just has an affect on me that I can't explain.  I'm an unashamed convert to ebooks.  I find them so convenient and rugged in a way any number of my paperbacks never were, or could be.  Their tattered edges and creased spines bear testament to that.

And from the side... (Just so
you didn't think it was just
the title page)
[Photo:Jack Gilbert]

But every now and then I have to go back to a printed book, just because there's something reassuring and physical about it.  And yes, before you ask, I am one of those people who likes the smell of a good bookshop.  I grew-up with that smell - along with several other smells like the sooty and oily whiff of good steam train - and it's just one of those things that sends my synapses sparking.  I'm just wired like that.  However, I recognise that not everyone is.

The last time 360 went to my beta-readers was nearly three years ago, ebook readers were a novelty and the majority of them read the hard copy.  This time the majority are reading a digital copy and a few are reading the hard copy.  In another three years, the ebook reader may even be a thing of the past and some other form of book consumption may have taken over - projected into our eye line on augmented reality, or VR headsets anyone? Oh, now there's a idea...I should have put that in the novel.  It's about virtual reality!

Wherever the next step in reading consumption takes us, one things is for sure: I'm going to continue printing a manuscript of each novel I write and enjoy the sense of immense satisfaction it gives me.

I think that's the feeling a book should generate in writer and readers alike.

Muse News #3

It's a milestone day!

Finally after nearly five months of work, the fourth draft of 360 is finally finished!  I say "finished", but of-course even as I prepare the copies for my loyal band of beta-readers, I been noticing things that I want to change.

Not a milestone, but as close as I could get.
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

Those things will have to wait until the fifth draft. I consider the fourth draft finished. I've made all the changes and refinements that I set out to make when I started this particular draft and fixed all the problems raised by various readers in their feedback from previous drafts, so that's job done for now.

I have to say that - overall - I am very happy with the fourth draft.  The plot is tighter and has better pacing while the text itself has benefited immensely from being changed from the passive voice to the active voice.  It makes total sense that an action story would be told in the active voice.  I don't know why I didn't do that in the first place.

There we go, you live and learn.  I'll know for next time.

With the fourth draft ready, I'll be distributing copies to my beta-readers this week. I can then sit back and wait with baited breath for their comments to come back (actually, I will be quite nervous).

Well, maybe not quite sitting back.  I'm not going to be totally idle.  A writer very rarely has nothing going on in their head.  I have at least three other ideas in various states of readiness waiting to fill the void that the last five months of editing will leave.  Who knows, a completely unexpected idea from left-field may strike me and demand immediate attention.

One thing is for sure: my next novel is going to be much shorter! (Why do I have to make these plots so detailed?).

I'm going to try to give myself this week off from writing...so next week's Muse News may be a little thin, but no doubt the creative pangs will overrule and I'll do some work on one project or another.

There will be there will be something to report, so do checkout how I do in next week's exciting Muse News!

Muse News #2

It's been a busy old few days in chez Gilbert.  Busy, but not complicated so this will be a relatively short Muse News this week.

It had been my intention to get the fourth draft of my current WIP (Work In Progress), 360, finished and ready for my beta-readers by the end of last week.  However, in rewriting the opening third I have discovered I've negated some plot elements later in the story.  They have to go before I can consider the fourth draft complete and in a fit state to hand over to my beta readers.

Also, after initially hacking 30,000 words from the original 142,000 (yeah, it was a mammoth) during the early days of working on the 4th draft, I appear to have inserted another 7,000 back in as new copy.  That means I'll have to cull another couple of thousand to reduce it to be closer to the 110,000 target as well as clear up the loose plot issues.

Consequently, the original allocation of May for beta-reading is a very doubtful now, so I've revised my plans and June will now be set aside for beta reading (beta reader availability permitting).

The only other real news this week is that, as those who read last Thursday's Notes In The Margin will know, I've been dabbling in recording another audio book version of 360. I've only conducted basic tests with my new microphone to establish the kind of sound quality I'll be getting, which is much better than my previous efforts for the second draft.

I've also been trying out some new voices for the characters as I wasn't entirely happy with the majority that I chose to use last time.  If the resulting audio book is good enough then, once the ebook has been published, I might look at pursuing the audio book idea further, possibly with an eye to commercial release, but that is a very tentative "might"! 

For now I musty concentrate on finishing the fourth draft.  My original target for completing it was the end of March, so I'm throwing every available hour at it at the moment so it isn't delayed any longer!

Hopefully by Muse News #3 I'll have much more to report!

Notes In The Margin #1: Producing an Audio Book - Am I Mad, or What?

When I started asking my friends if they would like to beta-read my novel 360, I didn't expect two of them to ask if I could provide it as an audio book.  One of them listens to a large number of audio books, so he knows what he likes and doesn't like and was ideal to give me some feedback on my audio offering.

My trusty ProSound microphone with Audacity
recording software running in the background
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

Which gave me an interesting challenge.

Recording an audio book isn't as straight forward as you may think.  And for those who do already consider it a challenge, it's even more of a challenge than even you think! While it's relatively easy to record a short clip of someone speaking on a computer these days, it's not so easy to record something of a decent quality that can be anything up to twelve hours long, which is how long the second draft of 360 turned out to be when I recorded it.

Twelve hours!

And you can't rush it.  Even at twelve hours there are some stretches where I gabbled my way through certain passages.  There was just so much text to get through and so little time but a rushed audio book sounds awful.

And so many retakes.

Oh, the retakes!

In some ways reading your work aloud is a really useful exercise.  It makes you appreciate what you've written, especially dialogue, where it works and where it doesn't work.  In other ways though it is infinitely infuriating as you stumble, stammer and mangle your way through text that reads like prosaic honey on the page.

However, clumsy grammar, or cliched dialogue aren't your only enemies.

Muse News #1:

It's been a long time since I've posted anything in my blog, so there's a mountain of news from the Gilbert pen!

After some long, deep and very meaningful chats with myself, I concluded that starting my indie publishing career (I hope!) with a potentially six book series is possibly a tad ambitious.   Consequently, I've dusted off my long-suffering techno-thriller, 360 and begun work on the fourth draft with the intention of getting it ready for publishing before the end of the year.

That means The Wickedest War, my previous work in progress, is being rested and I hope it will benefit from the many lessons I've learnt and continue to learn from publishing 360.

The Wickedest War - rested but not forgotten!
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

So, I have been working on a project during the last year-and-a-bit of blogging silence.  I've been working hard on the fourth draft of 360 and it's been an educational and emotional experience. I've always been poor at keeping the word counts down on my novels and 360 was no exception. The first three drafts hovered around the 142,000 word mark.  I lopped off a hundred words here and there between each draft, but I always managed to justify the survival every scene to myself.

Not so with the fourth draft.  360's been on a diet.  An extreme diet.  When I powered off my laptop last night, the word count stood at a slimmer and svelte 113,000 words.  Yep, I've been merciless.  A few thousand words will have to go back in to fill in some of the gaps but generally speaking, I don't think it will go much beyond 115,000 words.

I've also rewritten other sections to make the whole thing much tighter and pacier.  This week's goal is to finish that off and complete the fourth draft.  So, it's very nearly ready to hand it over to my ever loyal and patient beta readers for their views and comments and it'll be interesting to see what they think of the revisions.  I know a couple of them liked it just the way it was.

The other thing that's occupied me recently is the development of my online presence and conversations with other writers have convinced me that I really do need to get my backside in gear and knuckle down to keeping my blog up-to-date and my Twitter stream flowing.  If you're a tweeter then please do follow me @trebligkcaj.

As for this blog, I'm planning to post a Muse News every Monday with all the latest news on my works in progress and any other events worth sharing.

Then on Thursdays I'll be posting something I'm calling Notes In The Margin.  Those posts will cover subjects that I've been thinking about (I do lots of thinking) and will usually be writing related, but I may stray into more general stuff if the whim takes me.  The first one (this Thursday) will be about doing accents for audio books, so be sure to check that out!

And if I find anything else of interest to post between all that, I will!

Until next Monday, that's all for this week's Muse News!

Post the Nineth: A-Version Therapy

Apologies for the lack of posts lately.  It's been a mad month in the Day Job, as well in the Personal Life, and quite frankly I'm still not sure how I woke up this morning to find myself only a few days away from the clocks going back.  I'm sure someone owes me a large portion of October somewhere down the line.  Things will calm down soon hopefully and I'll be able to get into some kind of routine of publishing posts.

The Manuscript - in all its imperfect glory!
(photo: Jack Gilbert)

So what have you missed? Well, the good news is that my Proof Reader has finished proof-reading THE WICKEDEST WAR, thus becoming the second person (one of my beta-readers was the first) to have read both the 1994 original version and the 2014 reboot.  The general feedback was very positive. That was a huge relief to me, especially when you consider that his main observation of the original was "it's a good yarn full of thud and blunder".

So, I took a break from compiling the TWW bible - yes, it's taking much longer than I thought it would - and I started going through the marked-up manuscript.

There's only one marked-up manuscript, which is just as well because when I came to correct the electronic copy I found that it the digital versions have been fruitful and multiplied.

Post the Eighth: Know Thine Enemy (And Thine Good Guys and Thine Places...)

So, I started work on DARK DAWN just as I said I would in Post The Seventh.  However, I haven't added a single word to the narrative in the last fortnight.  Instead, I've started compiling the basic skeleton of the novel's bible, that's the reference guide for any of you out there unfamiliar with the term beyond the...err...biblical context of the word.

A small glimpse of the bible (with a small "b").
They're only spoilers if you know what you're looking for...
(Photo: Jack Gilbert)

And to procure a phrase from the Good Book, "it was good".  Is good, I mean.  But it got me thinking about THE WICKEDEST WAR.  It's now in the hands of another three beta-readers, including a fellow writer - one far more experienced than I am - and I thought to myself, "Jack, it's been two years now since you touched the half-finished bible for TWW.  I wonder how many inconsistencies they're going to find in that tome of yours..."

It turns out the answer is quite a few.

Post The Seventh: Confidence Tricks (of the mind)

It's been a bit of a crazy and full-on time at the Day Job lately, but I still feel I should apologise for not posting anything sooner.  Although, in my defence (yes, I know I'm my own prosecution counsel as well) this is about the tenth time that I've sat down at the computer with the intention of writing Post The Seventh.  However, the previous attempts all ended with me writing three or four awkward paragraphs which were then promptly deleted due to lack of clarity, direction and coherence.

The part of my brain that's responsible for assembling and committing words to the page just haven't been working properly for the last few weeks and I felt I had what they refer to in motor-racing parlance as "a bag of neutrals".  And if I'm honest, I've also suffered a crisis of confidence of late as well.

I should have seen it coming, the stress had been building-up again and I was pushing myself to stay creative in amongst it all, partially to keep my writing skills sharp but also because I wanted to stop my brain's fly-wheel from spinning itself into destruction thinking about work matters so I kept the problem-solving portion of it distracted with the construction of the plot for my next novel, DARK DAWN.

Post the Fourth: New Kid on the Blog

I should start off by apologising for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks.  It's been a crazy start to July, some of it good and sadly also some it not so good.  I won't bore you with the details - and I don't thinks this is the place for them anyhow - so I'll just say that hopefully things are back on track and I should be more regular from now on (no sniggering in the back row).

Right, so back to the title.  Yes, it's a corny title, I know.  But frankly, it's very true - and yes, I am referring to the "New Kid" bit not the "Post the Fourth" bit.  Reading around a number of blogs I've discovered how much of a novice I am in this field.