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 Tenth: Merry Christmas, Everyone!

I know it's been a while since I posted anything.  The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster of a ride and it feels like my feet have barely touched the ground.  However, I'm hoping that January will be calmer and far more productive than the recent weeks. I plan to post as regularly as I originally planned - if not more so!

Until then, may I wish you all...

A Very 

Happy, Safe, Peaceful and Joyous

Christmas!

Jack Gilbert

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.