Muse News #7: Scottish Trip Days 1 & 2

This won't be a long post today because the internet access here is a bit unpredictable and could drop out any second!

It's the evening of my second full day here and I've already had adventures a plenty.  Here are just a few of the highlights so far.

The View Across The Loch

This is my third visit to Kentallen and the view across Loch Linnhe is one of the things that I love about this place and no number of photos will do it justice, but he's one to give you an idea.

The view across the loch from Kentallen
[Phot: Jack Gilbert]

Fifteen Minutes of Terror

NASA described the descent of the Curiosity Mars probe as "seven minutes of terror".  I had a similar experience going on the Nevis Range cable car yesterday.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Nevis Range cable car, it's a wonderful feat of engineering.  It's just that I have a fear of heights and by their very nature cable cars rely on being quite a way off the ground.

It was something I wanted to push myself to do and I'm incredibly pleased with myself for riding it up Aonach Mor.  The views were spectacular and well worth it.  Here's a photo of the view along with the tweet I managed to fire off to distract myself from my vertigo.

Loch Lochy and the Great Glen from Aonach Mor
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

Loch Ness

And finally, today's exploration took us up to one of the most famous of Scotland's lochs, Loch Ness.  This was my second visit there - last year I took a fast RIB ride around it - but this time my appreciation was purely land-based.  Sadly, I didn't see the monster, but then again if I had, things could have got complicated, so it's just as well I didn't.

A small slice of Loch Ness, but no monster.
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

So, that's two days down and there are still another four to go!  There are more adventures awaiting and I'll try to post and tweet as and when internet access allows!

Notes In The Margin #6: Location Scouting Can Be Fun! (And Sometimes Useful...)

Today, I'm busy packing for a trip to the West Highlands of Scotland (I may have mentioned this elsewhere on The Annotate-Id).

This will be the third time I'll have been to Kentallen in as many years and it's safe to say that I've fallen utterly in love with the place.  I have my best mate to thank for talking me into going in the first place.  I chose Kentallen as the setting for 360 several years ago after I'd completed the first draft and felt unhappy with the vague description of the fictitious location in which I'd set it.

The view of Loch Linnhe from Kentallen on a very sunny day!
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

Like a character without a decent backstory, the anonymous place felt unsatisfying and shallow.  So, I made a list of the criteria the location would need to fulfill and started trawling Google Maps for suitable places around the Scottish coast.

Many happy hours of searching later Kentallen rose to the top of the list of places I'd virtually surveyed.  And so the second draft of novel saw it find its home in a fictional castle built on the shores of Loch Linnhe in Kentallen.  The novel went to my beta readers and still no-one was any the wiser that I'd made up all the descriptions of the Kentallen.

While 360 was being read, I hauled The Wickedest War from development hell and began work on a new draft of that.  Most of the action takes place in central London, a place with which I am very familiar and visit often.  Getting the details about places that I knew so well wrong was not an option. Some scenes, especially one chase along the South Bank and the nearby streets, relied on getting the geography and timing right.  I walked the route, noted the landmarks and the time it took to get between them. I also visited the other places in London that featured in the novel on fact finding visits too.

The remaining action takes place in the West Highlands.  I needed somewhere remote again - although not too remote - and the Highlands fitted the bill.  Thanks again to our friendly online map providers it didn't take long to identify a suitable location.

Then my mate asked if I planned to go to Scotland and visit those places too, just as I had with the London locations.  I made excuses and said it was too far.

We had the conversation several times over the next few months and each time I made excuses until it was suggested that we include them as part of a whistle-stop tour around Scotland.  Suddenly it seemed a really good idea!

I could happily walk for hours along this glen.
[Photo: Jack Gilbert] 

I'm really glad I agreed.  Not only did it give me a chance to correct the wildly inaccurate descriptions of the area in the earlier draft of 360, but I also got to know a lovely part of Scotland and hike through some awesome scenery, including the glen that features in The Wickedest War (seriously, the photo doesn't do it justice).

To see it on a map is one thing.  Looking up at the mountains rising either side of the river in the valley floor is a whole different matter. I've stood where my characters have stood and seen what they've seen.  I've sat on the shores of Loch Linnhe and watched the sun go down.  I've shared that experience and that moment with my characters. Hopefully, because of that my readers will share that experience too.

It's always worth checking your facts.  I can be satisfied that I did my best to get them right.  It won't always be possible, but where I can I will try to stand in my characters' shoes and see what they see.

And besides...why should the imaginary characters have all the fun?  Sometimes it's good for the writers to have adventures too!

Muse News #6: 1000 Page Views, More Audio Book In The Can & Visit to Scotland!

The Annotate-Id has crossed the 1000 page views mark!

Not a milestone, but close enough
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

I know that in the overall scheme of things, this is quite a humble achievement for a blog, but I hope that it's the first of many milestones that this blog will cross in its lifetime.

A blog is nothing without readers and the continued support of its followers.

Thank-you to you all for visiting and, in many cases, coming back again and again! It's early days yet, but I hope that you keep visiting for many years to come!

And if you really like it, please tell your friends about it! (If you haven't already)

More Audio Book In The Can

Work is progressing very nicely on the audio book beta of 360 and I'm now about a third of the way through.  I'm getting into the routine of recording a dozen secenes each day, although there have been some days where there's been neither the time, nor the environment (squawking seagulls outside, washing machine in the kitchen, or gravelly morning-voice) to record as much as I'd like.

I'm still on schedule to complete it in three weeks as planned, which is encouraging.  The headline for this then is probably: So far, so good!

Visit to Scotland

However, there will be a slight break in the recording schedule as this weekend, I'm heading to the West Highlands of Scotland for a week of R&R.  I'll be staying in a little place on the shores of Loch Linnhe in the area where I set most of 360 and during the course of the week I'll be visiting a nearby glen that features in the now resting novel, The Wickedest War.

Yours truly contemplating Glen Coe last year.
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

This will be my third visit to the area in as many years and to say that I've fallen in love with it is really quite an understatement.  The scale, the beauty and the tranquility of the West Highlands always leave me inspired and cleansed of stress and altogether more human than when I arrive.

I've always loved long walks through beautiful countryside and there are a few good long walks planned over the week which will provide plenty of inspiration for Kiranan's Crucible (as well as other stories, as yet unknown) and plenty of time and space to think about life in general (although, hopefully not over-think it...).

I'll try to post Muse News and Notes In The Margin while I'm up there, as well as some extra posts when the muse strikes, but it'll all be dependent on how late we get back from each day's adventures!  If previous years are anything to go on, there could be a few days that get missed...

However, I will keep the twitter feed as up-to-date as I can, so if you'd like to follow something vaguely like an irregular commentary on what I get up to, that's probably your best bet!

So there we go!  The next stop is Thursday and Notes In The Margin.  See there, or on Twitter for the Great Highland Hike!

Notes In The Margin #5: World Building With Wild Ideas

One of the advantages of writing a fantasy, or science fiction novel is that for the most part the writer gets to create the world in which their story is set from scratch.

On the one hand that can seem like an incredibly easy thing to do.  I mean, how hard can it be? They've got the freedom to do whatever they want in their world, unconstrained by the real world limitations, geography or rules.

On the other hand creating an entire new world can be a daunting and complicated task.  A whole world.  From Scratch.  That's no mean feat.  Think about it.  Designing a world.  That simple sentence covers a wide variety of aspects that have to be thought through in order for the resulting world to be credible and workable.  The writer has to set down how the society works, the hierarchy, the technology, the geography, the environment (and how that works) and place names to name but a few.  Add in to the mix magic for a fantasy novel and how that works, who can perform it and how to limit it so that every dilemma thrown at your characters can't be simply cured by casting a spell, and the writer suddenly has a huge job on their hands.

A new world! The Vale of Tremorn and the Lonely Road
from Harbith Hiln to Wickershore...or, is it? No, it's Glen Coe
on a wet Friday afternoon, but the Vale is based on it.
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

You might sense from that last paragraph that the brittle voice of experience was speaking there.  I'm currently brainstorming ideas for my next project which will be a series of fantasy stories and I'm finding the creation of this new world a little more complicated than I first imagined.

It's not my first attempt at world building.  I had to do it for 360.  In that story, the main characters are immersed in a virtual reality system that has three different games each set in its own "world" (A war game, an alpine resort and an enchanted forest).

Each game has its own characteristics, goals and features, but all three run on the same basic principles that are universal across the virtual system.

That meant that I had to lay down common rules that would apply to the overall system as well as invent the locations and characters encountered by the protagonists in the three games.  And like the magic of my fantasy novels, I had to make sure that the rules governing how the players operated in the games didn't make overcoming dilemmas too easy or too hard.

I had to rewrite those rules several times, I can tell you!

And that was just for one story.  When it comes to writing the series, I'm going to have to be extra careful to ensure that I keep things consistent across all the stories, or at least work out credible reasons as to why things change mid-way through if they do.

That's where keeping a story "bible" or wiki can help.  Some TV shows have them so that their writers can refer to them to maintain continuity and get the facts right ('cos there's nothing like getting a fact wrong to wind-up the fans - including me!).  It might be in the form of a notebook, online wiki, or other note keeping program like OneNote, or Google Keep among others.

I use a mixture of a real A5 notebook and Evernote to keep all my notes and ideas, although I'm trying a new system of sticky notes and two large sheets of card to mind map my ideas for Kiranan's Crucible.  I'll let you know in a few weeks how that goes.

But facts and ideas are only half the equation.  Sometimes you have to cater to real world limitations even in a fantasy world.  If your story features a city that's got a population of 50,000, how big would that city have to be?  A square mile may be too small (unless it's a city inhabited by halflings), but twenty square miles could be very sparsely populated for humans.

Or if you have two cities a thousand miles apart, how long would it take to ride between the two? A week?  Only if your horses can cover around hundred and forty miles a day at twenty miles an hour for ten hours solid (Or perhaps your characters use magic...?)

Factors like that will affect your plot.

The approach I'm using for Kiranan's Crucible is to think big, imagine everything, note it down, then filter through my grand ideas and temper them with some real world limitations where necessary.

That way I hope to create fantastic worlds that work for my characters, my plots and for my readers.  We'll see how that goes too!

So world building can be a huge amount of hard work, but it's also be a lot of fun and when it's all done and everything works, it can be very, very satisfying.

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!

Notes In The Margin #4: Over-thinking vs Inactivity

It's a relatively short Notes In The Margin this week, I'm afraid.  I've been doing lots of thinking.

Sometimes that's a good thing.  Other times it's not such a good thing. There appears to be a fine line between thinking things through thoroughly and over-thinking them.  When you're the kind of person who likes to consider every aspect of a situation before you commit to action, then it's hard to actually see where that fine line is.

I'm not sure how one combats that.  I still need to think it through some more...

So, anyway...lots of thinking and not very much doing this week.

After nearly five months of constantly pushing myself to get the fourth draft finished, spending as much time as I could editing and the rest of the time stressing that I should be working on it, I've found this past week an odd mix of blissful relief and sheer panic.

I'm relieved it's done now - although, I do still have the audio beta edition to record - but I'm also experiencing a strange twitchiness at not having anything to do.  It's like a writing low-level cold turkey.  My writing brain has learned over these last five months that inactivity is the enemy and it's wrong not to be working on the novel.  On the other hand my normal brain is saying "thank goodness I don't have to edit/write/create tonight!".

Of-course I haven't stopped all writing activity.  As if it were that easy!  As I mentioned, there's the audio book beta to record and I have a dozen ideas for novels queuing-up for my attention.  My imagination is never truly idle.  There's always something brewing away in that corner of my mind.  Like chunks of rock in new born solar system, some of those fragments will coalesce into larger moon-sized plot points, scenes, or characters.  Slowly, over time, planets of narrative will develop and the orbital plot threads will spin it all together until the whole thing is spinning harmoniously around the sun of the central premise blazing away with glorious radiance.

And other ideas will vanish into a black hole never to be seen again...

Actually, they disappear into one of my real, or digital notebooks, but that can be just as devastating as falling into a black hole!

See.  I started over-thinking things again.  I should stop now and try to switch off.  No, I will switch off now.  "Do, or do not.  There is no try" as one wise little green Jedi fella once said (Yoda, in-case you were wondering).

Before I do stop, I'll just jot down one last idea that I've just had that I think will fit nicely into the next novel...

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!