It's the Great July Ebook Sale - 50% Discount!

 

Smashwords - the Ebook distributor I use to reach Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Scribd - starts its Summer Sale today running throughout July. As well as epub format, it offers mobi for a Kindle.

Great news! Many of my titles are included, offered at 50% discount.

Link to my Smashwords Sale Page:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lindaacaster
(50% Discount automatically applied at checkout)

The Mythic Time-Spanning Romance trilogy Torc of Moonlight is offered as separate novels, or if you want even more savings, as the complete trilogy in one long ebook.

For who prefer their reading with a little more of a shiver, there's plenty to choose from within my Chillers.

Thinking about writing your own fiction? How about a guide which does what it says on its cover - no waffle, full stories explained: 

Reading A Writer's Mind: Exploring Short Fiction - First Thought to Finished Story

That's enough to keep you going for ages. Check out my personal Smashwords Bookstore, and enjoy your reading:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lindaacaster 

Torc of Moonlight Boxed Set Discounted to 99p / 99c

 

Or #RomanticFantasy - whichever is your preferred sub-genre label.

The boxed set Torc of Moonlight Trilogy is currently discounted to 99p / 99c for just over 900 gripping pages. Set in real places readers can visit, even on StreetView, this alternative reality story is for those who like their Fantasy set in the Here & Now with a hard-core side-helping of History.

White Ladies are renown for guarding water courses. They are seen from the corner of your eye - except modern sensibilities insist you are mistaken. Yet browse any village history and a White Lady will be there, perhaps in a line drawing surrounded by puddles and bullrushes. She kept the spring water clean. She's the reason Well Dressing festivals survive in this age of water on tap and mains sewerage.

You can read more about White Ladies HERE

To purchase the boxed set for those long, dark, autumnal evenings just around the corner, go to your preferred vendor:

Kindle  ¦ Nook  ¦  Smashwords

 

Alas, despite asking nicely some time ago, Apple and Kobo refuse to discount the price. What can I say? Go buy it from Smashwords instead.

 

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Also just entering a 99p / 99c discount period is my Dark Fantasy short story collection Contribution to Mankind and other stories of the Dark.

 

There are six stories to create a frisson down your spine or have you checking the door is locked and bolted. One is even based on true events.

Links: Kindle : Nook : Kobo (Hurrah!) : Smashwords : (only Apple refuses to play nicely)

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If Fantasy, SciFi, & Horror, or the plentiful sub-genes thereof, are your cup of hemlock, have a look at the current 99c offerings at SFFBookBonanza 

 Enjoy your reading!

Torc of Moonlight Trilogy - Christmas Special Price

Seasonal promotions are hitting all the digital stores, including my Torc of Moonlight Trilogy boxed set. For a very limited period this 900+ page fantasy romance is a mere £2.99 / €2.99 / $2.99 or equivalent. Go grab it now and feast on more than just turkey this festive season.

The over-arcing story follows Nick and Alice through three books, three cities skirting the wild lands of the North York Moors, three time periods, and nine years - those numbers are significant to the storyline - as the pair grapple with the realisation that Celtic folklore is based very much on living fact.

I tripped over the premise, or should I say I kept tripping over it, as I undertook various walks along ancient byways in my home county of Yorkshire. History might be buried, but it's not always dead, and TV programmes like Time Team and Digging For Britain now emphasise how people lived as well as marvelling at the physical traces they left for archaeologists to excavate. 

Unpolluted drinking water is a commodity humans have always taken care to secure. Today it's chemically scrubbed and piped into our homes; in Victorian times the village pump helped to keep clean the water from the local spring; before the mechanical pump, the spring itself would be surrounded by a stone well-head to help retain the purity of its water with its run-off allowed to pool in the ubiquitous village pond. It is here The White Lady, protector of the water, is found under the sub-heading "folklore" in county histories written by altruistic country gentlemen. 

The White Lady was no mere ghostly form in previous centuries, but she was always female. The traditional Well-Dressing festivals of Derbyshire, rich in Christian symbolism, are an attempt to conflate and thus suppress the belief. The same was attempted in the medieval period where stone churches dedicated to All Saints or All Souls were built close to springs venerated at the end of the farming calendar - the Celtic year-end festival of Samhain demonised by Christian teaching into All Hallows. Despite now being a largely secular country, we still refuse to let go. Halloween is the most commercialised "festival" next to Christmas.

If you like the works of Barbara Erskine, Robert Holdstock, or Phil Rickman, the Torc of Moonlight Trilogy may well be your cup of Yuletide pleasure. It is on offer for a limited time only:

Amazon   ¦  Kobo   ¦   iBooks   ¦   Nook   ¦   All formats

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Research: Mapping Our Way To Understanding

Here in the UK we are fortunate to be able to pore over Ordnance Survey maps of the entire country, rural and urban alike. Each map shows, via simple icons, a welter of detail beyond the topographical: modern, historical, and prehistoric. 

They helped me build an entire series of weekend walks, and I’ve relied on them heavily for my fiction, especially the Torc of Moonlight trilogy, which has its watery roots in those written walks. I don’t own a satnav, but carry a copy of the Ordnance Survey’s book of road maps in the family car and prefer to navigate rather than drive, pointing out items of interest not immediately seen from the road: Medieval castles, Iron Age ring-forts, Roman road routes, Prehistoric barrows.

What did people do before the first of these maps were commissioned in the 18th century? They improvised.

Maps have always been produced. Think of a stick carving lines in damp mud or sand, the detail being passed orally. Later those details were often written into charters. I came one upon such example recently while viewing a YouTube rendition of a 1981 BBC history programme In Search of Athelstan led by a young Michael Wood full of hands-on enthusiasm.

For a bit of context, Athelstan was the grandson of King Alfred the Great. It was Athelstan who, in the 900s, made his grandfather’s dream of a united England a reality. As kings did in those and later days, he rewarded his supporters with estates of land. Between 25-32mins into the programme, Michael Wood walks the boundary of one such estate by following the wording of its charter alongside a modern Ordnance Survey map of the area. The fact that he still could, over 1,000 years later, is at first nothing short of miraculous, even down to pointing to listed hedgerows and named streams. Yet is it?

I find the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral awe-inspiring, even though I’ve not yet laid eyes on it in person. Dating from around 1300, it is believed to be the largest medieval map still in existence (1.59 x 1.34 metres / 64 x 52 inches). Inked on a single piece of calfskin, it shows the world as it was then understood.

Christian maps of this era always place Jerusalem at the centre and the east at the top, but once you get your eye in the detail is spectacular and very recognisable. Britain is at the bottom left. 

Check out the digital version HERE, and be sure to highlight the colour-enhanced version showing how bright it would have looked when first commissioned. There is also a 15 minute explanatory video from History West Midlands fronted by an image of the beautiful Hereford Cathedral, itself dating from 1079.

Not all maps were undertaken by the great and the good. When I was a Native American re-enactor I saw reproductions of powder horns engraved with topographical maps, mostly river systems, for use by trappers known as Mountain Men.

They weren’t the only people who used this type of utility map. Left is an image of a powder horn dating from the American Revolutionary War showing a map of Charlestown and Boston, including named wharfes and gun batteries, which belonged to a British soldier, “E.B.” of His Majesty’s 47th Foot.

Along with handily dating it, 1775, “E.B.” added the inscription A Pox on rebels in ther crymes. Not a man to cross, then. Perhaps he didn’t want to be there.

Map reproduction is courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, where close-ups of this image and others can be viewed HERE.


The most modern, and a map that never fails to impress, comes from the International Space Station showing planet Earth. YouTube has a number of real-time and time-lapse runs. I’ve chosen one at random. May you find it very, very restful and glad you're living now and able to view it.


All images are reproduced via Creative Commons licensing.

Read an Ebook Week: 50% Off!

It's Read An Ebook Week and I have three titles subscribed via Smashwords.com which offers its titles in both mobi format for Kindle and ePub format for Kobo, Nook, iBooks, etc. Use the coupon code RAE50 at the checkout to get 50% off - which is $4.50 for the Torc of Moonlight Books1-3 boxed set.

Grab it while you can. Read An Ebook Week finishes on Saturday 10th March.

Direct links:

Torc of Moonlight Boxed set   ¦   The Paintings chiller   ¦   Reading A Writer's Mind writer's guide

Enjoy!

How Historical Should Be Your Historical?

I have been following an earnest debate in a Facebook group regarding how close to factual history Historical novels should stay.

On the one side there’s the fiction is never fact and shouldn’t be taken as such. On the other there’s the fiction should stick to the fact until the fact gets in the way of the fiction. And a lot of differing views threading in, around and between.

My stance is that authors have to be true to themselves and their prospective readers, as far as their publishers will allow.

I’ve never wanted to write about historical figures, or even historical events. I’m much more interested in how ordinary people lived their lives in what we might call a historical era, but that certainly doesn’t mean that I can make it up as I go. Just as modern London can’t be set in modern Poland for the sake of a fictional story, named places that existed as historical fact both have to be set in their true place and have an authenticity to them corresponding to the stated date. And not just in looks or smell.

I remember being in a cinema watching Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. RH (Kevin Costner) had just landed on English sands below the unmistakeable white cliffs of the country's southern shore when he uttered words to the effect of: Tonight I will dine at my father’s table – ie in Nottingham. The  cinema erupted in gales of laughter, with someone behind me quipping, ‘Got a helicopter waiting on the cliff-top, has he?’ And that was it for the film. The suspension of disbelief had been well and truly trashed, the audience more intent on chortling over the succession of gaffes than concentrating on the story.

Cinema-goers do that. Readers don’t. They throw the offending novel at a wall, give it a one-star review for wasting their time, and never read that author again. So novelists play fast and loose with history at their peril, while Hollywood adds the euphemism Based on... and runs all the way to the bank, massacring History as it goes.

Yet every Historical novel is also based on… people, events, places, eras, that once existed. History – the factual History we novelists take as primary or secondary source material – is based on… documents that are based on… hearsay or, if we’re lucky, eye-witness accounts, transcribed by… translated from… and we would be foolish not to accept that everyone along that line is relating facts as they saw them, or was instructed to see them. Truth, after all, is a many-faceted light in the darkness.

This is one of the reasons historical novelists add a Historical Note to the back of their  books, gently separating the history from the fiction for interested readers. You’ll find one in each of the Torc of Moonlight trilogy, to both separate and dovetail the past and the present storylines.

But there’s not one added to Beneath The Shining Mountains, a true based on… the remembrance of a then old woman, translated to an American ethnographer to be set down in a foreign tongue, doubtless edited for understanding, and doubtless edited again two generations later for a thin volume of “tales” from a people who lived yet whose life had perished, her story re-envisioned by me with the help of a wide range of secondary sources that might, or might not, have been as historically accurate as maintained.

How historical is your Historical?

Mine? I do my best. In the end its all any novelist can do. We’ve just got to ensure that we do it.

Christmas Cheesecake and Microphones

Come down to The Wrygarth on Wednesday, they said, we've something going on.

It soon became clear that what was going on was 'The Phil White Show' from Radio Humberside. It's a good job the front car park of our local, The Wrygarth Inn at Great Hatfield, is of a size to back in its travelling studio. I never did ask mine hosts, Ray and Sandra Thompson, if they'd measured it beforehand.

Phil White has been travelling the region for nearly a year doing outside broadcasts from out-of-the-way places and fascinating venues. As he maintains, there's always something of interest to fill his week-day 2.5 hour programme. He should know: by Christmas he'll have reached his 250th.

On a wet and very cold Wednesday, though, he and his two techies were pleased for the comfort of the Inn - if not for a handy manger, for the heat, the coffee, and the superb desserts Ray laid on as tasters. Ray doesn't merely own the pub, he's a highly qualified chef. Believe me, the Christmas Cheesecake was fought over.

Yours Truly in front of the Xmas Shelves

I'd been invited to chat about the Torc of Moonlight trilogy, for sale in the pub's shop, and was intent on discussing the background to Celtic water deities still recalled in the folklore of villages in the area, but it started by being a cabaret spot about Did I come here often and why I was on lime & soda, which rather wrong-footed me. Anyway, if you're desperate you can listen to my Six Minutes Of Fame via the BBC iPlayer HERE (starting at 45mins) which will be archived off-line mid-January. I have a feeling, though, that you'll need to be in the UK to listen as it needs a sign-in.

Of course, no writer worth their salt would pass up the research opportunity of such an occasion, and before the programme went live to air I collared one of the techies and asked nicely for a tour of the bus. 

The rear part is a relaxation area, both for Phil and the crew, and to conduct interviews, and is covered in memorabilia collected during the making of past programmes. The studio section, a mini version of those at Radio Humberside's HQ in Hull, is set just behind the driver's seat. As can be imagined, it is a bank of monitors and trailing wires with a single chair and a mixing desk. An aerial at the rear of the bus picks up the wi-fi signal from Phil's microphone, pushes it through the studio set-up, and via the dish on the roof is bounced off a satellite - currently somewhere above South America - to their HQ in Hull to be broadcast. 

I didn't understand half of it, but found it fascinating to be taken through the process. Will I use it in some future fiction? Never say never - which was why I asked for the tour.

White Ladies and Green Teeth

The Torc of Moonlight Trilogy launches today! Yay! And just in time to snuggle down over the Christmas break and immerse yourself in 900 pages of time-spanning Gothic Fantasy. It is certainly Gothic, but is it Fantasy?

The characters are clearly fictional, I make no bones about that, but I’m also clear about the settings being real-world places readers can visit. That leaves the un-named deity who, by slow degrees, is determined to resurrect herself, and re-exert her influence over her environment. Now that’s Fantasy, surely? Not quite.

Years ago, when I was a back-packing walker, my preferred area was the North York Moors - a place of sweeping vistas, Iron Age hillforts, Roman marching camps and Industrial Age workings – all returned to Nature. It didn’t take me long to realise there were also an awful lot of springs named Lady Well marked on the Ordnance Survey maps I used.

At first I accepted that the Lady in question was a nod to Mary, mother of Jesus. However, with a bit of research it soon became clear that the Lady, or Ladies - each was a resident of her own water source - were linked strongly with Pagan beliefs. They only become an amalgamated, unnamed female entity when conflated during the early Christian period with that other powerful female icon, the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the surprise is not that such occurred during the demonisation of all that was not Christian, but that hardly any had taken on the saint’s name directly, as happened in less wild places.

We do know the names of some pre-Christian water deities, mostly thanks to early Roman occupation and writings: Coventina on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland; Arnemetia at Buxton Springs in Derbyshire, Senuna at Ashwell in Hertfordshire; and the most famous in the country, Sulis, at Bath in Somerset where she presided over thermal springs prior to the conquest. Even when the invaders tamed the flow of heated waters by building a bath and temple complex in the accepted Roman style, they only partly conflated the known goddess with their own Minerva. To this day she is known as Sulis-Minerva.

Silver votive plaques depicting Senuna excavated at the Ashwell shrine site, now in the British Museum

White Ladies, or a White Lady, pops up all over the country as a folklore memory of a once exalted deity, though they are now often referred to as a ghost. Attending a history day at a nearly village last month, I was intrigued to see mention of a White Lady known to have walked the area of the pond and spring used as the source of drinkable water before the village was connected to modern piped mains.

Ghostly apparitions aren’t always known as the more benign White Lady. In another village just north of where I live a short road leading to its village pond is named Bugg Lane. And the native name for a spirit or ghost? Bugg or boggle. It’s where the term bogey-man comes from, originally one of the fey, the people of the Otherworld, it was better not to annoy.

In this respect, Jenny Greenteeth gets star billing. Those who were of a superstitious leaning considered ‘Jenny’ a witch or fairy name. Jenny Greenteeth was, and sometimes still is, associated with deep, dank waters covered in clinging duckweed, of a decaying being intent on pulling the living to their deaths. Rather than it being a true water hag, might she be the last remnants of a remembered guardian of a fresh water spring polluted by man’s unthinking industry? Rather than being demonised, perhaps Jenny Greenteeth and the other White Ladies should be an icon for our environmentally-conscious time.

The Torc of Moonlight Trilogy is available as a digital boxed set or individual paperbacks:

Kindle  ¦  Kobo  ¦  Nook  ¦  iBooks  ¦  Smashwords

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Boxed Set Trilogy now on Pre-Order

After hours of fun last week, the digital boxed set of the three Torc of Moonlight novels is finally available for pre-order - launching 8th December.

The novels concern the resurrection of a Celtic water deity in an area of what is now the North York Moors in England. Ritual deposits in water courses are a given in archaeology, and I use the ultimate - a sword - in Book 1 to kick off the trilogy. Yet ritual deposits are not simply something of far off history; they continue to this day. Have you never tossed coins into water hoping for 'good luck'? 

If you live in the UK and stand still long enough to consider your own surroundings, you'll find it uncannily easy to discover echoes of water worship close by. I live on the coast in East Yorkshire. Within a few miles, in one village there is a Bugg Lane leading to a quintessential village duck pond - Bugg, like Boggle, is an old word for ghost or apparition - while in another village the written history mentions remembered folklore of a White Lady appearing by the local spring-head. 

Is there a medieval Christian church in your vicinity named All Saints or All Souls? Their dedicated feast days are 1st and 2nd November, All Hallows Eve, a time of vigil, being 31st October. Close by there will be, or will have been, a community water source used for autumnal divination rites as well as everyday drinking. Their pre-Christian deities, demonised so long ago, give us modern Halloween. Even the celebrated summer Well Dressings in parts of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, now a tourist industry of its own, cannot truly camouflage their ancient origins.

History is mere inches beneath our feet, and the flow of water is used as the flow of time in these contemporary novels:

Book 1: Torc Of Moonlight - set in Hull with a Celtic resonance

Book 2: The Bull At The Gate - set in York with a Roman resonance

Book 3: Pilgrims Of The Pool - set in Durham with a Mediaeval resonance

Read more about the individual novels here, or on the trilogy's retailer pages:

Kindle  ¦  iBooks  ¦  Nook  ¦  Kobo  ¦  All formats

Formatting the Trilogy into a Digital Box Set

Three novels, formatted to (almost) perfection, to be amalgamated into a single file for a trilogy box set. How problematic can it be?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. And it’s down to technology, or the incremental improvements in technology. During the period it has taken to write and launch the individual novels into the digital world I have changed computers twice, and the version of Word probably three times. Who keeps count?

The first flag came when I emailed the file destined for Amazon to my Kindle for a check. My shortened internal Table of Contents worked fine, but the bookmark did not connect with the Kindle’s Go To button to allow readers to link to it. Mmm.

Most of my titles are available on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, and Nook. However, as I don’t have a Mac computer and I don’t live in the USA, I use a distributor to intercede on my behalf for the last three. I use Smashwords. There are others.

So I altered the file slightly and uploaded to Smashwords. There were no autovetter flags and the mobi format transferred to my Kindle worked first time. Brilliant! Except within hours I’d had an email from Smashwords saying the ePub’s NCX list was not corresponding to the internal Table of Contents. Cue loud groan from me. Which was when I sat back to consider why I was having problems when I don’t usually.

Ah, changes in technology were inputting unseen code, probably countermanding one another. I could see only one option: Nuke the file.

The term comes from Smashwords’ own Style Guide – How to Format Your Ebook. No matter which digital retailer is used this free download is both extensive and written in the language a non-techy can understand.

The ‘nuclear’ option, when all tweaking fails or, as in my case, I’ve no idea what to tweak, is a fail-safe method of clearing all unseen code. The Word file is copied and pasted into Notebook, and from Notebook it is copied and pasted into a new, fresh, Word document. Then the formatting is re-applied via Styles. Say it quick and it doesn’t sound much, but for a trilogy it is time-consuming, to say the least.

And this is where I’m at. Having the old file and the new file side by side for guidance, all the indents, centres, emboldens, and page breaks have been reinstated, and I am halfway through reinstating the 927 instances of italicised text. Word is good, though. On the old file Enter italics into Search and Replace, tick Highlight, hit Find All, and it does just that, allowing me to slide through the pages.

Note to self for the next novel: Use fewer italics.

31st October is Halloween. Er, Not Exactly

This year, Halloween in its purest form probably falls on 4th November so as to align with the full moon, but then we should, perhaps, call it Samhain. But don’t let that distract you from your ‘trick or treating’.

Though if you are in the UK you really should be bobbing for apples, and if you are in Mexico perhaps you should be honouring recently deceased family members in Día de Muertos, probably because the government tells you to. It certainly wasn’t a country-wide observance back in the 19th century. Only the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico had a similar festival, except that was held at the start of summer.

This is the problem with Halloween – the vigil of All Hallows Eve – marked for the Feast of All Saints the day after, and the day after that, the Feast of All Souls. It has always been a movable feast. Back in the day, when Christianity was intent on becoming the dominant religious force, the Church moved or invented festivals to coincide with deeply-ingrained pagan observances, most of which were Nature-aligned. Think Christmas and Easter.

For Celtic peoples, Samhain celebrated the agricultural year’s end during which divinations were undertaken to glimpse the impending fortune of the people. How many of those divinations were water-based no one truly knows – but it seems a very high percentage going by the number of extant medieval stone churches named All Saints, or All Saints & All Souls, doubtless built on the foundations of previous Saxon churches often built of wood but carrying the same dedication.

If you are living in the UK you’ll have one within a reasonable distance. A bit of detection should locate the water source close by. Yes, that quaint hand-pump wasn’t always attached to a spring source. Or how about that picturesque brook which never runs dry even during the driest of summers? 

Like all PR, repeat the message often enough, ridicule, or in this case demonise, past beliefs, and at first the ‘folklore’ is questioned; eventually it is forgotten. When it is resurrected – a sort of neo-Samhain – 'trick or treating' is what you get. Especially when there’s a good helping of PR behind it to make cash registers ring.

Ever thrown coins into a “wishing well”? Who are you expecting to respond?

For a time-spanning fictional insight, check out the Torc of Moonlight trilogy. Book 1 is currently on offer. (Think PR.)

Interview and SciFi+Fantasy Giveaway Thoughts

The Torc of Moonlight trilogy is complete, Hull's FantastiCon is over, and I'm gearing up for the British Fantasy Society's annual FantasyCon in Peterborough at the end of the month. As part of my RandR in between I'm slowly turfing out the house and hacking back the garden, but the digital promotion continues, nonethless.

I'm interviewed on the Fantasy & Magic website with the questions focusing on why I chose to write the trilogy, and Fantasy in particular, and the evergreens of who my influencers were. It's never that simple, of course. I consider all Fiction to the Fantasy; to me, some elements of storytelling are just more fantastic than others.

Also on-going is the promotional side of things. InstaFreebie has recently offered direct hosting facilities for self-gathered groups. One finishes tomorrow [see HERE]...

Link: https://www.instafreebie.com/gg/shUSLwOigkJnTxPjqUbc

...and the other carries on until the end of the month [see HERE]

http://www.fantasyandmagicbooks.com/instafreebie/

Authors tend to work in the dark with most giveaways, or at least the dark shadow, regarding the number of ebooks claimed. But with the new InstaFreebie group giveaways authors have access to a dashboard making it easy to see how many ebooks are claimed, both of their own and of the other authors in the giveaway. As I key in this post late Friday afternoon, 25 titles have been claimed more than 50 times; only two have had less than 10 claimed, and my 25% partial of Torc of Moonlight is one of them. Mmm... perhaps I need to rethink my 'partial' strategy. As far as I can see, mine is the only partial in the group.

In this context, it will be interesting to see how my Beneath The Shining Mountains 10% KU sample does in the Romance Samples To Whet your Appetite! giveaway lined up from 10-30th September. Though I'm not entirely sure what the organiser's somewhat chilly snow scene brings to the group's landing page. Especially with no text.

https://www.instafreebie.com/gg/fmDycdM9TmbE14o4snJL 

At the moment, though, all this promotion via giveaways is a toe-in-the-water testing for me. We shall see what we shall see.

#Editing 13: Print After Ebook?

Paperback - soon to be available

Pilgrims of the Pool is finished - except for the paperback.

The ebook edition has been out about ten days, and many thanks to all my readers who have re-Tweeted, shared my Facebook announcement, and even bought a copy. I do appreciate the help to get it noticed. As expected, one of the responses has been Where's the print version?

Mainstream publishers tend to launch print versions first, hardback, then paperback. Sometimes the ebook comes last, sometimes along with one of the print versions. The publishers' main intention is to maximise profit. Prior to the hardback release the publisher will have sent out ARCs (advance reading copies) aimed to maximise sales by having reviews ready to hit publications and retail sites on launch day.

Well-organised indie authors also send out ARCs to their 'street team' volunteers for exactly the same reason, gathering responses to quote on book covers. This takes some forward thinking, and when have I been so organised as to work that many months in advance?

Therefore I launch the ebook, promote it heavily for around a fortnight, and then start to check and format for print. By the time I've completed this I hope to have the first reviews in to be able to quote snippets, with permission, on the backblurb and the inside cover. As I key in this blog I already have two 5-star reviews up on Amazon, for which I am very grateful.

A note on formatting for print. Most publishers simply use a single formatted copy for both, but ebook and print are two different sized reading experiences. Print can comfortably carry longer paragraphing, whereas an ebook is usually read on a smaller screen. And who wants solid text margin-to-margin? The added benefit is that the novel gets yet another proofread en route.

So that's the state of play at the moment. When Pilgrims of the Pool is available as a print copy, I'll let you know.

See also: 

Editing-1: What Does Editing Actually Mean?
Editing-2: The Structural Edit

Editing-3: The Content Edit

Editing-4: The Line Edit
Editing-5: Line Edit Update 

Editing-6: Beta Readers 

Editing-7: Metadata 

Editing-8: Beyond Beta Readers
Editing-9: Writing in a Circle
Editing-10: Polishing the Novel
Editing-10A: Scheduling Hiccup
Editing-11: Scales Falling From My Eyes
Editing-12: Ebook Launch!

#Editing 12: Pilgrims of the Pool - eBook Launch!

Pilgrims of the Pool is finished. And it is launch day! Yay!

Yes, finally, after much editing tribulation, Book 3 in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy has winged its way into the ether and is now available for download as an ebook at a launch discount. Get it while you can.

History lies mere inches beneath our feet.

Nick Blaketon leaves Durham to free Alice from the Celtic deity holding her prisoner at the Pool, echoing pilgrims who tread the route 900 years before seeking a fabled spring where an angel-woman cures all ills.

Alice is overjoyed to be reunited with Nick, but she is not the Alice he remembers. As is the land, she is transforming, and he feels caught between betrayals.

When her presence at the Pool is jeopardised by a hydraulic fracturing operation and the conservationists opposing it, Nick cannot walk away. But do the pilgrims pose a greater threat? What knowledge, handed down the generations, are the current landowners hiding?

As Time intersects, has Nick faith enough to change events in a mediaeval past of hallowed saints and conjured demons, or has Alice’s power to heal initiated her own demise? 

Amazon ¦ iBooks ¦ Kobo ¦ Nook ¦ Smashwords

Book 1, Torc of Moonlight, is currently on offer at 99p.

Print will follow in due course. Why? That's for another blog post. 

#Editing 4: Line Edit

Pilgrim of the Pool, the final novel in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy is finished. Except it’s not. And that’s no April Fool’s joke.

Having done Structural and Content edits, next up is the Line Edit. I prefer to use this label rather than the all-encompassing Copy Edit as it truly fulfils its goal. Now is the time my eyes bleed as I go through the typescript line by line. It will take longer than a week because I work slowly. Yes, it can be pressed into three days, but tiredness produces mistakes and working fast means I end up reading the story, not weighing the words which make up each sentence.

What am I looking for?

• Syntax – narrative and dialogue shouldn’t read as interchangeable; neither should dialogue from different characters.
• Sentence openers – we all have our foibles; mine is And, He/She.
• Adjectives – too many or not enough? Readers want to experience the story, not take a description-by-numbers course. Two is enough, one might do. If it slows the action in a high-action sequence there shouldn’t be any.
• Adverbs – overuse of words ending –ly is laziness. Choose the correct word. Walked forcefully equates to strode. I suggest doing a global search on a chapter to see how many are flagged. For newbies the result can be horrifying.
• Colloquialisms – mine should not be on the page; the characters’ should. For this novel, my historical characters should not sound like my contemporary; neither should they sound stilted or laughable to modern readers.
• Mixed Metaphors & Symbolism – mixed metaphors can turn a tense scene into a laughable scene; too many snow lay like a fat blanket and readers will do more than roll their eyes.
• Repeated Words/Phrases in Close Proximity – repeats are useful for wracking up tension; used by accident they wreck the pacing.
• Dialogue – should each be given plain, or is a dialogue/action tag needed to delineate who is speaking? Or is one needed to act as a pacing spacer?
• Punctuation – is it both correct, and correct for the principal market? For instance, the American market  doesn't use semi-colons the same way the British market does. My trilogy might be going to the American market but it is a story set in the UK featuring British characters. The American market can lump it.
• Spellings – the same applies. My Native American historical uses US spelling: favorite, color, etc, and I can get away with it because of its setting. If I was writing in a contemporary US setting the grammar would need to be changed, too.
• Word Use – the same applies. I use that in dialogue and feel it’s okay, but I use it far too often for comfort in the narrative. An American reader would balk at any. Is there a rash of had had?
• Spell/Grammar Checker – most authors have at least their computer’s spellchecker in operation, but these can’t be trusted for fiction where syntax and word contractions are manipulated for tone and atmosphere.
• Length of Sentence/Paragraph – this will depend on the action/passivity/dialogue of the section. I ensure that each sentence doesn’t contain too many images or actions, or readers will feel as if they are juggling. I want them to juggle the motivations of the characters, not words in a sentence. E-readers usually take 150-180 words to a screen-page under normal usage. It doesn’t want to be a wall of solid text. I tend to split paragraphs more for an ebook than I do for a paperback.
• Anything else – again my catch-all. At this stage it will be mostly items I’ve previously missed or have queried.
• Automated Checker – yes I use one. Pro-Writing Aid is my choice; there are others. Notice that I use it last. It is my final flagger. Mostly it pulls up items I’ve made a conscious decision to use as aiding the tone or atmosphere of the novel’s delivery, but it will also flag items I’ve overlooked, which in turn concentrates my mind not to miss it next time. I play the same game with it as I did with the editors of my earlier magazine/novel length works: to produce fiction where nothing needs to be changed. It won’t happen, but it is a good goal to aim for.

Next week... I’m still on with the Line Edit so I’m not sure yet, but I’ll be back!

See also:

Editing-1: What does editing actually mean?
Editing-2: The Structural Edit

Editing-3: The Content Edit

Editing-4: The Line Edit
Editing-5: Line Edit Update

#Editing 3: Content Edit

Release date coming soon

Pilgrims of the Pool, Book 3 in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy, is finished. Except it’s not. 

Last week was spent on a Structural Edit. Some chapters were re-positioned, others were queried and marked for a future decision, but overall I’m happy with the balance. My notes – just over a page of A4 – were reviewed, line-editing changes I’d marked along the way were keyed-in, and a clean copy of the typescript printed. Beyond this stage, working with a typescript festooned with different coloured annotations soon becomes a recipe for disaster.

This week I’ve been concentrating on the Content Edit. What am I looking for?

• Facts – yes I’m writing a novel, but facts are the bedrock of any fiction, no matter the genre, and these facts need to be correct. I am working with contemporary conservation, wind turbine and oil-shale hydraulic fracturing; a lab environment using a mass spectrometer and a chromatograph; true places; and a historical thread set around 1150. Can the Benedictine monks of Durham’s priory actually walk in the Chapel of the Nine Altars or was it still under construction? What was the church actually called at the time? What did they eat, when and where? How did they travel? And on it goes... Obviously much of this was either researched prior to the start of the novel, or on the hoof as it was written, but the context still needs to be weighed.
• Seed, Mature & Harvest – information and artefacts the characters use within the conveying of the story need to be in place (seeding), and mentioned (maturing), before they can be used to the effect necessary (harvesting). If one character is going to slug another with a baseball bat, that bat had better be talked about or dusted long before it’s needed. The same goes for information imparted. Most pertinent detail is slipped on the page as a throwaway line so readers don’t gleefully jump all over it believing they can read the writer’s mind. Once, they’ll forgive; three times and they’ll seek another novel to read. Also, it is very rare that an item is seeded, matured and harvested within the same chapter or couple of chapters, for exactly the same reason. Each needs to be woven into the fabric of the novel so they over-arc one another.
• Hooks & Bombshells – just as the opening of a novel needs a hook so as to engage the reader, throughout a novel hooks are used to pique interest, and conversely bombshells are end-of- sections or chapters written so the reader desires to know what happens next. These can be as overt as portrayed in a TV soap opera, but not all the time or they become laughably wearying. In a novel the use of a series of subliminal bombshells, each ratcheting up the tension by degrees, often works better. It depends on the genre.
• Conflict – a chapter should not tread water. It matters little whether the conflict is external or internal, pin-prick small or devastatingly large, it needs to be there.
• Pacing graph – no novel of any length can ignite on opening and keep soaring like a rocket; readers would be emotionally exhausted before they were halfway through. There has to be slower, perhaps more introspective, segments where both the character and the reader take stock. A check of the graph, be it mentally or physically plotted on a wall chart, ensures that variations are sown throughout the length of the novel, with the final quarter increasing in pace to the climax.
• Character – consistency. This is something I broadly looked at during the Structural Edit. Now is the time to look at it in detail. One set of subsidiary characters were subsidiaries in Book 1 so I need to ensure they speak with the same syntax and haven’t developed an odd accent or extra children or talk about a dog that was never mentioned in Book 1. Also, the main character was alcohol-free in Book 2, yet in this typescript there is mention of “a pint” in a pub situation. So is he or isn’t he on the wagon? He also wears a ring that is pertinent to the story, yet it’s not mentioned between pp54-120. That’s a hellova gap. Likewise, the Benedictine monk starts with “prayer beads” which become “rosary beads” which are forgotten halfway through the book. Somehow I don’t think a medieval monk would forget their use.
• Time/Continuity – the three story-threads move forwards, but not at the same pace. Now is the stage to ensure the days of the week/s are in sequence, particularly as certain chapters have been repositioned.
• Anything else – this catch-all was used during the Structural Edit, and in truth it acts as a coarse filter for whatever edit follows. Picking up phrases or overlong sentence structure at this stage helps to clear the decks.

See you next week for my take on a Line Edit.

If you're busy (and who isn't?) but would like to read the series as it unfolds, add your e-address to the 'Follow My Posts By Email' box in the righthand column and Blogger will send you notification as soon as the posts go live.

See also:
Editing-1: What does editing actually mean?
Editing-2: The Structural Edit

Editing-3: The Content Edit

Editing-4: The Line Edit

Editing-5: Line Edit Update

#Editing 2: Structural Edit

When I was still messing with the novel's Structure

 Pilgrims of the Pool is finished. Except it's not.

I’ve been busy this week staring at the door in my office. As you can see from the image, this is where I Blu-tack a précis of each finished chapter, colour-coded to show its point of view, and more or less split into the quarters of the novel which make up the elements of the principal’s Character Arc. And the reason for this? I had an extra chapter that needed fitting in. Why? Because I messed up. Sometimes authors just do. The trick is to realise it and correct the problem.

Each of the novels in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy have three story threads: the main which arcs across all the novels, a subsidiary contemporary, and a subsidiary historical. Because I’d messed up early in the writing (chapter 7 of a 41 chapter novel – doh!) the story threads were out of kilter. Does this matter? It does to mine as each chapter echoes and/or reflects elements of the story threads around it.

This highlights exactly what a Structural Edit is all about – the overview, the big picture – hence it is far easier to see set out on a door than it is on-screen or even in a paper document.

What am I looking for?

• Balance – are the separate threads in groups or spread deftly through the whole, feeding from one another? Is the main story thread actually the main story thread or has a subsidiary usurped it? My main thread has 20 chapters; my subsidiaries 15 each, therefore this is a close-run thing so will be monitored during further edits. Another novel might have a single forward storyline but use flashbacks; the same need to balance applies.
• Continuity – something can’t occur on a Thursday if it isn’t set up until Friday of the same week. Elements of a story are seeded, allowed to grow, and harvested – in that order, even if there’s a big time/chapter gap between.
• Pacing – do the story threads reach their individual climaxes and the novel’s – and the trilogy’s – in the correct order, within a tight time-frame so as to elicit the planned reader reaction?

After re-arranging the chapter order to fit in the orphan, I then spent three days with the paper copy of the typescript, a coloured pen, and a pad. At this stage some authors like to push their typescript onto an e-reader so they simply read, make separate notes, and don’t fiddle.

But I like to fiddle. It’s part of my on-going line edit that starts as soon as I commit the first sentence to a Word document. There is no correct method; it’s whatever works for the author. My colour of choice this time round was green, simply because the typescript already holds blue, red, black and pencil. Sometimes the page can be that messy; sometimes I’m on the third printed version of a chapter, marked such in a corner.

So what am I looking for? The above, plus:

• Theme – consistency. I want only one, not half a dozen. Sometimes novels are winged and the theme develops during the writing, sometimes the theme only becomes apparent at this stage, sometimes the theme only becomes apparent when a beta reader points it out. For this novel the theme was in place before I started writing. It is, however, the theme of the novel, not the theme of one character’s story thread, hence an eagle-eye for consistency.
• Motifs – are they mentioned and then forgotten? Are there too many mentions? Are there too many motifs?
• Characterisation – consistency and continuity. All main characters should change through the course of the novel because of their experiences, so if there’s a change there’d better have been a corresponding experience, or more likely a series of experiences, to prompt it. I don’t fiddle in-depth at this stage, but annotate the page and make notebook observations to study later.
• Sense - Does the novel make sense? Are questions asked at the start answered by the end? Overall, is it too complicated or too shallow? The trilogy is deeply layered so this novel shouldn’t be at all shallow, but I can’t make it too complicated either. People are reading for entertainment. It’s a matter of balance, and adhering to the genre/sub-genre expectations.
• Anything else – if it catches my eye, no matter what or why, the page is annotated and detailed observations are written in the notebook. Specifics are important here. Check character means absolutely nothing several days down the line. It also acts as a preliminary pass towards a Content Edit.

See you next week for my take on a Content Edit.

If you're busy (and who isn't?) but would like to read the series as it unfolds, add your e-address to the 'Follow My Posts By Email' box in the righthand column and Blogger will send you notification as soon as the posts go live.


See also:
Editing-1: What does editing actually mean?
Editing-2: The Structural Edit

Editing-3: The Content Edit

Editing-4: The Line Edit

Editing-5: Line Edit Update

‘Pilgrims of the Pool’ Is Finished. Now what? #Editing

Final in the 'Torc of Moonlight' trilogy

Let’s be correct here: Pilgrims of the Pool is not finished; the first draft is finished. But let’s celebrate a bit on that score. After much angst it finally has The End pinned to its typescript. It – and me – now moves into the Editing phase. But what does this actually mean?

I don’t write what is often termed a ‘fast and dirty draft’ so the novel is edited, sometimes ferociously, alongside the writing of it. This says a lot about why I’m not a fast writer. It also means that my editing regime wouldn’t work for everyone, but for me, this is the schedule:

• Structural edit
• Content edit
• Line edit
• Continuity edit beyond books 1 & 2
• Combined structural/content/line edit
• Transfer to e-reader for eagle-eyed read-through
• Beta readers
• Draft the metadata (all the descriptions needed for publishing)
• Edit (or hopefully just tweak) after studying comments from beta readers
• Collapse (a rest period where I ensure the marketing is ready for the launch)
• Format for ebook
• Transfer to e-reader for final eagle-eyed read-through
• Finalise metadata

Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing posts on what each entails. If you’re interested in receiving these as they are written, key your e-address into the 'Follow My Posts By Email' box in the column on the right. Otherwise, I'll be back next weekend with the whys & wherefores of a Structural Edit.


See also:

Editing-1: What does editing actually mean?
Editing-2: The Structural Edit

Editing-3: The Content Edit

Editing-4: The Line Edit
Editing-5: Line Edit update

Looking Back & Forward To The New Year

It’s often said that looking back offers only a rosy-eyed view, but I think this Yuletide between-time also offers the clearest. Ostensibly we’ve had a week off from our normal hamster-wheel activities – time for a laugh, general bonhomie, relaxation, and a needed deep breath. Assessing where we are comes easier.

Over the past few years problems with my health grew to impinge on normal life and, for my writer side, disrupted my concentration. 2016 was one of physical rehabilitation which has gone well; my concentration is still under review.

I’ve not done too badly. This blog has resumed its weekly posts, I’ve opened a YouTube channel for my video booktrailers, and added substantially to my work-in-progress, Pilgrims of the Pool, the last in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy. But I also discovered a hole in it – that concentration element – which should have been waving warning flags, or was waving warning flags that I failed to see. As a result one of its three storylines needs to be ripped out, re-planned and re-written, and the other storylines dovetailed into it. Such happens, but it needn’t have.

So, high on my Resolutions for this coming year is re-cultivating my concentration, and that means going back to basics and re-learning good habits. I’m a list person, always have been as my memory has never been my outstanding asset. Have list + kitchen timer = better habits. At least that’s the plan.

What’s your plan? And your best habit?

In the meantime I have news! As part of bolstering my public presence – another of my New Year’s Resolutions – I am interviewed on AL Butcher’s Fantasy site Library of Erana talking about my novels, research, writing techniques in general, and the importance of editing. Join me across there, or back here next Saturday. Or if you’d prefer, add your email to the box in the column to have my posts delivered quietly to your Inbox. As I’ve found with the blogs I follow, it makes life so much easier.

See you next week. And may you enjoy a Happy & Successful New Year.