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Needles and Haystacks

I am not a procrastinator, in general, but I do indulge in what some might call “creative prioritization.” You know: the fun stuff first, the not-so-fun stuff next, the tedious and boring bits dead last. I can euphemistically refer to this as putting the “most bang for buck” items up front or go all corporate and say I’m going for “the low-hanging fruit” first, but I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.

I’m just delaying the inevitable, and in editing, the inevitable includes the dreaded, stupefying, and largely useless practice of Spell-check and Grammar-check. I’d skip the whole damned process if it consistently came up with nothing, but it doesn’t.

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Is Someone IN There?

Yesterday (okay, very early this morning) I submitted the final content for FC books IV and V to the CreateSpace “submission review” process. As I’ve mentioned before, this process finds a lot of formatting errors such as text beyond margins, low-DPI graphics, unembedded fonts, and so forth. It’s a good review process, and it encourages the author—through feedback, easy-to-follow help guides, and forum discussions—to submit the highest quality work to achieve the highest quality product.

Up ’til now, I’ve assumed this was a mechanical review process, but after the response I got today, I’m not so sure.

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Kurt R.A. GiambastianiI’ve fallen down on the job, here. My excuses are many and diverse—I’m on vacation, I caught a cold, the Giants are in the NLCS—but I can still say that I’ve kept my priorities straight. I may not have posted here each weekday (my stated goal), but I did spend time every day editing my MSS for the Fallen Cloud Saga re-release. So, there’s that, anyway.

In re-editing the MSS for FC:I-FC:IV, however, I noticed two distinct patterns.

The first pattern I noticed was an increase in my cockiness as an author. This is not a good thing as it led to stupid artifice and ill-thought-out departures from established conventions. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten over that one, as I’m now correcting all those “artistic decisions.”

The second pattern was a decrease in editorial attention. This, also, is not a good thing. Unfortunately, the two patterns exacerbate each other—the cockier I got, the less my editor cared to work with me, and vice versa. It’s a chicken-and-egg argument, determining which came first, but I also know that by the time we got to FC:IV, the publisher had decided my numbers weren’t good enough and closed the book on the series, my editor was looking for a career change, and I was the last one to know any of it.

So, what does increased editorial disinterest look like? Continue Reading »

A Wing of Plovers

They don’t have a cool collective noun like “a murmuration of starlings,” but they were enthralling nonetheless.

Yesterday, I stood on the beach while a wing of plovers gyred and swooped around me. I stood transfixed, my feet freezing in the cold water, watching them, hearing the whispers of a thousand wings surround me. They flew as one creature, sides flashing like a school of fish in clear water, black wings, white bellies, gyring and twisting as one, creating shapes in the air above the sandy waves.

They rose in a mass, split into two amorphous shapes, each one moving around the other, until they merged like droplets of quicksilver. They spindled into a long roll and swept across the sand before piling up again into a heap, a mound, a pillar fifty feet tall.

As the wing spun and eddied, individuals would fly off from the body, peeping as they shot outward, slate-winged rockets ejected from a massive, living firework.

And then they settled, falling like heavy leaves back down to the sand, the rustle of wings replaced by a piping chorus that drowned out the roar of the surf. The wing of plovers in the air, now a congregation on the shoreline, dipping each black beak into the sand, searching for food, skedaddling back and forth in time with the waves until the ocean sent another big roller to make them take wing once more.

I stood there for the better part of an hour, rapt, giddy, grateful.

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Restoration Point

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiWe each have our own Restoration Point, a place that speaks to our inner being, calms it, and recharges our spirit.

My wife is lucky; hers is at home. She loves being at home where it’s peaceful (when I’m not there, one assumes), pretty (when the gardens are in trim), and she can do what she wills (most of the time, anyway).

I’m not as lucky. Sure, home is great, and we make it as peaceful a place as can be, but for my soul, it’s the ocean or nothing.

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Vacation, Writer-Style

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiI’m on vacation, so naturally, I am working on my book(s).

My wife chides me. Work has been in a furor for over a month and I haven’t had a day off in three solid weeks, so what do I do on my first day off? I finish the edit on FC:III and start the copy-edit/formatting process. This is fun? This is gearing down? This is taking time off from work to…work?

Actually, yes, it is.

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Limited View

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiLast night, as I was re-editing FC:III, I came across (what I humbly consider) a good example of a narrative tailored to a limited POV. Here on this blog, and on some of the blogs I follow, we’ve talked a lot about building characters—physical appearance, how they speak, internal attitudes, believable actions and reactions, etc.—but these are all things directly connected to the character. There’s another level, more abstract, that I think bears consideration and discussion.

I’m pretty strict when I use limited omniscient POV. Some writers are more free, allowing the narration to describe a thought or a memory or a past action that is outside of the current POV character’s knowledge, but I don’t. In addition to this, though, I put limits on the narrative. This is most obvious when I’m dealing with characters from diverse backgrounds, as I do in the Fallen Cloud Saga.

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