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Some publication news, and big personal news: I’ve gone through the first round of edits, and now I’m waiting for the second run-through; and I’m happy to announce the birth of our second child, Hattan! He came a week ahead of schedule, but mother and baby are both happy and healthy.
Nobody is getting any sleep (with the possible exception of our first-born; the happy older brother Aiden is protected from the worst of the nightly noise), so my writing has gotten a little sporadic. Still, plenty of stuff online to be done, and that going well. This is a short one. More to come next month. So tired. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers
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No news yet on the publication front; I’m told it will likely take until March until I get the first round of edits back. I’ve got plenty to fill my time before then. There’s online presence stuff I’ve got to take care of (how does the Instagram work?), “Rainbow” is always sitting there waiting, and of course there’s school.
I almost – almost – started the Wheel of Time series. I had the book in my hand and was getting ready to turn to page one, and I just … couldn’t take the step. I’ve got The Eye of the World. I own the book. I will read it someday. But not yet. Not yet. I’m thinking the next series I am going to pick up is Herbert’s Dune. It’s older, less of a commitment, and is about space. It’ll be a nice change of pace from the fantasy I’ve been immersed in for months. I’m pretty sure my local library has a copy, so I’ll check there first. (Support your local library, folks. They are more than depositories for books. Use these spaces!) One last word here about Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire: there’s a lot of theories out there about a lot of topics in the books, but there’s one theory I feel the need to take a public stance on. The maesters are NOT involved in a comprehensive conspiracy against the Targaryens, but I’m pretty sure some of the leadership could be. A conspiracy of a select few, not an organization-spanning ordeal. There. I feel like I’ve taken an important stand. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Happy new year! I’m happy to announce that Thinklings Books has offered me a contract for my first published novel, Skate the Thief, the first book of the Rag and Bone Chronicles. We’re on a tentative schedule to get the book published by early June of this year. So exciting!
I’ll post more publication news here as I get it. My first step now is … waiting. The editor at the company is scouring my manuscript for imperfections, of which I’m sure there are more than a few. I can hardly believe this is happening, to be honest. I mean, I think my book is pretty good, but I didn’t know if anyone else would be interested in trying to sell it. So, after years of false starts and disappointments, I’m going to be published! I’ve noticed that the nervous energy isn’t getting in the way anymore. It’s still there, but since I signed the contract, it hasn’t stopped me from writing on “Rainbow” anymore. I would start working on book 2 of the Rag and Bone Chronicles, but I’m not sure what we’ll need to change in book 1 first. With that in mind, I’ll turn toward “Rainbow” in the meantime. Then, it will be several rounds of editing and proofreading for Skate, and then promotions will start. Stay tuned for more updates! Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Hopeful news: a publisher is interested in my book! They responded during the #PitMad event on Twitter to my pitch, and they were happy enough with the sample I sent in that they wanted the entire manuscript. I’ve only gotten this far with a publisher once before with a different manuscript, so this is very promising. I’ll provide updates next month, assuming I’ve got something more to report.
Whenever I’m waiting to hear back from a publisher or an agent, I usually get filled with too much nervous energy to get anything creative done, and I find that to be the case now. Try as I might, I can’t get any more work done on “Rainbow in the Dark.” I keep snapping back to the other manuscript, and I get flummoxed. I find it easier to exercise, though, so at least the energy is useful for something. I don’t usually get writers’ block; I tend to have enough time between writing sessions to be able to come up with the next steps in the plot and a reason for them to happen. That is one of the nice things about revising and editing; I get to go back and smooth that stuff over and make it look all planned out. Neil Gaiman says later drafts are there to make it look like you knew what you were doing the first time, which is just great all around. That’s all for me this time. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers The #PitMad event is coming up next month. I think I’m going to wait for that to start shopping the manuscript around. If no one bites there, I’ll start sending it off to publishers and agents. Here’s hoping!
I’ve finally finished my re-read of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to exploring the lore of the setting and speculating on the plot/character developments likely to come in the future novels, especially The Winds of Winter. A Dance with Dragons was published almost a decade ago, and in the 8 years since its release, fans have pored over the pages of the series to hunt for clues and established communities for the discussion of the characters and likely destination of the series as a whole. The sheer amount of content generated by fans in this time is mind-boggling: pages upon pages of text typed out in forums, hours and hours of commentary videos, stunning pieces of fanart – it’s stunning to consider. Martin talks about two broad categories of writers: architects and gardeners. It’s a wonderful analogy, and Martin describes himself as more of a gardener than an architect. I identify with that as well; I can start with a broad overview of what I want the story to look like, but I don’t get any specifics at all before I get to writing. Many times a character will pop into my head, and as I introduce them into the story, I find that I’ve forgotten to name them. Not very architectural of me. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Alright, I feel pretty comfortable with my manuscript again. I’ll start shopping it around again soon. A few more cleaning sweeps first.
When I was a youngster, my grandfather used to take me out almost every night we stayed with him to a sort of makeshift campsite a couple hundred yards from his home. He’d get a fire going and we’d sit around the flames listening to the sounds of the night and talking. He’d tell stories and talk with my mother about the news of the day while I sat and watched the fire dancing. He usually kept hounds of one sort or another, and we’d hear their braying off in the forest whenever they caught the scent of some critter or another. Of all these memories, the stories feature most prominently. They would be tales from his past, mostly. Recollections of his time riding the railways with the hobos during the Great Depression, descriptions of his limited childhood education, snippets of conversations with fellow workers in California – the topic changed from night to night, and he often tread over familiar ground. Some of his stories I could recite to you today, nearly word for word, so often did I hear these stories of his. My cousin recorded some of these stories of his, and I’ve got a copy of them somewhere. I’d like to find them and make sure I’ve got a digital version that can’t get scratched. He lived during wild times. People may say the same of us one day, I suppose, but his tales felt … different. Like him, they were from a bygone era, stories that happened in the time they did, and not transferable to any other. I’ll try to find them. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers “Rainbow in the Dark” has got a whole chapter under its belt, silly thing that it is. I’ll be looking back at the manuscript I plan to shop around before the next blog post.
There’s an adage in writing circles that is always worth remembering: show, don’t tell. It’s an axiom that reminds writers that we shouldn’t use the narrator to just tell everything to the reader. If you want the reader to understand what a character is like, show the reader. Imagine if, when Darth Vader first shows up onscreen, a narration crawl shows up to tell the audience how bad of a dude he is. Totally ineffective! Instead, the movie shows us how nasty he is, from his appearance to his actions. Everything about him reveals how cruel and dangerous he is, and nobody has to tell us that. Characterization should be the same in good novel writing. Having said that, it’s hard to do. Whenever I’ve got a character in mind, the person is a short list of landmarks. He’s got a bad leg. She’s out for revenge. He can’t make friends and it makes him lonely. She has trust issues. So the challenge for me as a writer is to take these characteristics and turn them into events, which is turn reveal the character for who they are. It’s a complex series of steps, and it takes up a bulk of the creative labor during both the drafting and editing stages. If plot were simply a matter of “Thing A happens, then thing B happens, then …” and so on, anybody could write well without much effort. To make a story good, though, a writer has to work to make his characters feel real. To make characters feel real, you have to show them to be real. Telling won’t cut it. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers While I am waiting for time to pass before returning to the manuscript, I’ve started another manuscript. Who knows whether it will ever get finished, but I have to do something with the creative muscles while the other manuscript sets. Working title for this next project: “Rainbow in the Dark.” I like to give my manuscripts funny names while I’m working on them.
The school year approaches, and I greet it with hope, enthusiasm, and trepidation. I cannot pretend not to have gotten used to summer hours and general lack of commitments with my time. However, the structure of coming back to work is appealing, and of course I’m looking forward to making this the best school year I can. I hope to implement some changes with my grading practices that will make my gradebook more meaningful as a reflection of learning, and we’re getting a brand-new curriculum that I’m excited about using. It’s expansive, so we’ll be learning as we go this year, right along with the students. Summer vacation, by the way, is a relic of the past that we really should be getting rid of across the board. Researchers have known for ears that such an excessive break from the classroom has a demonstrably negative effect on student knowledge retention, particularly among those most vulnerable students we serve in public schools: low-income family students. These students perform worse on tests covering the same material from May upon their return to school in August. This phenomenon even has a name among education researchers: summer brain drain. As much as I love the break, it’s got to go. It probably won’t happen, though. Inertia is a powerful force in the world of education policy. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Okay, I think I may be done with this last round of revisions and edits. I’m going to do some final touch-ups and then wait two months before coming back to the manuscript again with fresh eyes. At that point, I’ll feel comfortable shopping it around again.
I’m beginning book five of A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ve mentioned before that I found this re-read of the series surprisingly enjoyable, so it’s going on to my list of evergreen series. There are a few books and series of books that I can pick up again and again and enjoy each time (so long as the reading of the same book doesn’t happen too soon), and it looks like this series will be one of them. I just have to wait along with everyone else for The Winds of Winter to come out. Another author who I can do that with is R. A. Salvatore. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve reread The Dark Elf Trilogy, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, and all the rest of the Legend of Drizzt. I know I’ve reread the first two trilogies more than I have the rest of the series, but they’re all good for another read. The Cleric Quintet is a separate but related collection that I’ve worn the spine off of; if I’d known how many times I’d be cracking that open, I’d have gotten it in hardback instead of paperback. I do admit to usually skipping or skimming through the second book on rereads of the Quintet, but the others are definitely worth multiple readings. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Edit and revise, edit and revise. I’ve managed to trim about 20,000 unnecessary words off of this thing. I guess that’s the problem with my “word vomit” approach to drafting: it’s messy.
I’ve been playing through a pair of my favorite games: Baldur’s Gate I and II for PC. These RPGs were groundbreaking in their day, and with the updated graphics in the rerelease, they hold up well. The characters are still funny, the gameplay is still frustrating and rewarding, and the world feels fleshed out in a way that a lot of modern RPGs fail to achieve. I think part of the issue is the “railroad” approach that a lot of modern games follow: the player is dragged along on a series of activities, and as the player completes watch activity, they are brought to the next one, with little or no opportunities to explore the world around them. These games don’t do that; there is a linear plot, but the speed (and in some cases, the order) of this plot assumption is entirely up to the player. This does lead to some issues regarding immersion (you can be told that something is urgent and then spend two in-game years waltzing around the wilderness in search of wolf pelts for some sweet cash with no penalties), but overall the effect is one of wonder as you wander from locale to locale, some of which seem to exist for no other reason than for you to show up and try to find secrets. They’re really fun games still, twenty years later, and I encourage anyone with an interest in the genre to pick these up and play them all the way through. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers |
AuthorJeff Ayers writes books that are pretty good. Archives
May 2024
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