EasterCon – I’ll be at EasterCon on the Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st April…
Saturday 20th, 7-8pm: I’ll be reading from The End of Magic with some amazing authors in the Earhart Room. More here.
Sunday 21st, 10:15am: I’ll be on the The Current State of Podcasting panel in the Johnson room. More info here.
Last time I was Eastercon, I was reading from Robot Overlords and had an excellent time! Hope to see you there.
After two rounds, the copy edits on my fantasy novel The End of Magic are done. I was so happy to get Lisa Rogers as the copy editor. Lisa worked on Robot Overlords and I loved her attention to detail, her forensic knowledge of the English language and all its wonderful nuances, but most of all I loved how she saved me from looking like a complete and utter numpty on countless occasions.
A copy editor (sometimes known as a line editor) will check and format your punctuation and grammar, but will also highlight continuity problems, factual errors, inconsistencies and timeline issues. For this book, the timeline was the real bugger. I had characters having breakfast when they should’ve been having supper, I had a character sneaking into a camp to look through a telescope at the stars… in the middle of the day… and, in a first for me, I had a character wander around with their genitals hanging out for all to see after having a pee…
Next comes the proof read, where a new set of eyes will find even more errors. Writing a novel is essentially a process whereby you fail a little less each time, until you reach something that’s not quite perfection, but at least won’t be a tedious collection of typos.
Another exciting development was the cover questionnaire that arrived this week. Unbound’s art department asked me for details about the book, the characters, the settings etc. They also wanted a list of comparable books in the same genre, and a mood board of images. Luckily for me, I’ve been keeping a private Pinterest board for this book since I started writing it and I blogged about book covers a while ago, so I was able to ping these back fairly quickly. It’ll be fascinating to see what they come up with… don’t believe any of that “Don’t judge a book by its cover” nonsense. It will be crucial to get this right.
The good news is we’re still on schedule for a February release. Pre-order now and tell your friends!
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Very handy tip for any screenwriters using Scriv…
I stumbled across the Auto-Complete function the other day when I was doing a menu-crawl around Scrivener’s nooks and crannies. It’s not the same as Auto-Correct, which I’ve had to turn off. Either Auto-Correct is too imaginative or I am: when I had the feature turned on, Scrivener kept changing my characters’ names and “correcting” other words that I didn’t notice until I reread my pages. Or worse, until I read them to my critique group.
Auto-Complete, on the other hand, only does what you’ve told it to do, offering up long or difficult-to-type words or phrases when you type the first letter. For novelists, I imagine this would most often be character or place names. In my collection of unpublished novels, I have a parallel worlds tale set partially along a Texas Coast dominated by the Aztec Empire. Tenochtitlán popped up from time to time, and I was glad…
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I’m giving away a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s novella LEGION, and it’s been signed by the man himself. To be in with a chance of getting a copy click here before midnight UK time on 7th May 2018.
Good luck!
We had the brilliant and all round lovely author Lara Dearman on the podcast this week. Lara is a debut novelist who has gone from community college courses to a major publishing deal with her book The Devil’s Claw. It’s an inspirational listen and I know Lara will go on to great things. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN NOW
Also have a listen to this week’s Deep Dive, where Mr. D and I discuss the topics brought up by our chat with Lara, and I reveal my true feelings about Enid Blyton. CLICK HERE for a wee snippet.
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If you liked that episode and want some more, we’ve started having post-podcast deep dive discussions for our Patreon supporters. You can support us and get the extra content here.
And if you’re looking for something new to read in 2018, then grab a copy of our novel Back to Reality on Kindle now!
This just made my day…
Back to Reality: The feel-good novel of the year! by Mark Stay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve listened to the Marks’ podcast (The Bestseller Experiment) for a year and I was keen to read the book to see if it was any good. And it was!
It’s a fast and funny time slip type story. 42 year old Jo (with her unhappy life) suddenly finds that she’s swapped bodies with 24 year old Yohanna who is really Jo from an alternate reality. They have to get back into each other’s bodies before their time runs out and one of them dies.
Having listened to the podcast I felt weirdly affectionate towards this book even before I started it, like I’d watched this story grow up, and there are certain bits (like the character names) that popped out as Easter eggs. This added an extra dimension to…
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I heartily endorse this message…
When the weather outside is very cold, frosty, and wet, playing in the garden isn’t an option. So you can either do a massive pile of ironing (nah!), or those other boring household chores that you try and put off for as long as possible (do I have to?). Instead, you can get out your cookery books, look through the recipe books, and bake some of the most wonderful shortbread cookies ever. You can add whatever flavourings you like, just keep the basic shortbread the same.
So why not make the house smell wonderful, and once you’ve made your cookies, sit down with a couple of them and a nice cup of tea. The ironing can wait for another day…..
This continues on from my first post about the Gollancz Festival 2017.
After the morning panels were finished I got another chance to talk with Mark Stay (Orion Publishing, Author & The Bestseller Experiment). It was an informal chat with Mr Stay, as he was on hand for any customer or author enquiries. We had a chance to discuss The Bestseller Experiment, and briefly touch on some of the other projects he had mentioned in some of the bonus video chats the two Marks had done, and of course at the time the big query regarding the future of The Bestseller Experiment. I managed to avoid pitching my current projects, and when Mark asked about my work I give a concise overview; I think I did well considering how much I’d have liked to have said 😉
Mark Stay guardian of the Author-Portal for #GollanczFest 2017
Mr Stay’s welcoming…
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This week, I finally finished editing my manuscript of my debut novel, ‘From Here to Nashville,’ ready to send off to the Romantic Novelists’ Association to be assessed as part of their New Writers’ Scheme. As some of you will know, I originally started writing it in MS Word but when I ‘won’ Camp NaNoWriMo last July, I decided to buy Scrivener and I’ve been using it ever since. I love Scrivener and find it very flexible but there is so much to learn all the time. I recently managed to successfully export my second novel to my Kindle from Scrivener (see blog post here) but this week, I had to work out how to export my manuscript from Scrivener to Word. As it took me quite a few goes, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned whilst doing it.
1. Read the notes about the…
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In today’s mini-episode of the Bestseller Experiment podcast we discuss the dark art of getting other authors to give you quotes for their book. One way is to start a podcast and call in every favour you have to try and get authors on the show and then beg with them to read your book after a year or so… of course, that approach might not suit everybody, so we explore some other methods. But it pays to be bold! CLICK HERE TO LISTEN NOW…
Mark Stay Writes 