I have finished proofing, and sent off the AA (Author’s Approval) manuscript for Cast in Fury. This is literally the last thing I have to do, pre-publication, for Cast in Fury, and it is now out of my hands until it shows up in stores (and in my front hall, in a box, which I will stub my toes on and trip over until I move it). So that’s done, or as done as I can make it.

I’ve tied up the two long arcs that started in Hidden City, on the way to Terafin.

I’m almost finished the optional project which I started in April.

No pictures this time. I don’t have a camera. My husband has the scanner (at his office).

I’m about halfway through House Name, which is the tentative title for the second book of House War.

I’m laying out background information for Cast in Silence, the fifth Cast novel.

My job for next week is to read through a couple of stories, and then read through chapter one of everything I have in an electronic format (which, unfortunately, doesn’t actually include any of the Sundered books because I had those backups on floppies and they were unreadable many years later =/. But I hope to clean up the mistakes that weren’t copy-edited out of existence in the finished books, and then to have first chapters available here for downloads, as samples of the book.

But: I added an interviews page, and also an upcoming appearances page. Because they have no pictures. >.>.

All right.  Back to the book now.

This is the cover for the forthcoming Cast in Fury, an October 2008 release from Luna Books. The cover itself came in the mail with the line-edits/copy-edits for, oddly enough, the same book, and I’ve been reading those.

Which made me think of the stages of a book. Because I have a severe sensitivity to outlines, I will do almost anything to avoid writing them. This would include writing the whole book first. Because all writers work in their own unique ways, this isn’t meant to be prescriptive, and it’s not meant to offer advice; it’s just a statement of what I do.

So… in my case, I basically sit down, over a period of several months, and write the book. This would include all the hair-pulling, all the revisions and editing, that go into writing a book before it’s submitted. After I write the book, I submit it to my publisher (in this case, Luna), and I go on to think about and start a different book. But some months after I’ve submitted a book, I will hear back from my editor. My editor will point out certain infelicities in clarity (I am, of course, being kind to myself here), and allow me to revise the manuscript before it’s line-edited. It will then be sent out to a copy-editor. I won’t see the original line-edit until after the copy-editor has also done a pass through the book, at which point, the book will be sent back to me with all of the editing and copy-editing marks.

At this stage, I go through the manuscript again, and I look at all the queries — because sometimes copy-editors will catch things like eye colour changes (I am not, sadly, very good at this. I knew my husband for several years before I realized that he had blue eyes. I am not, unfortunately, making this up, and this lack of awareness on my part does translate into fiction because it’s something I have to consciously reach for unless the eye colour is an integral part of character). I will also look at other changes, and sometimes I will change things back to the original.

On the whole, though, I don’t, because on the whole, copy-editors are very, very helpful people. When I’ve finished going through this, I will pack up the pages with red ink (mine) and send them back to my editor (or in this case, her assistant). The changes are incorporated and the book then goes to production. I am not entirely certain in the case of Luna at which stage a font is chosen, so I’m not sure which department does that. But after it goes to production, I will get what Harlequin calls page proofs, but which are not quite that.

They are the book, in standard manuscript font (12 pt. courier) with line numbers beside each line of text. At this stage, I am proof-reading and catching any typos that might have been missed or introduced when the other edits were keyed-in. I will not see the actual, printed book page until I have the book in hand, although I believe in-house there are proof-readers who will get a print out of the actual page proofs as well. 

So, I am not yet done with Cast in Fury.  I have one more read-through after this, at which point, the book will be complete on my end.

I often post miscellaneous bits and pieces about writing, or at least my thoughts on the process, at my livejournal, msagara.livejournal.com. I can cross-post those here if people are more comfortable asking questions here, and if you have an opinion about that, either way, please let me know.

I mostly wanted to move the bibliography to someplace it was easier for me to update because I am utterly hopeless at site updating without some sort of easily accessed gui. Which WordPress does have. Does it work? Well, no; for some reason it immediately destroys all line-breaks, which makes formatting anything that isn’t straight text a touch difficult. It’s a total pain. But in theory I can update more frequently.

Of course, I don’t really have all that much to update at the moment; I’m working on House Name, which isn’t on the schedule yet (it being not very close to finished) and sometime soon, I will be reading the line-edits for Cast in Fury, which is an October title.

Part of the reason I don’t update frequently is because writing a book is long, slow, and marked by frequent bouts of hair-pulling and a certain sense that everything will be too long, which I can imagine is tedious for people who actually want to read a book, and not a list of unfortunate complaints.

But: I will be going to the Worldcon in Denver this year. And I’ll be the GoH at Conclave 2008 in October, which is kind of exciting for me.

I posted this as an answer about series writing over on sfnovelists.com, but I wanted to post it here as well, so it would be, among other things, easier for me to find.

I currently have two worlds in progress, and they’re very structurally different. The first, the DAW books I write as Michelle West, aren’t really self-contained, and they’re certainly not short. I started those in 1994, and have continued to write them, and for me? They’re not finished yet. They don’t have an ending. I had envisioned a number of ending arcs, emotionally, for a large cast of characters– but I am only approaching the end of one of many character arcs in the newest set of books; the end of the six book series, The Sun Sword brought one of the key characters to the midpoint of the arc I’d envisioned for her before I ever mentioned her on the page.

Because I’m not finished, I don’t have that sense of restless frustration one has when there’s nothing new to experience or explore. Because I know where it’s going (if not always how it’s going to get there), what’s happening in the present of the book resonates with the ending I see in the distance, and it moves me. It probably bores a lot of people, though.

The novels I write for Luna books, as Michelle Sagara, I envisioned as more episodic (in the Buffy sense). And as I reach the end of each one of those books, I’m finished. I’m done with the story; I’ve said what I had to say. There’s more to say – there is an overarching season-arc, to borrow the Buffy analogy again – but I want to start saying the new stuff now. I want to explore other corners of the world, other races, other crimes. The world is both broader and less detailed, and that was intentional – because if it wasn’t, I thought I would lose steam, lose the sense of the immediate and the new that comes with exploring new terrain.

And when I reach the end of the longer arc, I want to be done. I will have run out of things to say at that point. And while I know people will prefer one book over the others, I don’t want them to feel that I’m phoning in my lines; I don’t want them to feel that I should have stopped, and just kept spinning in place.