I’ve been renovating

I hope you like it.  I’ve broken out the series in the bibliography so they now each have their own page, but have left the text in the plain list alone.  I’ve added cover images to the sub-pages.  More important, I’ve also added .pdfs and .html of the first chapters (or prologues) of all of the DAW and Luna novels that have been published.  I will, hopefully closer to the publication date, also add the first chapter for Cast in Silence.  

I haven’t added links for the first chapters of the Sundered series, because unfortunately, I have no electronic copies of those; they were written in the days when floppies seemed like a good back-up medium, and the floppies with the files didn’t survive the passage of time all that well.  (BenBella worked from the printed pages of the original mass market editions, rather than an actual text copy, because I didn’t have any electronic text versions to send them).  As time permits, I’ll try to type them in.

The one thing I would like to do is start to put a few short stories up on the site for download, and I’m taking votes or suggestions at this point; if there’s an out-of-print story in particular that you want to see but haven’t been able to track down, please leave me a message in the comments to this post.

Michelle West update: City of Night

I have some news for Michelle West readers.

But first, a small digression.

I’ve said before, and will no doubt say again, that no two writers I know work in the same way. It doesn’t matter what their stated process is; when you get down to details, the process that sounds the same actually differs widely.

Some writers are outliners. They can write an outline which they can more or less follow, and use the outline to guide their story as they write the actual book. I can’t. I’ve done it once, and what it taught me was that it’s not a guide — for my particular creative process — it’s a straightjacket.

Some writers can look at a story and have a natural feel for its length; they know when the story will be too big — or too small — for a single novel. They know if a novel is roughly 100k words, or 125k words. I envy this in the same way I envy someone who is fluently bilingual, because I am also incapable of this.

My editor at DAW, Sheila Gilbert, has worked with me for nine novels now. She knows my writing, she understands my process, and she understands the way I parse novel structure. She asked me, once, for an outline, and when I fell silent — and I’m not generally silent, but she’s patient with this — she understood that outlines were not something that worked with my process. This would have been after Hunter’s Death was completed and handed in.

We had discussed what I would do next, and I told her that I would like to write a duology set in the same universe as The Sacred Hunt. She asked me what it was about, and I told her; she asked me for something on paper, and I believe I gave her two double-spaced pages. It might have been less. But knowing the way I work, she bought the two books on those two pages.

(I should add here that the first three chapters of the first draft of Broken Crown were actually about Kiriel’s childhood. They didn’t work, in the end, and they are the only chapters that haven’t worked that I’ve kept.)

You’ll note that I’ve said ‘duology’ and ‘two books’ here. You will also note, if you’ve read them, that there are actually six books in The Sun Sword.

I knew that Broken Crown ended with a scene between two characters. But this was before I started to write it. The scene that I thought would end the first book occurred at the end of the third book, because the war and the politics of the war were far more complicated than I anticipated, and because there are some emotional transformation arcs that simply don’t work if they’re too compressed.

I knew what the end of the series would be; I knew where it was going. (I’m trying very hard to avoid spoilers here, just in case.) But…I didn’t realize how long it would take to get there because all of the emotional depth and tone of a work come out only in the actual writing of it, for me. Before I start to write, I plan, I research, I build backgrounds (and try to figure out how the hell an army of any size both moves and gets fed, but that’s a different post), I look at the balance of power, and magic, of gods and immortals — all of these things are done before I start to write the actual book. But the emotional weight and mood of a book only comes when I write.

And the people become real only then, as well. The writing itself is a form of alchemy that brings life to the dry facts of research. The excitement — and the frustration and the uncertainty and the joy — is in the writing, not the planning.

I always think the story will be shorter than it is. Always. I think this is partly self-defense, because sometimes the length of a novel seems so daunting at the beginning, and beginnings for me often require several starts before I find the right way into the story itself. But it’s partly because the nuance and the complexity occur as I’m in the middle of it, and not before.

You’re probably wondering where this is going.

It’s been over a year since Hidden City was published in hardcover, and since then, the paperback has been released. And I have been working on the next book in the series the entire time. In June of last year, I wrote that I was tying up two long arcs on the way to House Terafin. As usual, this tying up took a little longer than I thought.

But I did. Then, instead of ending the book there, I thought It’s only a few hundred more pages once they reach Terafin. I can just fit that in as well. I kept writing.

Six hundred pages later, with at least another two hundred pages to go, I accepted the inevitable. I could not, in fact, fit in the second, closing arc, unless I started to cut several hundred pages. I sent what I’d finished to my editor to ask her what she thought. She agreed that both arcs would not fit in a single book, and also emphatically rejected the possible cuts.

And so, we come to the point of this long post. The two arcs, which will bring to a close the early life of Jewel and her den, will be published as two separate books. The first of these, CITY OF NIGHT, is schedule for March of 2010. I am not quite finished the second, HOUSE NAME, but that’s a couple of months away, now.

I want to apologize for the delay, and for the peculiarities of my writing process. While I was waiting to hear back from my editor, I started the groundwork for HOUSE WAR, which will follow HOUSE NAME. The battle at the end of Sun Sword changed the world in ways that weren’t immediately obvious, but some of those will become obvious as the House War is fully joined.

I do know where things are going, I promise. I will finish these books, just as I finished Sun Sword. I love these characters and their world and their stories, and I will, I’m certain, weep to see them go when their stories are finally done. But…I don’t know how many books it will take. I want to be able to tell you, because it’s one of the questions I’m most frequently asked.

The truth is, I don’t know. Every time I try to come up with an answer, I’m wrong, and I feel guilty — and vaguely unprofessional — because I’ve gotten it wrong again, and I know that’s disappointing. I was trying so desperately to fit all of this into the one book because I’d said it would be one more book. And it’s two.

So I’m going to try to avoid that part, at least for a little while. I will say that, having laid out some of the groundwork for the House War, I can’t see it being one book. That’s a guess. But for fear of making the same mistake, I’d like to leave it at that for now; to say that CITY OF NIGHT is finished, bar revisions, and that HOUSE NAME is almost finished, bar same, and that the House War has just been started.

– Michelle

News about Lady of Mercy and Chains of Darkness

Hi, Was wondering why there seems to be a major prob in getting hold of Lady of Mercy? I have the other three books and didn’t want to start reading htem until I had a full set but I can’t get a copy of this book unless I am willing to pay £400.00 or more for second hand …. Are there going to be any more published at all?

Thanks for your time xx

 

A couple of people have asked this, so I thought I would pull it up out of comments and answer the question here.

The publisher, BenBella books, changed distributors, which meant shifting all existing stock out of one distributor’s warehouse and carting it to the new warehouse.  The books that went out of stock during this period of transition were not reprinted, probably because it didn’t make a lot of sense to reprint boxes of books and move them into a warehouse only to pay to have them moved to a totally different warehouse a few weeks later.

However, the transition between warehouses has now been completed, and the lovely person in charge of production did get back to me; the files for those books are now heading to the printer, and there’s a minimum turn around time of two weeks.  They should be available for order from BenBella (and I assume, in theory, from other on-line venues) within a few weeks and hopefully they should then remain available.

Apologies for the delay in my response, especially to all the people who did ask, and who got, for the most part, my very unhelpful silence =(.  

– Michelle

Cast in Silence Cover and News

 

Cast in Silence

I meant to actually post this at about the same time as I posted it on my Livejournal, so forgive me for the delay.  I really, really like the cover, which comes across on my computer as much lighter in the scan than it is in real life.  The on-sale date is the 28th of July, 2009. What this means is that in theory it should be available on the 28th of July in any store that has ordered it. What it means in practice is that some of those stores will have it earlier, some possibly a bit later. I’ve been saying “August 2009″ in the store.

 

While doing this, I realized that I have not actually responded to comments here; I have been trying, since the final revisions on Cast in Silence were finished, to make headway into my sadly neglected email box, and needless to say, there is much groveling to be done there.  As well as here.  

But my excuses are as follows:  I’ve never been the world’s fastest writer, and I break my day into two working blocks.  One of those is devoted to the Michelle West novels, and the other to the Michelle Sagara books.  I wasn’t entirely certain if it would work, but to me the books are so different that they don’t bleed into each other and get in each other’s way.  This, as you can imagine, was a huge relief to me.

When I reach the end of a book, though, it still devours most of my mental acuity, and at that time, I’ll put aside whichever book isn’t ending and concentrate solely on one.  This has worked out really well — for the writing.  But I used to use one of those blocks of time to do the already small amount of things I did on the internet, and unless the writing is going really well, or I’m working on Page Proofs, I tend to disappear for long stretches.

This is not because I hate people, or I don’t appreciate the fact that they like my books, and that’s one of my constant fears in all this.  It’s because I have found a way to work on two novels at once, and it doesn’t really leave me with a lot of other words to say which might be interesting or relevant.  Or, you know, sane and professional.

But I have news:

Luna has bought three more Cast novels, following Cast in Silence.

I only know the (working) title for the first of these three: It’s Cast in Chaos, and is the one I’m working on now. Or was, until the Page Proofs arrived.

But as a number of people have emailed to ask me what someone also asked here on this blog, I wanted to segue into something that looked like an intelligible answer.

Sandra said,
October 11, 2008 at 5:15 am · Edit

Michelle,

I’m really loving the new ‘Cast in’ series. How many books are you planning to write for this series?

I hope the answer is not too upsetting for people, because the answer is: I don’t know. I have a series of events that are unfolding entirely in the background (with a little in the foreground in Shadow and Fury), and those events will culminate in closure for Kaylin.

But… Cast in Silence is about the missing six months of Kaylin’s early life. Cast in Chaos is what I refer to as my Refugee book. I very much want to write a Dragon Court book, and I would like to write a book about the Aerians; I would like to write a novel about the Wolves, and in particular the Shadow Wolves. I need to write a book about the fiefs (this last will become clearer after Silence, about which I will say no more). I would like to write one book which sees Kaylin actually leave the city. I’m not sure if his would be on holiday, but given her life, I kind of doubt it.

I hope, with every book I write, that the story contained in it stands enough alone that people coming to the world for the first time won’t get lost the minute they hit page one, but at the same time, I want Kaylin to change and grow as she experiences things.

Update

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.

Writing progress, and update

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.

Cover for Cast in Fury

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.

Writing posts

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.

The Hidden City

The Hidden City is available now.  If you’re Canadian, the price is 24.95, the US price (but in CDN dollars), rather than the 30.00 CDN it was solicited at. 

 

If you’re australian, it’s available at Galaxy Books. For more, because it has to fly half-way across the world. 

 

The Hidden City is the first book in the House War series.  It’s actually the earliest of the novels, chronologically speaking, that are set in this universe.  It’s also my very first hardcover — and the jacket is absolutely stunning; jpegs don’t capture the feel of it. 

 

I am playing a bit with wordpress because I’m aware that I don’t update official news very often, but the lack of <br> as a feature in editing has caused me an ulcer’s worth of grief.  I do not know much html.  What little I do know is apparently not entirely relevant to wordpress.  We have exchanged words (well, I swear at wordpress and it gives me the cosmic raspberry) to little effect, but I hope to have some of the kinks ironed out some time soon.

 

In the meantime, if you find your way here, I’ll answer any questions you want to leave in the comments.  Because that much, I’ve been able to figure out how to do… 

A note about writing series

 

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.