Toreas Blog

First of all, I’ll continue writing, no worries here.

Second, I had last Friday the probably best experience of my life as a writer so far. I spent the greater part of three hours with 7 other people and they analyzed and picked apart my story, truly slaughtering it. And it was fantastic. I have listened, asked questions and gotten good answers back. I made tons of notes and gotten even more written into the margins and the lines of printed copies the others brought with them.

It was great to hear that I achieved a few of the goals I set out to accomplish. One was that the story is interesting and interesting enough, pulling you in, to keep you reading the next chapters. It was clear that some would not be interested in fantasy but all around everyone gave me good feedback. So bolstered by that compliment it also was easy to accept that there are many flaws in my writing (as expected).

Since Toreas is an experiment I am going to spell out the major things wrong with it at this stage (and anyone reading this later can still view the history of the revisions). Hopefully this will help other authors as well in some way or another.

Point of view: Especially at the beginning I switched and mixed the point of view. It’s not clear who’s head the reader is in. This needs a rewrite for certain, to clearly state who is currently the active point of view. Also it needs to be limited to one point of view per chapter (exception is one chapter where I break the point in the middle, but there I need a clearer indication).

Show, don’t tell: This is probably the worst for me and I imagine many writers, especially in fantasy. You want to tell everything you see to the reader, but that leads down a path where you talk down to the reader instead of showing the reader what’s going on.

Repetition: Even if something is worded differently, it’s still repeating. Repetition can be very tedious on the reader and give a sense of being talked down to (to a lesser extent than show don’t tell) and also makes the text appear more suited for younger readers, which brings me to the next point.

Know who you write for: You usually know who you write for, age wise usually and often genre specific. So there will be a different content in an adults only book than in young adult or middle grade. Toreas is geared into the young adult to adult area. Probably more towards adult but I doubt and young adult would keel over dead from reading it. By choosing that bracket, I’m making promises just as well as when I set a plot in the story. It’s not all flowers and rainbows, in fact it can be outright nasty at times. But this is what I would ant to see in a story and what I have to deliver if I want to write for the adult bracket. If I wouldn’t want that, then it might be for younger readers.

Tighten the text: I was told that a third of the whole thing could go. Some of it is repetition but that’s not all. Now after being happy that your text is a certain length, you are reluctant to cut, but it has to be done in order to progress from OK to excellent text. My use of the word just is an example there. I got told that I use it excessively and just a quick scan of chapter 17 shows me how useless it often is and how much better the text is with a different word in it’s place or even more often, it just removed. I trimmed it down to a single use in a turn of phrase where I think it has it’s justification. In the same step I have heard that using “finally” is a bad idea and so I have been thinking hard before using that one as well. I’m certain there are more general words but also some that are specific to writers which might come up again and again. But to catch those I believe you need someone from the outside to point them out to you.

Don’t forget the setting: When I say setting I’m not (only) talking about the room or area the characters are in, but a general view of the world, how are they, what is different from every day modern life, whats unusual, but also what might be just the same? Giving the setting more detail will make the world appear more alive.

Of course there are also a lot of grammar mistakes in there, but those come later, once the other things have been ironed out. By that time I will have discarded some of the grammar and added some new mistakes.

So, I know what I have to change and enhance. Now I’ll try to let as much as possible of what I have been told flow into the revision of chapter 17 then get some feedback on it. When it passes, I will spend a bit time to redo chapter 1 and 2 to submit them to the writers group again and see if I improved on it. If so, I’ll keep adding new chapters and rewriting old ones in alternating cycles until I have the entire novel up to a higher standard.

If you haven’t heard about flattr yet, you have missed something important. Like all these other small things on the internet have changed the way we blog, socialize, make bookmarks, chat and send mails, so is flattr a way to change how we pay for content.

Like you have seen in pages like Digg or Facebook, you get to see a lot of these flattr buttons all over the web soon. Clicking the flattr on the bottom actually allows you to say “Hey I like this”. But there is a twist. You go to flattr, sign up, and then you send flattr, say 2 bucks to start with. Now for a month, you click on flattr buttons as often or not often as you like. Every button you click is recorded and at the end of the month, your 2 bucks are split evenly among all the people you liked. This way you can give the people who are creating content money, without revealing details from yourself and all the hassle with it. The transfer is done instant and by PayPal, so it works very fast and simple.

The less people you click, the more each single person gets. So if you are interested in it, I still have a spare invited code for flattr left over.

I actually missed the 1000 readers point by a bit. Currently the story has slightly more than 1100 readers and it’s growing rapidly.

So first and foremost: Thank you.

I write this story for my own enjoyment as well as an experiment in storytelling and apparently it appealed to a lot of other people as well. To blatantly copy my own homepage:

The story currently is 32,410 words long, spans 13 chapters and if it was printed, it would be 137 pages long.

That right there is already pretty good. I have currently about twice that much written down (not all connected together) and waiting for editing. And all of that taken together, about 25 times (or maybe even more) as much worth of stories in my head.

Yes Toreas is going to be long. Yes there is a lot to come. And no, not all and everything is about Eric, Zara, Shimon and Taji’ra. I wont even say if one or all survive till the end of the story. That I can be mean, I think I already established, so no character is safe, ever.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it and that you come back, read more and tell everyone you know about it. And pineapples will be eaten.

I decided to actually use twitter more in a fashion that it was meant to be used. The blog is for all those things I want to say in more than 140 characters or that have a certain significance to them none the less. Twitter is more fleeting and up to the minute. So for example I will post progress on twitter, when I finish a write down of a chapter, make progress on something else, have writers block or whatever else comes my way in terms of Toreas.

That way the blog is a cleaner place where you can find the things most dear to me and if you are so inclined, keep closer to the pulse of Toreas by watching the twitter status run along. And of course for your easy viewing pleasure, the blog also shows you the latest status updates on the right hand side.

Google was kind enough to send along a coupon for around $100 in AdWords money. AdWords is what they call their money maker. In short, you pay them and they display your ad everywhere where people have signed up for their AdSense product. You can specify by keywords and so get a more targeted way of having your ad displayed.

So I set up the account, selected keywords and setup an ad. Pretty early on I discovered that the Toreas page has a big flaw. I was leading people to the homepage and they were lost there. Few found their way to the introduction from there. Even fewer kept reading on. So I went and changed that to show them directly to Chapter 1. Now suddenly a lot more staid and started reading. They even went on and started reading chapter 2 and 3.

Currently this experiment brings in about 50 new readers a day and so far quiet a few have returned for more. I might keep this up at a later date if it keeps on performing this well.

This one month has been interesting but it also has limitations. Although I have upped the limits pretty high, the limits were rarely reached. I believe you could get a lot of visitors through this program, but now, after I stopped it for all but some selected search keywords, I will see how many of these I will retain over the next month.