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.

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.

I have been reading the next chapter over and over again in the past days. I’m very unhappy with it. It has two important bits in there and neither is really conveyed the way I would like them to appear. But I am at a loss for words or what I should change.

So tomorrow I will attempt a rewrite of the chapter. Thanks to using a version control software, there is no problem in overwriting the existing one, I can always retrieve the old one. If the attempt gets worse than the original, I’ll just revert to the old version and give correcting that one another stab. All of this though delays the chapter more than I wanted to. The plan was to release this soonish, but now it will have to wait longer.

I like to commit to something fully and then do it until I come to the conclusion it no longer works. I also like to do what I say I will do. So if I were to say that I release one chapter a week, I would commit to it and do it. But I can’t.

Right now, it comes down to about 1 chapter per week, which averages in the 2300 words region. To say it in book terms, that’s about a normal sized novel of roughly 120’000 words per year. Or in about 3 years I have enough material to fill one of larger fantasy novels out there. It also means that in about 17 years I should be roughly done with writing out the entire story that I have in my head.

Committing to a schedule would mean I have to be bale to keep the schedule or I would not do it, simple. If there is a schedule, people want things on time, I know I do. Right now, I’m writing a script that will take care of updating the wiki pages correctly when I add a new chapter, put a note up on twitter and maybe I can even interface the blog for this as well. Then I would just paste the latest text into a box, write the short blurb for the blog post and submit the texts all in one quick go. It will update the stats, the story page, the front page news and links, just everything I do currently by hand.

If I had a schedule I pre-load the next chapter(s) and have an automated script publish them for me, always at the exact same time.

But I don’t have one, because life happens. As of this moment, I have not written a single line on Toreas for almost a week. I have been thinking about it a lot and ideas and wordings I need to place into my text editing tool of choice, but I have not yet found the time to sit down and do it.

So for now, the schedule stays irregular at about “roughly once a week”. If I get a buffer of 30 chapters or more, I will start a regular schedule until I see the buffer runs too low. Preferably I would like to release often, even twice or more in a week, but I just lack the time the writing requires to manage that.