Publishing and Editing

August 25, 2008 at 7:07 am (down to business, editing, the writing process)
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I wanted to take the time to thank all the readers who have been loyally following the book, sending us emails, and posting to our blogs to give us feedback and encouragement. KL, KMRicker, and I are so glad to hear that you’ve enjoyed reading School for Adventurers. =)

To give us more contact with our readers, KL and I have created our basic but lovely RSS feed. We’ve also created a new facebook group called Eastridge Academy: School for Adventurers. Shameless plug: Join our group, if you’re so inclined…and tell your friends too!

For the past month, aside from earnestly trying to stay ahead of the Book 2 updates, KL and I have been working on publishing Book 1. We’ve decided to go the self-publishing route and have been putting the agents of various self-publishing companies to work to impress us with their features, options, and marketing packages.

It’s certainly a learning process, as I’ve never had the experience of self-publishing a book before. There were a lot of factors to think about: what size we wanted our book to be, what we wanted our retail and wholesale prices to be, what our royalties might be, as well as what types of marketing and advertising strategies we needed. I don’t think I’ve ever really given a thought to the sizes and shapes of books before, but after a month of research, I can proudly say that I am able to identify different genres by their book dimensions alone.

KL and I decided to go with BookSurge in the end, mainly because publishing through them makes our book that much more affordable (I didn’t realize that 350-page, *paperback* fantasy novels can get to be as much as $21.00, yikes!). Also, it feels like BookSurge might give us more control of how our book looks, which is important particularly because KMRicker has conceded to give KL and I a pretty book cover if we’re very good. Anyway, if everything goes well, we’ll be able to have a paper copy to sell in a couple months’ time.

In the meantime, KL and I are editing and improving our first book before we send a final draft off to print. We’re tightening the narrative and throwing in new scenes. We’re also typing out more descriptions about the world and characters in an attempt to really round out the SFA universe. By the time Book 1 is given to the publisher, it’ll probably look different than what is on the website now. Hopefully, all the grammatical and continuity errors will be hammered out, our plot pace will be more fluid, and, yes, there will be more scenes of Fell. =)

Anyway, keep reading and telling us what you think!

Best,

“Jae Elle Whye”, or JLY

7 Comments

The Second Book

August 14, 2008 at 8:07 pm (the writing process)
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

KL and I posted the first part of our second book, as several people might have noticed. =)

It’s always exciting and a little terrifying to start a new book. It seems as if we’re starting over. However, at least, with the second book, we already have our characters and our world in place, so it’s not as intimidating.

One of the more amusing jobs that KL and I face as writers is naming our books. As KL and I never got around to deciding the name of our first book, we were faced with the task of titling both. Because there are several main characters and several threads running through our novels, it becomes hard to summarize into simple titles and taglines.

Do we name our characters in the title? The Adventures of Fell, Wisteria, Averi, and Rai seems a bit long and uninformative. And, what would Book 2 be called? The Further Adventures of Fell, Wisteria, Averi, Rai, and Friends? …no.

Or, should we stick to the relevant nouns and concepts that our book addresses? The Thief, The Princess, The Farmer, and The Mage is like one of those logic puzzles. The Princess must be Averi, and no one knows more about farming than Fell. But, who is the Thief, and who is the Mage? Rai’s not all that good of a Thief, but he’s certainly no Mage. And, Averi’s also a Thief, but there’s no way that Rai’s the Princess. At any rate, we abandoned this title.

We also thought about following the Harry-Potter-title format. However, Wisteria Ling and the Magical Mystery Sword didn’t strike the right chord, especially since it cuts out three of the main characters. For that matter, Averi and the Diplomatic Relations Disaster also failed on multiple fronts.

So, we ended up talking about what we were both looking for in a title. Like the sucker I am, I knew I wanted alliteration, and, ideally, some sort of connection to our plot. KL, on the other hand, wanted something that sounded exciting, or had to do with fighting, which led to her throwing in a lot of words such as, “Fight! Sword! Battle! Adventure!”

The end result of hours of brainstorming was a compromise. Book One ended up being the title we’ve been using all along as a placeholder–Eastridge Academy: School for Adventurers. And, Book Two became Eastridge Academy: The Stolen Sword.

And, our tagline is:

“Eastridge Academy: School for Adventurers…where adventurers are made.”

(A serious title for a very serious book.)

=)

JLY

6 Comments

Countdown to Disaster

July 7, 2008 at 7:25 am (the writing process)
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I named our timeline to finish the end of the book “Countdown to Disaster” as something part poke, part joke. A motivational poke because KL and I still need inspiration to get through the final preparations for tomorrow; a joke because I know, of course, hands-down, without a doubt that we’re going to finish everything on time. Ne, KL? =)

Anyway, as KL and I are write our free time away trying to get SFA into shape for our 7/7 deadline, I’m getting the opportunity to reflect on everything we’ve done. Watching everything come together is both stunningly startling and sumptuously satisfying.

The end of a book has always been my inner-writer’s weakness. It’s *hard* to finish a book, and quite difficult to tie all your characters and plots together and make meaning out of all the writing that has come before. It’s something that I’ve never really been able to do, so as the first time actually writing and finishing an entire book, the end comes as a rewarding and pleasing surprise.

As KL has pointed out, all our scenes are falling together quite easily because of the pieces and clues we’ve laid throughout the rest of the book. Our hardest task is, well, firstly, remembering all those pieces, and secondly, weaving together something that comes out quickly but still retains the high quality of writing we’ve managed to maintain throughout the book. I think we’re doing a good job. An old proponent of waiting for inspiration to strike, I used to be skeptical when I read in writing books that you should set aside time for writing every day and practice it. Now that KL and I have been writing pretty much every day, I have to say that coming up with and phrasing our ideas is becoming much easier because of the time we spend on it. Not that we don’t have our blocks every now and then, but we still manage to work through them.

At any rate, I look forward to being able to share the rest of the book with all its readers as we start updating more frantically.

I hope everyone comes back to read the second book, coming out 08/08/2008!

<3,

JLY

4 Comments

Beginning to Write

November 27, 2007 at 7:01 pm (the writing process)
Tags: , , , , , ,

November 26, 2007

KL and I have different approaches to writing a scene, a fact which becomes most apparent when we write together. KL likes to dive in head-first and plunge into her writing. I generally have to mull over all my ideas before getting anything down on the page. Our writing sessions usually consist of KL saying, “That sounds good to me”, and me saying, “Perhaps we should think about it some more before we move on.”

Personally, I think KL’s got it right. (Though, I will say some forethought is required.)

One of the most important things about being a writer is to remember that you actually have to write. I used to scoff in disbelief when I read in books on writing by famous authors that a true writer should set aside a small portion of every day and simply practice writing. I laugh now because it’s true. Writing is not just some magical skill that’s borne from a good imagination and a spark of inspiration (though those usually help). As with everything, learning how to write well requires mostly hard work.

Having said that, where does one start?

A blank page can be really intimidating.

I’m both a perfectionist and a writer, and while it may seem like the former should help the latter, being too much of a perfectionist is just debilitating to the writing process. I think too much, which isn’t always helpful. And, in those cases, I always find myself returning to my 2007 New Years’ resolution of “Write first, revise later.”

You can’t really make a scene better if it doesn’t exist in the first place.

I think some of the hardest scenes I’ve had to deal with when writing SFA were scenes involving Rai Ravin. My conception of Rai Ravin was of this really charming guy character—the kind of boy in high school that all the girls swooned over and that all the guys were friends with. My problem when writing Rai Ravin was trying to figure out how to channel his character because I found him a little intimidating to write for. I used to complain to KL that Charming Male Rai Ravin would be really difficult to capture, seeing as how I was neither charming nor male.

But, really, it’s not good to be intimidated by characters that exist only in your head, and writing Rai Ravin really just boiled down to hammering the scenes out, no matter how badly the first time around, to see how things would play out.

Rough drafts are supposed to be just that—rough. And, hopefully, drafts get better.

So, eventually, Rai Ravin became a much more tangible and real character to me, someone that was much easier to write about. But, it really did take getting over the initial worry and distress of getting it perfectly the first time to get to that point.

Of course knowing this doesn’t necessarily mean I’m cured of my perfectionist streak, but I do try my best to follow my own good advice every now and then.

Thanks for reading,

J.L.Y.

Leave a Comment