Things move on. The first pass pages of SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB have arrived!
A sabre tooth is an essential part of any editing process. For those deep cuts.
For those of you who don’t know what they are, the first pass pages are the pages of your manuscript laid out exactly the way they will appear in the final book. Now is the chance to go through and pick out any errors that might have been missed in the so many times you’ve gone through the manuscript before or which have been introduced at recent stages.
When you hold a book in your hand, it has been through SO MANY rounds of editing and checking. For example, once I’d finished editing and revising SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB (which involved at least seven major drafts), it went through:
One round of revisions based on my agent’s feedback
Two major rounds of revisions based on my editor’s feedback
One round of copyedits
And now this set of first pass pages.
It’s possible (probable) that there will be more rounds to come (I assume that that is why it’s called FIRST pass pages).
Apparently, at some point in between all of this, writers are supposed to write other books too. :)
First pass pages are where you go through and check every word, every comma, every spelling and have the last chance to pick up anything important that has slipped through the net. You can’t blink or you can miss something. It’s kind of brain-intense.
Music Monday is a series where I, you know, occasionally talk about old music. On a Monday.
We don’t get enough horror in music anymore.
No, I’m not talking about the horror of a reforming boy band or even the kind of gore show that some bands put on. I’m talking about the genuinely creepy songs that seem to be the products of truly deranged minds.
Admittedly, back in the 1970s, there seemed to be an awful lot of deranged minds out there making music (possibly due to all the more interesting drugs). Take dear old Arthur Brown or Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull*, for example. These days, how often do you get musicians appearing as deranged as Arthur getting pop hits? Not often enough, I say!
But despite the abundance of deranged musicians, the person who was synonymous with the creepy horror song was Alice Cooper (although none of his songs was quite as horrific as the fact that he has morphed into a golfing Republican in later life). Most people know some of his more popular hits like School’s Out, I’m Eighteen and Poison, his more creepy stuff is a little less well-known.
Perhaps his most epic contribution comes in the form of the trio of songs Years Ago / Steven / The Awakening:
* Disclaimer…
I have no idea whether Mr. Brown ever took any drugs of any type, and I’m pretty sure Ian Anderson never did. But here is Arthur Brown with his best-known song, Fire:
Today, the Advance Reader’s Copies of my novel, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB, arrived here. The are incredibly shiny, colourful and full of yummy chocolate goodness (well…)
Steph took some photos and a video of me opening the package (I wasn’t sure what was in the package, because I had no idea the ARCs had been printed yet). Here we are though:
And here is the video where you can get a better look at the ARCs! (My first attempt at a YouTube video…)
The cover and the internal illustrations are all by Jeremy Holmes!
Stephanie Burgis tagged me for this fun Ten Terrible Titles meme. Here are the rules:
Scroll through your manuscript and stop on a random place, ten times. Whatever you land on becomes one of ten terrible titles.
I did this for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB. Basically, I opened the PDF of the galley, closed my eyes, scrolled and then dragged the cursor across before opening my eyes. Whatever was highlighted I chose (and, hey, I even found a typo on the way…)
The only changes I made were to make sure I had either full sentences or coherent clauses. Oh, and I left out one that would have been a total spoiler for the end of the book.
So, enough waffle, here they are, in no particular order (well, in reverse order, because, you know, just because I can):
We have improved upon them beyond recognition.
Smaller glass windows at the side. (Doesn’t that one sound exciting…)
The moons were high and the sky clear.
We plunged through the grass.
All I could see were the whites of her eyes.
The next moment, it regained its footing and came for me again.
Mama’s eyes flashed. “And as for you, Edward!”
A snapping serpent oak lunged out of the darkness.
Their enormous pale eyes staring like mad moons.
Hanging from a dragon’s claws far above the ancient Martian landscape.
Actually, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB had quite a few terrible titles before I got the one I wanted, but none of them as bad as these, I hope.
This is kind of weird for me. I used to write lots of short stories, and I published maybe 17 or so of them before I decided to switch to writing novels, and then I stopped on the short stories altogether. In fact, I’m struggling to think when I last wrote a short story.
According to my website (which is the source of all wisdom), the last short story I published was in June 2011. It was a fairly short piece called The Equation and I wrote it all in one go on Christmas Eve in 2010 as a Christmas present for Steph. I wracking my brain, but I really think that was the last short story I wrote.
However, with SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB due to be published in January 2016, I figured it might be nice to write a tie-in short story as an introduction to the world or as something for people who liked the book to read. And also because, you know, writing a novel is such an enormous job that sometimes I need a break.
I made an attempt a couple of months ago, but the story got carried away and turned into a novelette, called The Dinosaur Hunters, which I will revise and try to publish (or self-publish), but I still wanted to do a short story.
And today I finished it. It’s just under 5,000 words on first draft, so it is definitely a short story this time around, and it’s called The Bad Guys. SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB is a middle grade novel, but The Bad Guys is definitely an adult story, not least because it has *whispers* rude words in it.
Anyhow, the next thing to figure out is whether it’s actually any good. I’m rusty at the short story game. I’m just hoping I haven’t completely forgotten how. Wish me luck!
So, today I got to see the cover for my book, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB, and it is completely and utterly awesome. It really is. It is colourful, exciting and just shouts adventure!
Sadly, I can’t share it with you right now. :( It is undergoing some final tiny tweaks, but in about a month, I shall be releasing it to fly free into the worlds on its little clockwork wings.
If you want to be the first to see the cover, though (well, apart from the artist, and my editor, and a bunch of people at the publisher, and me…) you can sign up to my brand new, spanking newsletter and I’ll email you the cover before I put it up anywhere else. Here’s the form (hopefully…)
Subscribe to this theoretically-awesomely-incredible newsletter.
This is my occasional series about old music that I like and you’ve never heard of (or maybe you have; how would I know?)
This time around I thought I’d go local, or at least local to where I grew up.
Bristol, in the U.K., is a great city. It’s diverse, progressive, with a lot of history and culture. It even has its own science fiction and fantasy convention, BristolCon. What it doesn’t have, though, is a great deal of native heavy metal. As I’ve pointed out before, heavy metal grew out of the industrial cities of the British midlands. Bristol isn’t part of that, and although it used to be a port city and still has an aerospace industry, it was never the kind of heavy industrial centre that the midlands were.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t any bands, of course. Wherever there were working class neighbourhoods, there were going to be heavy metal bands.
So I’m going to talk about two of the better-known bands from my home city.
First up is Onslaught. Onslaught were formed in Bristol in the early 1980s, before I was really into metal, but in 1989 they released what I think is their best album, In Search of Sanity. This album contained their most complex songs, and while there is certainly a clear influence from Metallica, the vocals from their singer Steve Grimmett led to a more melodic sound. Welcome to Dying, below, is the longest song on the album, coming in at over 12 minutes:
If you’re looking for a rather shorter song from them, here’s the band doing a cover of AC/DC’s classic, Let There Be Rock.
The second local band I’m going to highlight is band called Jaguar. I’ll be honest, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about Jaguar. They never had a great deal of success, but their music is fairly representative of (although slightly faster than) a lot of the young heavy metal bands around in the period of about 1979-82. Listening to them, you can see why bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Def Leppard became such international successes and Jaguar didn’t. That’s not to say that they were a bad band. They weren’t, and they’re still worth listening to. This is a single they released in 1981, called Back Street Woman. I didn’t actually hear them when they were first around (they folded in 1984, before I got into the music), but I came across this track some years later on a compilation album. Here it is:
These weren’t the only heavy metal bands in Bristol, of course (hell, every school probably had half-a-dozen wannabe bands playing to a few dozen friends), but they were the most successful and worth a few minutes of listening.
That’s all for today. Next blog entry is going to be about something else entirely. Stay tuned… :)
Music Monday is a very occasional feature where I talk about music that is often forgotten these days and which deserves to be remembered.
Back when I was young, Heavy Metal was a pretty male genre of music. Most of the bands were male and most of the fans were too. It had grown up among the young, working class men of the industrial towns in the British Midlands. But even though it was sweaty and unfashionable, it was also pretty open and accepting, and it wasn’t entirely male.
Today I thought I’d highlight a couple of the female heavy metal bands who made a name for themselves back in the 1980s.
First up is a band who were every bit the match for more famous Motörhead (with whom they also collaborated with), Girlschool. This band was as uncompromising, heavy and in-your-face as anyone else out there. Girlschool were pretty big news in the early 1980s, and they’re still active now. Here they are with the first track from their 1980 album, Demolition. The track is “Demolition Boys”:
Another band who could give anyone a run for their money in terms of energy and sheer musical aggression were Rock Goddess, formed by sisters Jody and Julie Turner while they were still at school (Julie was only 9 at the time and was still at school when their first album was released). The band never really hit the major league, but they did support bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. This track is from their second album, Hell Hath No Fury. The track is “Hold Me Down”:
These weren’t the only female metal bands of the time, of course, and there were plenty of bands with individual female members (Doro Pesch in Warlock being probably the most prominent), but they were still a rarity and you probably won’t hear much about them when people talk about the history of heavy metal. You should.
First up, my book Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, and its sequel, The Emperor of Mars, have been resold for publication in Germany. They’re going to be published by Loewe Verlag. I have absolutely no details about when the books will be out (or really anything else, for that matter), but it is so cool that the books are being translated into German. I did three years of German at school and lived in Vienna for six months, so I’m going to make an attempt to read it in the German. Mind you, my German is kinda rusty.
It’s all completely cool and completely unexpected.
The morning after Vaidwattie left, Srilal found the first thing of beauty. It was lying on the damp pavement outside his house, where a thousand boots trod every day. The first thing of beauty was an origami bird so delicate and fine that when Srilal lifted it on the palm of his hand, he thought it might fly away.
Today we spent the afternoon up at our local vineyard with a bunch of other mums and lots and lots of small children. (Yes, we do live in Wales. Yes, it rains a lot. Yes, there is a vineyard here.)
I actually packed my computer and notebook, intending to get on with some work (I’m desperately trying to finish off a novella that’s tied in to my forthcoming book, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, and I have a freelance project due at the end of next week), but the weather was so nice and the kids were having so much fun that I left it all in the car.
Somehow, we seem to forget that this vineyard is nearby and that it’s absolutely great for kids (there’s a stream and plenty of places to play) and of course for adults, and then we remember and absolutely swear that we’ll come back. The Easter holidays are just beginning, and my brother Martin is bringing his kids down to stay for a couple of days, so if we get some nice weather (not guaranteed here!) we’ll have to bring them all up for an afternoon.
In the meantime, we’re not planning to go away anywhere over the break, so we’ll be trying to do some day trips with the kids. I’m going to take them to the aquarium in Bristol, and their grandma will be taking MrD to the science centre in Cardiff (his little brother, MrX, is too young for that), and then we’ll see. We’re thinking about the Wales National Showcaves, which look absolutely awesome but may need a few days rather than a day trip.
In between all of that, I’ll have to try to get some work in.
Still, it’s spring and it’s been warm, and I’m feeling happy. It’s funny how that can make everything seem much more possible.
