I have written a short story.

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.

Two awesome (for me!) pieces of news today.

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.

Second up, if you like flash fiction, I have my very short story Five Things of Beauty up as a podcast at Toasted Cake. It’s only about five minutes long.

This is the opening:

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.

Go listen to it! :)

This is the coolest thing EVER!

NASA have just announced that Mars once had a vast ocean covering a large part of the northern hemisphere. In fact, oceans may once have covered 20% of Mars, up to a mile deep, meaning that abundant water would have been around for plenty of time for life to have evolved (certainly longer than it took for life to evolve on Earth). Here’s the video explaining it:

For me, this is utterly, totally cool, because, of course, my book Secrets of the Dragon Tomb is set on a Mars where there are oceans, animals, and of course all sorts of alien weirdness. In fact, the map I made (adapted from Google Mars) has oceans in similar places. Here’s my map:

My map doesn’t show most of the ocean areas, because that’s not where the story takes place, but there’s some it showing.

I love it when things like this turn up and make me all excited for my novel. Now I really can imagine that there were pterodactyls flying through the sky, strange clockwork machines, and ancient dragon tombs. Because if I was right about the oceans… :D

So, I’ve just finished the copyedits for Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. This is actually the first time the book has felt really real. Obviously it’s not laid out yet, or bound up in a cover or anything like that. It’s still a printed manuscript. But seeing it like that, covered in copyeditor and editor marks, with notations for the layout and so on, well, that basically says: this is going to be a real book. Everyone involved is acting like it’s going to be a real book. It’s not just in my head. A machine is in motion and it’s gaining momentum.

Anyway, that’s not what I was going to blog about. I was going to blog about copyediting.

This manuscript, this Secrets of the Dragon tomb has been read dozens and dozens of times. It has been read by me (over and over and over and over again), my critique partners, by Steph, by my agent and my editor. It’s been reworked and revised and polished repeatedly. So it should be good. It should be a shining jewel of sparkly unicorn-ness. Right?

Oh dear.

This, folks, is why we have the absolute lifesavers called copyeditors. These wonderful, lovely people seek out errors and inconsistencies like I seek out the last square of chocolate in the house.

Here are just a few of the errors that my lovely copyeditor picked up:

1. I used two different names for the same character in the first two pages (oh, and since you ask, this is the version currently doing the rounds on international submissions…)
2. I clearly have no idea how to use hyphens. Not the slightest idea. At least 90% of my hyphens were deleted by the end
3. Similarly, me and commas have only the slightest acquaintance. Indeed, if we were at a ball in Regency England, we would need a third party to introduce us before we could properly speak to each other

And so on. That’s just the beginning of it.

I know not everyone goes through a traditional publisher when they put their book out. I know a lot of people self-publish (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; it works for a lot of people, and very well). But if you do, for all that’s holy, please, please do yourself a favour and employ a copyeditor, because no matter how well you thought you did it, you absolutely have to realise you are but a worthless worm of incompetence without them.

An aside (or a below)

You can now pre-order Secrets of the Dragon Tomb pretty much anywhere except Amazon.com (because they are being weird):

Indiebound | Books-a-Million | Powells | Amazon UK | Book Depository | Chapters Indigo

It looks like the publication date of SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB has been pushed back once again, this time until January 12^th, 2016. Sometimes publishing feels like being Alice through the looking glass: no matter how fast your run, things never get any closer.

So, yeah, I can’t say I’m over thrilled by this development, but, you know, it gives me the incentive to just get on and write something else entirely. With so long until SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB comes out (and who knows for sure that it won’t get bounced again), I can probably write an entirely different novel between now and then. I’m thinking of having a go at an urban fantasy, because I’ve been reading a lot of urban fantasy and really enjoying it (and I have some ideas, which always helps…).

So, does anyone have any recommendations for good urban fantasy? I love Jim Butcher and Laurell Hamilton and I’ve enjoyed books by Patricia Briggs and other similar writers. I also love some of the more British urban fantasy writers (who often edge into horror) like Mike Carey and Ben Aaronovitch. Steph has recommended Ilona Andrews.

So, what else should I be reading in the genre?

Update: Over on twitter, C.G. Cameron recommended Tanya Huff, so that’s going on the list, if you’re looking for UF books yourself.

We’re about to move house. This isn’t exactly voluntary, because we rent, and our landlady wants to move back into her property, so we have to find somewhere else. First up, we considered moving here:

Unfortunately, it’s just a bit too far to commute to Mr. D’s school, and we’re not about to make him change schools for a puny house like that.

Then we considered moving here:

But, apparently, it’s not actually real, as such. So, you know.

In the end, we’re moving to a house that is slightly smaller and slightly dingier than the one we’re in now (boo!) but which at least has a separate office (hooray!). Getting ready to move is turning out to be a bit of nightmare. We’ve been in this house for, ooh, something like 4 1/2 years, and to be honest, we haven’t actually gotten rid of anything in those years. And we arrived with boxes of stuff we hadn’t gotten rid of from previous houses.

So, Steph and I have been sorting through piles and piles of random stuff, trying to get rid of it. (Anyone want an old pram/stroller? A carrycot? A baby car seat?) I can’t bring myself to take stuff that is still in good condition to the tip, but I also can’t figure out how to easily get rid of it. I guess we could put it on ebay, but to be honest, we don’t have time to do that before we move.

We have managed to donate about 20 million items of baby clothes to poor, unsuspecting charity shops by taking them there and running off at high speed before they could say they don’t want them. All I have to do now is wait until Steph is out and then get rid of all of her books while keeping mine. :D

Anyway, we’re moving in about a week’s time, so most of our junk will probably come with us again. If you should have our new address and I’ve forgotten to give it to you, let me know!

Now, back to work. I have a room to sort through and a freelance project due tomorrow.

Oh yeah. In other news, it looks like the publication date for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB has been pushed back again until September 22, 2015. I do so love the vagaries of publishing.

Credit: Photo of Blenheim Palace, by Nicholas Jackson. Used under a Creative Commons 2.0 License.

So, I’ve been buried deep in revisions of SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB these last three weeks or so, hiding in the corner of a cafe for four or five hours a day whacking away about it.

While I was busy working a few very cool things showed up.

First up, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the rest are now all listing the publication day for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB as August 18, 2015. I haven’t heard anything official, but for now, I’m going to assume this is right.

Second up, SECRETS… is now actually available for pre-order from Book Depository, Books-a-Million, various international Amazons, including Amazon UK (although oddly not Amazon USA, which is peculiar, because right now it’s only scheduled for North American publication), and it’s listed on Indiebound, although whether you pre-order it probably depends on your local indie store.

There’s no cover or book description up on any of those sites yet, but you can preorder anyway! (Here’s some info about the book right here on this lovely website, just for you.)

So. What are you waiting for!

Okay, now back to the revising!

Yes, I’ve just received my editorial letter for my first novel, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. For those of you who don’t know about such things, you get an editorial letter after you’ve sold your book, as part of the publishing process. It’s where the editor goes through in detail what you need to change to make the book publishable. Pretty much every book gets one of these. Maybe there are a few bestsellers who don’t, but everyone else does. The edits can be minor or incredibly major (and if you self-publish, you’ll need to hire an editor to provide the feedback for you, because you always need it).

Anyway, this is basically the feedback I got in my editorial letter:

Or something like that… :)

As my book is a middle grade book, a couple of the things I’m having to fix are making the protagonist younger (he’ll be 12, instead of 14 as he originally was) and making the book shorter (it was 100,000 words in the first draft, 75,000 words in the draft that my editor bought, and will now need to be closer to 60-65,000 words.

I’m also going to have a map at the front of the book. I love maps at the front of books! In fact, it’s not really a book if it doesn’t have a map, right???

Luckily for everyone, a proper artist is going to draw the map, but I had to provide a rough version for them to work with.

So, as a kind of peek, here’s the map I sent to my editor.

I don’t intend to explain what any of the things are on the map. You’ll have to wait for the book. I did decide to alter the geography of Mars a bit, because I have the power.

Right. Now back to the rewrite!

So, I must admit I have no idea what to work on next.

Right now, I’m waiting on the editorial letter for Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. I’ve also turned in the sequel, The Emperor of Mars, so at some point I suppose I’ll get an editorial letter for that too.

I’ve also got the first draft of another, unrelated middle grade novel, and the first draft of yet another novel, which will probably turn out to be for adults.

I see an awful lot of revising novels in my future, but to be honest, I feel like I’ve been revising novels for ages. I know some people love revising, but after a while, I’ve gotta say, I want to write something new.

But then if I write something new, I’ll have to revise that too. Aaaaaarrrrrgh!

Ahem.

This week, both Steph and I are working on auditions for freelance work. In fact, we’re both working on auditions for the same piece of freelance work, which makes things a wee bit competitive around here. I have proposed that if one of us wins the work, they will buy the other a ‘How to Write’ book as a consolation prize. Shockingly, the suggestion was not met with a great deal of pleasure…

Anyway, after this week, I’ve got an open schedule, and I need to do something. Just not sure what.

So, who’s got a great idea? And can I do it without having to revise anything?