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.

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!

This week was half term, so we took the boys up to London to register them for their American citizenship (they now have dual British-American nationality, British from me, American from Steph). After 3 hours sitting waiting in the US Embassy, we rewarded the boys with a trip to the National History Museum, and particularly the dinosaur gallery.

Baby X is a little young for it, but he likes crowds, but Mr D had what may have been the absolute best time of his life. He loves dinosaurs and adores animals, so he tore around, identifying species and boggling at everything. We chased after, trying not to lose him in the ridiculous crowds.

Anyway, we had a good time, and half term is over tomorrow, so Mr D is back to school and Steph and I have to get back to work.

Right now I’ve cleared out all of the freelance work I’ve had, so I can dive into writing. I don’t have long to draft my new book, and I have loads of figuring out to do before I can even start, so it’s going to be a busy few weeks.

Wish me luck!

It was an absolutely stunning day in Wales today. Beautiful, warm sunshine, a clear sky, a slight breeze to relieve the heat. I’ve become accustomed enough to the way British weather behaves with the kind of climate change we’ve been experiencing over the last decade to realise that this might be the best of the summer, even if it isn’t officially summer yet. So, me and the boys and Maya (our dog) went down to the river Usk to enjoy what might be a brief summer.

Mr D. dressed up in his explorer outfit and went looking for dinosaurs among the buttercups and long grass (we were chased by T. Rexes and raptors for most of the walk); Baby X fell asleep in his pushchair. Maya, who is getting on a bit, trudged gamely if not 100% enthusiastically behind.

Now Mr D is playing in his paddling pool and I’m going to watch a bit of rugby.

We’re going to America at the end of July this year and staying for a bit month. So, I’ve decided my target is to write a complete novel before we go! (To be fair, this is going to be a chapter book, probably about 10,000 words, which sounds a little less impressive, so I’m going to say: I’m going to write a whole novel!)

Last Friday, we were driving back from holiday, passing through Wiltshire and Somerset (in the U.K.), and at the same time, I was just starting the latest big fat fantasy novel I’d come across. (Well, not at exactly the same time, but, you know what I mean.)

Anyway, one of the coolest things about taking that route (other than getting to pass through Bath on the way) is seeing the names of the towns and villages that you go through.

Names are important. They tell whole stories just by themselves. For example, on our drive, we passed Dead Maids and Cold Ashton. I have no idea what the story behind ‘Dead Maids’ is, but you don’t have to to immediately know there is a story there.

If we’d been a bit further south, we might have passed through Buckland St. Mary or Netherhampton. If we’d been a couple of hundred miles further north, in Yorkshire, we could have been in the fantastically named Ravenscar (the ‘scar’ being evidence of the Norse influence in the region, deriving from the word for a cliff or a steep, rocky slope) or Stainforth.

Every one of these names is suggestive of a history, a location, and a culture. Just by their names, they conjure little stories.

By contrast, the fantasy novel I started reading was full of the far-too-common fantasy nonsense names, like Blargh and K’ching (I made these up, to save the blushes of the author of the book I’m reading now). These randomly made up names do absolutely nothing for a book. They don’t give a sense of place or culture, and they certainly don’t give any history. They make a book feel thin.

Tolkien, of course, was the master of using names to lend verisimilitude to his books (look at how the names of places reflect the history and the nature of their peoples). George RR Martin does it well, too, with names of places in the North and Dorne being quite different from those in the Riverlands, and different again from those in other countries. (There is a reason Vaes Dothrak is not next to Riverrun; the names tell you about the people, their culture, and the place; they’re not random names.)

There’s not really any excuse for using random combinations of letters as names of places in fantasy novels. It’s simply the equivalent of shouting, ‘Hey! I couldn’t be bothered to do any real worldbuilding for my book!’ Which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly a selling point.

Anyway, because we were on vacation last week, I didn’t do any work, so this coming week, I’m on super-extra focus to make some real progress in figuring out my next book.

Oh yeah. And I’ll be setting it in the real world. Where the names have already been sorted.

And the obligatory links:

An awesome webcomic by The Oatmeal about the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp is awesome. And hard. Really hard.

If you use WordPress for your website, almost every plugin you use will load extra junk into the site, slowing it down. This plugin can help you control that and speed things up again. I’ve been doing this manually, but for my next site, I’m going to try this.

A new type of Tyrannosaur with a long snout found in China. We love dinosaurs. Yes we do.

The image of the map in the header is an old map of Yorkshire from a photo by Richard used under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license.

Yesterday I said I was going to blog my way back into writing, because I’d been distracted by life things and then fallen into procrastination. Yeah, I do see the irony in this…

Anyway, yesterday’s target was to go through my notebook and figure out what to start working on next. Well, I managed to get a bit of time in the early afternoon, and then some more time in the early evening while Mr D was at his first ever Drama Class (which he absolutely loved).

I think I’ve pinned down a story (possibly chapter book, possibly young middle grade) to do some work on, and so that’s what I’m going to be doing more of today. Just jotting down ideas, structures, maybe trying to get started on pinning down a voice.

One thing I really found useful yesterday was reading through Jim Butcher’s old blog where he talks about writing. In particular, there’s an entry where he talks about ‘Sequels’. By sequels, he doesn’t mean ‘book 2’ but instead:

Sequels are what happens as an aftermath to a scene.

I realised that I’d never really thought about sequels before. I write them, but I’ve never consciously thought about them. In fact, most books on writing focus exclusively on scenes, and sometimes I’ve found myself trying to force sequels into the structure of a scene, and that’s not been good for them, because they’re not scenes.

Here’s what Butcher says is the structure of a ‘sequel’, as opposed to a scene:

Here’s the basic structure to a sequel. It’s another little worksheet you can fill out when you’re thinking about it ahead of time:

1) EMOTIONAL REACTION:
2) REVIEW, LOGIC, & REASON:
3) ANTICIPATION:
4) CHOICE:

It’s an interesting blog post, and I’m not going to try to justice to it here, but take a look. It’s certainly making me more conscious of what may be a slightly neglected part of my own writing.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of Butcher’s stuff (his books as well as blog), and although I was initially skeptical (don’t know why; maybe I just tend to react instinctively against popular stuff, often to my disadvantage and later regret), but I’ve come to admire how well he does his stuff.

A couple more links, while we’re at it:

If you have a website, you need to make sure it works just as well on phones and tablets as it does on a desktop or laptop. Plug your web address in here to get a quick look at how your website really looks on different devices.

India’s budget mission to Mars – quite inspiring

Right, off to do some of that writing now!

I have been bad.

Yes, it’s true, for one reason or another (possibly and another), I haven’t done any ‘proper’ writing for weeks. Okay, I do have some excuses:

• The entire family was horribly sick with various colds for at least the last 6 weeks
• Mr D has been on his Easter holidays
• We had extended family visiting
• W’ve been sorting out our disaster of a house so that Steph’s parents could visit
• And I’ve had a freelance project with a tight deadline.

So, yes, I’ve been copping out on the personal writing thing. And, once you do miss a few weeks, it can be hard to force yourself back into the right headspace.

Anyway, the point is that the only way I’m going to force myself back into doing this is by blogging myself into accountability.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. Every day I’m going to blog about what I’m going to do. Then I’ll have to do it, right?

Today’s work is notebook work: going through the outlines of ideas I’ve got jotted down and choosing something to develop further.

And, to stop this blog being utterly boring, here’s today’s random interesting links:

Neanderthals were not less intelligent than modern humans, scientists find – From The Guardian

Prehistoric North Sea ‘Atlantis’ hit by 5m tsunami – From BBC News (This is talking about ‘Doggerland’, where the North Sea now is).

If you’re interested in Doggerland, by the way, Stephen Baxter’s Northland novels are a fantastic alternate-history exploration of the era

And finally, listen to a free podcast of Stephanie Burgis’s awesome short story, Foxwoman, over at Toasted Cake podcast.

The header image on this post is Susan Lueck, and is used under a Creative Commons 2.0 License.

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?