I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year. That means I’m doing something different, and you may never get to read it. I’ve had a bad history with writing things for National Novel Writing Month which I end up being unhappy with. In fact, I’m having another shot at something I’ve done through one November before.
We’ll see where it goes, but you get another Fox book next month whatever happens.
Witches and Ray-Guns 
I cant Imaging why it woud be hard to Wright a novel in a month heck i need to years for Twenty pages
we bow to your supeior personage …
Being able to write words fast is not necessarily a great skill. You don’t always get useful words out. NaNoWritMo is really supposed to push would-be authors to write instead of second-guessing themselves.
As an example of how writing fast may not be a good thing, think about ‘Game of Thrones.’ Production rate: terrible. Has TV series and huge following: yup. Of course, I think even Martin’s fans think he takes slow production to an annoying level, but you can’t deny the results.
I, personally, wouldnt call Martins production rate terrible but rather a deterrent to many readers. I dont mind a slow pace, so long as its consistent, and he is in no way consistent. He wants to work on other stuff besides Song of Ice and Fire? Fine, just dont leave your readers hanging for 3+ years for a new chapter and no guarantee of how long the next wait might be. Theres a reason that Ive never bothered reading past book 2 after having read 1 and 2 as new releases. These days I prefer digital indie or small publishing houses and the pace indie authors tend to release. No large publishing house artificially stretching release dates(or pushing generic crap), just an author releasing something as soon as its done. Rapid release pulp fiction with all its flaws is often more entertaining than overly complicated, perfectly edited, thousand page epics.
Well, tbh, I’ve never read any GoT and I watched one episode of the TV series and decided that I could see naked women on the internet any time I wanted. I wasn’t getting much more out of it than that. And I’m not a big fan of Tolkien either. I read most of Lord of the Rings on a 2 week holiday in France when I had more or less nothing else to do, and it took me three years to get up the energy to finish it. (The films are a bit better since you have overblown action scenes and the ability to just skip over everything with Frodo in.)
And I guess I’m reading more and more indie stuff, even if the lack of proofreading does make me cringe at times.
I agree with Arik.
Back in the day sci-fi authors tended to release one book a year … if I was lucky. The problem was, I read so much that by the time the third or fourth book of a series hit the shelves I had forgotten most of the characters and any backstory that I read three years ago in book one.
Then the indie market came along and fellows like you produced two, three and sometimes more highly enjoyable full-length books per year and I get to thinking … WTF? If these newcomers can hit the scene producing at this pace, why can’t the “experts” like Moon, Drake, Weber and Martin do the same?
Mike Shepherd published a dozen or so books the old school way – one every year for the most part, usually released in October. Then a while back he let his fans know that he was breaking from the big house and going full indie. His editing quality took a very small hit and he sells pretty much entirely on line now (I haven’t seen his latest releases at Barnes and Nobel, anyway) but he now seems to be on track to release three or four books and several short stories every year.
Voracious fans like myself will forgive a few editing flubs for enjoyable stories from favorite authors produced at a good clip, especially in it’s an ongoing series.
….. I must admit though, writing a novel from scratch in one month seems ambitious for anyone!
Well, when I was writing about the first 10 Thaumatology books, I was writing one a month. Admittedly, this was a little weird for me, given I’d never actually finished a novel before. Then again, my personal situation had changed suddenly, and I didn’t have anything else to do. BUT, it’s only 1667 words per day; if you’re not trying to edit as you go along, that’s not a huge number to put out. That’s the idea behind NaNoWriMo: push writers to get volume out and worry over the quality in December. It’s one way to do it.
There is a writer named Michael Anderle who started out writing a book a month. Not long ones, @75000 words or so. The first ones were good stories, but fairly awful editing wise. He has since gotten MUCH better. Vampires and Werewolves with a sci-fi twist. I am hoping for a dragon to show up sooner or later. It has to. Almost everything ELSE has.
‘The Kurtherian Gambit’ now several authors collaborating on works spanning all kinds of eras and genres and it is still growing. No words can really do it justice except ‘BIG’.
Oh, and ‘ESD beam for the WIN!’
He is also now an indie publisher, helping aspiring writers get their stuff out there.
I came in on TKG just as book 7 was published, a whole 5 months after Michael Anderle published book 1, and the editing process hes set up had only been going for a couple books at that point. Difference between self edited book 1 and actual edited later books is huge, lol. If you go onto youtube and look for some early interviews with him, he talks about why he started out publishing at the rate he did with ‘good enough’ editing and fairly bad self made covers using the minimal viable product concept. Makes sense and obviously worked as he is now an Amazon top 25 author. Obviously the space vampire who really enjoys cussing genre was being neglected.
And yeah, BIG about describes it… more than a dozen authors and 60+ books in the universe in the 2 years since book 1 and just over a year since collaborations started.
Not that anyone asked, but if they did, I’d have to come out and say that those books are still awful.
This is one of those cases with an “editing = proofreading” conflation. The original novels had both issues. Now the proofreading got better, but no actual editing happened. There was no reworking of plot holes, flat characters, badly done scenes or anything …
Copy editing is the type that refers to grammar, punctuation, etc. Developmental editing has to do with the plot and other storytelling aspects. TKG got the first, but not much of the second. On the other hand, it is fun anyway. It’s basically paranormal/sci-fi A-Team.
Nietzsche wrote one of his works bored on a train journey and basically released it straight afterwards. Tolstoy worked on War & Peace on various versions and editions with different endings and so on for a decade or so. My favorite contemporary author would probably be Haruki Murakami, and he writes about a novel every 2-4 years (but at very varying lengths).
So I feel speed means little when it comes to quality. It’s just completely different from author to author. I think it also depends a bit on where the author’s strength lie, for example, Seth Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant seems to me incredibly well-crafted when it comes to the language, and I’m not surprised when he’s saying that he’s thrown away millions of words written because he’s always searching for something better.
Meanwhile, for eg Weber according to what I read the main time factor is planning out battles and doing the math for those and then writing them in an engaging way. Entirely different challenge with entirely different time requirements.
But I can’t help myself from feeling for certain indie releases that less speed and more quality would have been possible and sensible. Of course, rationally I understand that a delay might have only been that and nothing else, or even made things worse. But emotionally it too often feels that there was a lot of potential there and the craft could have gone better ^^;
I if I remember correctly didn’t Steven King have novels released under a different pen name because he was churning them out?
Before internet publishing books went hard cover to trade paperback then to regular paperback. Paperbacks used to be CHEAP. The publisher made money by volume rather than unit price. Nobody wanted a story to go to paperback right away and suck profits from hard cover.
Would be nice if big publishers would recognize the fact that they should not be charging hardcopy prices for electronic books. I understand why paper books cost what they do, but charging the same price for a new release ebook as they do for the hardback just feels like greed and fleecing of the readers to me. The music industry refused to understand the changing times and it caused major consumer backlash, I feel like the same thing is coming for the publishing industry at some point. I love paper books, but paper publishing is going to slowly die down to a limited or niche market such as textbooks or collector editions over time, and publishers need to start thinking about a time when they are much less relevant than they are now, sort of like the newspaper.
One more plus in the indie publisher and author column, and one more mark against traditional publishers in my view.
Richard Bachman. According to Wikipedia, King published seven books under that name, though I’m not sure why. It’s possible he wanted to see how well the books would go down without his real name attached. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Another Fox story is great but what I am waiting for is another ultrahuman story. Really want to the what happens when the Union and Cygnus meet the other guardian. 2017/2018 is a bit vague.
Working on that. I started the next episode and got stuck. Hopefully, you’ll see the next book early(-ish) next year.
When might we expect a new Kate novel?
Honestly, I’m not even sure what I’m writing in December yet. I have no idea what’s coming out in the near future, unless the NaNo project works this time.