Finding the Story

A couple of weeks ago, I announced on Facebook that I had finished the rough draft of Legends of the Five Directions 4: The Vermilion Bird. Social media being what they are, I’m assuming most readers of this blog didn’t see that post, which probably disappeared among the many other updates of their friends. But for me it marked the transition from the process of discovering whether I have a story to my favorite part of writing: the first revision stage.

This may seem like an odd preference. Isn’t the first draft more fun? Well, in some ways, yes. If I could outline worth a darn and stick to the plan, no doubt I would like that first run-through best. In the first draft the story is brand-new and shiny, and I follow the characters almost in awe as they come to life on the page.

But as I’ve confessed before, my outlines are sketchy at best. I try to have a plan for where I’m going, although I don’t always get there (Vermilion Bird is a perfect example: I had a reasonable sense of where my main couple would end up, but several other characters kept me in suspense almost until the last chapter). Sometimes I also draw up a list of midpoints to keep the book focused, but usually that’s a waste of time, since by the time I hit page ten, someone has done something unexpected and there I am, back in the woods. And while the exploration is a blast, and I learn what’s going to happen as I go along, the nagging sense that I may never reach the end or even have a story, in the sense of a well-connected tale that starts off one place and ends up farther along the same path, gives the whole process a somewhat frantic air.

As a result, I like the second draft best. By then, the general arc of the book is in place. I understand who the characters are, what pleases and worries them, what they recognize as troubling and what they have buried so deeply that only the developing story events can bring the truth to light. Of course, there are byways—and even highways—that go nowhere and people who show up in chapter 15 and have to be introduced earlier, details I forgot were already covered and others that somehow slipped through the cracks. But the trunk of the book exists, and the rest is a matter of pruning and grafting, planting and uprooting. At this point I go through the novel several times as quickly as I can, adding and subtracting until I have a more or less clean line from beginning to end.

That is not the end of the revisions, by any means. I do individual runs for style, to remove clichés, to check for (historical, psychological, typographical) errors, to adjust for readers’ comments, to monitor that the dialogue sounds like something real people would say and excludes modern slang or post-medieval concepts of the universe. Only when I can’t think of anything else to fix does the book move toward publication. By then, I’m usually so sick of it that I can’t look at it anymore, at least for a while.

But that second round is special. The story is present but still new and exciting, rich with hidden depths and twists to uncover. It catches me up, to the point where I forgot to write this post yesterday. And now I have to get back to work. See you next week!


Images: Phoenix purchased from Shutterstock.com; Emperor Babur of India supervising work on his garden courtesy of the British Library.

Catching Fleas

I’ve heard a story—perhaps you’ve heard it too, although it’s probably more an urban legend than reality—that the makers of Oriental carpets weave mistakes into their work, because only God is perfect. Frankly, this story always makes me laugh. Does anyone have to manufacture mistakes? I can make a dozen before breakfast without even trying, especially with a middle-aged memory working on my behalf. Which brings me to today’s topic: proofing.

As some of you know, I handle all the typesetting and proofing, as well as much of the copy editing, for Five Directions Press. I make my living the same way. And like most editors, I am a perfectionist. Show me a poster or an advance review copy, and my eye goes immediately to the extra space, the comma that should be a period or vice versa, the preposition that ends a sentence. I can’t help it. When I’m reading for pleasure, I wish I could turn off that inner voice commenting on faulty grammar or words that break across lines when they should not, never mind spelling and capitalization errors.

So it may come as something of a surprise that of all the parts that go into my job, proofing is the one I dislike most. Editing fiction is usually fun (if nonfiction not always—it depends on the topic), typesetting artistically satisfying, writing pure joy. But proofing demands intense focus on tiny, essentially arbitrary details. Worse, it’s so final. From proofing, a book goes to press, where any mistake that’s missed will remain visible forever. Small things, big impact—a classic prescription for stress.

Proofing is, of course, essential. Work riddled with errors brands an author or a press as unprofessional. But as an activity it is humbling, especially to a perfectionist. Proofing reveals the places where one’s eye skipped over the same mistake a dozen times before. In the novel I’m working on now, I read the file before typesetting, during typesetting, as a printed PDF after typesetting. I created an e-book and checked the formatting, although the error I have in mind would not show up in an e-book. Only when I went to investigate a problem the author identified—which turned out to be caused by her computer, but that’s another story—did I realize that I had assigned the wrong tag to one chapter opener, so that the pretty small caps that set off the first line everywhere else didn’t appear. This after going through the file about eighteen times to check specifically for typesetting errors: things like vertical justification (facing pages ending at the same place) and ladders (same word stacked two or three times at the left or right edge of a paragraph). I saw a thousand trees and missed the giant rock sitting smack where it should not be. That’s proofing.

One thing that helps, I find, is changing formats. Things I can’t see on screen or miss in printouts leap out at me in an e-book or the actual book. CreateSpace lets authors order bound proofs, which look exactly like the final output. I always insist on seeing the bound proof before I sign off on a book, whether it’s mine or someone else’s. In the past, I’ve found incorrect headers, photographs that printed too dark, tables of contents that didn’t match the chapter headings, authors’ names spelled incorrectly, and more—all this in articles and books that three to six people have read, sometimes more than once. We learn to read by recognizing patterns, to see words rather than individual letters. So faced with a page, the mind fills in the blanks, and nothing but kicking it out of its comfort zone lets the proofer see what’s really there or not there in place of what we expect to find. Then there are the errors no one could predict, like the cover that looked perfect on screen but developed a color mismatch or stray lines on export, visible only in the final output or when blown up to 600% in Photoshop.

And that is why I don’t worry about inserting errors in my work. Because hard as I try to root them out, they multiply like fleas, and there are always more to find. But as irritated as I become every time I finally catch sight of that giant rock, I’ve had to learn to chill. Because it’s true: only God is perfect.


Image: Clipart no. 109370633.

Publishing Too Soon

Writing is a tough business, especially novel writing. Almost by definition, it takes place in a virtual cave—one would-be author alone against the onslaught of the imagination. Characters talking in your head, moving pictures of setting and plot: isn’t this most people’s definition of insanity? Sure, the writer knows at some level that these are his or her creations, but tell that to a character who has decided that, come hell or high water, she is not embarking on that terribly convenient (for the author) mission that doesn’t happen to fit with her way of looking at the world.

In addition to the intense solitude of fiction writing as an exercise, budding novelists encounter another problem. To be able to write, you must first have learned to read. The vast majority of us learn to read at an early age, and those of us who become writers have often been reading for several decades before we produce finished work as adults. Since we are such accomplished and passionate readers, we tend to assume that we have what it takes as writers, and since we are writing alone, there is often no one to correct that misapprehension.

The third problem magnifies the first two: finishing a story feels fabulous. At the moment of typing “THE END,” almost every author knows this draft represents the greatest work in world literature, a piece of perfection equal to the classics. Every one of the nine hundred pages, now so laboriously completed, shines like the proverbial sun. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the first book or the twenty-first, in that instant of completion the thought of withholding this gift from its unwitting but eager readership seems cruel. And so the first draft gets pushed out into print before it’s ready.

In the olden days, by which I mean a decade ago, that last step was not possible. Vanity presses existed, but few people read the books they published. To reach a market, writers sent out typed, then e-mailed, queries to literary agents who, drat their uncaring souls, failed to recognize the genius. The agents did not reply or, if they did reply, sent standard responses. Writers had to work their way up to requests for full manuscripts, detailed critiques, and personalized rejection letters before they finally secured a contract. In the process, they did a lot of rewriting. And slowly, slowly, authors learned that, however necessary in terms of preparation and training, the mere fact of being avid readers did not mean that they had mastered the craft of novel writing.

Believe me, I know. I’ve been there and done that, as they say. Twenty-plus years ago, I sent queries to agents for novels that these days I can’t bear even to look at. I think of those queries and cringe. What must those agents have thought? But I know the answer: they had seen thousands of submissions just like mine, and within three pages, if not three paragraphs, they thought “here’s someone else who doesn’t know what she’s doing,” tossed my query aside, and sent the standard letter—or nothing.

At the time, I was disappointed, not to say devastated. But now I consider myself fortunate to have had that experience. It took me fifteen years to write a publishable novel, reading craft books and working with more accomplished fellow writers all the way, and in those fifteen years publishing changed. In many ways, it changed for the better, because a highly consolidated market rejected good books as well as those that still needed much more work. But in one respect, authors lost from the change. As I have discovered from hosting New Books in Historical Fiction and from co-founding Five Directions Press, it has become easy to publish a book too soon.

Not only beginners or self-published authors make this mistake. Even mature writers sometimes put out books at a point when they could use another round of editing or error checking, when the plot is still sketchy, when the main characters’ motivations remain cloudy or inconsistent and their developmental arcs unclear. In these cases, the writers are usually seeking to make money with additional titles or have signed a contract they must meet. Sometimes the writer has become such a big name that no one in publishing wants to criticize his/her books. But for whatever reason it happens, the person hurt in the end is the author. The established author at least has his or her early works for readers to enjoy. The new author may never recover from those slow beginnings, inept dialogue, clichéd emotions, and trite descriptions. At Five Directions Press, that’s one of the things we do for one another: we decide as a group when each of us can safely release her book.

So do yourself a favor. Put the first draft away, toast your achievement in champagne, and pat yourself on the back. You’ve earned every drop and chortle. You finished a novel, and that’s amazing. But don’t send the file out (or upload it for publication) just yet. Go back in a week—better, a month—take out the blue pencil, and revise. Read the dialogue aloud and listen to whether it sounds clunky. Show the manuscript to a writer friend you trust. Show it to a few more. Collect their comments and repeat. Get recommendations for books on writing and read them, or if you can, take a course. Hire an editor who specializes in your genre of fiction, who can point out where your specific story goes off the rails or needs further development. Join a critique group and learn while doing. Find a way that works for you. But whatever you do, don’t publish the first draft or even the third. One day, you’ll be glad you waited.


Image from Clipart.com, no. 20413568

One Step Forward

On Labor Day, at 3:30 or so in the afternoon, I typed the last sentence of the rough draft of The Swan Princess. This is always a bittersweet moment, when a book that began life as a vague idea, almost an image, congeals into a visible shape. Not yet an adult shape, fully formed, but a real story with a beginning, a somewhat hairy middle, and an end. I have left the stage of pure imagination and moved into the (for me) even more vital stage of revision.

The bittersweet quality was particularly pronounced with this book. Like many writers, I find beginnings and endings easier than middles, which have to sustain interest and develop the plot and characters without rushing to the resolution of problems. Perhaps because The Swan Princess is also the fulcrum of the series—the third of the five directions—finding its heart became a slog in a way that the first two books never were and I hope the last two will not be (since I already know their basic stories). The whole novel is, in a sense, a middle—focused on development and the retention of interest more than resolution.

Of course, I still have a long way to go. As tends to happen with my stories, characters insisted on doing things for reasons I don’t yet understand and that may not work when I do figure it out. On the whole, the resolutions at the end mirror the problems established at the beginning, but a few hares I started in chapter 1 veered off into the woods in chapter 8 and never returned. I have either to catch them and bring them back or erase any traces of their presence. Key secondary characters vanish for long stretches of time and need invitations to check in once a while before the reader forgets them and their concerns. At least one minor character requires building up, whereas others will do better with some trimming. The spiritual and political background so important to the series as a whole so far appears in patches, at best.

But the book was also a learning experience for me. I discovered that, however hard I cling to the illusion, I cannot outline a novel. I need to see it on the page in all its glorious complexity and illogic. I find the characters, the plot, the dialogue, and the settings by writing them out. Even comments from other trusted writers can’t help much at the start, because until I know what course the story will take, I have no way to assess whether I should push a problematic incident in this direction or that, give it more space or cut it altogether. Once that spine exists—sketched out and filled with place-holding clichés as it inevitably is (because if I stop to edit, I will not move the story forward)—then constructive criticism works, because I can figure out how to respond.

A few days to revel in the sensation of accomplishment, and it’s back to the drawing board—or in this case, writing desk—to prune the dead wood and nurture the sprouts that see the sun only in chapter 10. With luck, the revisions will go faster than stage 1, and I’ll have completed my sixth novel late this year or early in the next. And when I start book 7, I’ll know to lock myself in the office and write it down, warts and all, before inflicting it on my long-suffering, endlessly patient and helpful critique group. But then, I already have a good idea of what should happen in The Vermilion Bird....

Speaking of my critique group, if you happen to live in the Philadelphia area, three of us are giving a panel at the Helen Kate Furness Free Library next Wednesday, September 16. Stop by and say hello. You can find full information and sign up on Facebook or get time and place from the Five Directions Press site. Hope to see you there!

Cover Craziness

As I’ve mentioned before, I can be a bit—well, let’s be kind and call it obsessive. I edit and typeset for a living: every comma counts, every font choice matters. And I blow off steam by attending classes in classical ballet, an art form dedicated to attaining perfection in every tiny detail of placement and line. So it’s no big surprise that when it comes to something like cover design, I tweak endlessly, moving elements up and down and side to side, switching out fonts, applying drop shadows and beveling and embossing and so on until I’ve driven either myself or everyone round me mad. At this point in my life, I probably can’t help myself. But in the last week or so, I have realized that sometimes I’m so busy pruning the branches that I forget to step back and look at the forest.

It all started innocently enough. As I mentioned in my last post, Five Directions Press has decided to reissue The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel in a new, smaller trim size. That gives us an opportunity to update the cover design for this, our first book, to match the evolving standard that we have developed as a cooperative. I had a couple of ThinkStock credits that were about to expire, so I used one of them to purchase a lovely picture of Widener Library (where the book opens) in winter. So far, so good. But the rapier on the front cover had never had a high-enough resolution for print, and it no longer showed up on the site where I had recorded downloading it, so I decided to use my one remaining credit to replace it.

I won’t drag you through the ins and outs of what happened next, except to say that I ended up with a different rapier with cleaner lines, purchased from Shutterstock. But it was only after I had expanded and reduced and feathered and rotated the image, then tested the double pimpernels representing Ian and Nina in every conceivable configuration, then uploaded it as final and posted it on this blog that I noticed that the sword had a spur jutting from its hilt that suggested an erotic component more suitable to Fifty Shades of Grey than to my romantic but far-from-explicit novel. Wrong message!

To ensure I wasn’t overreacting, I enlisted Sir Percy, my faithful spouse, as arbiter. He took one look at the cover and confirmed my worst fears. Oops. I went back into Photoshop and removed the offending spur, twisted the flowers to a new angle, and re-uploaded the file. Then I went and removed the earlier version from wherever I could (Facebook stuck to the darned thing like glue), including this blog, and replaced it with the new one.

Naturally, when I received the proof of the book (with the problematic cover), I found a bunch of other errors that needed fixing, including an unrounded apostrophe and missing book title on the back cover. So the saga continues, even though the front cover is now ready for prime time. And since we may as well update the covers on the e-books, too, we will correct any “fleas” that I find in the proof in those files as well (these are tiny corrections, an “into” that should be “in to,” for example—I told you I was obsessive).

But the moral of this story is clear: don’t become so focused on the branches that you forget to look at the trees. Even the most perfectly shaped leaves won’t do much good if a whacking great skyscraper is standing in the midst of the forest.

Writers Alone and Together

We thought we were originals, but instead, turns out we are at the front of a wave but not the only surfers. Which is great—always nice to have a few friendly folks to share the journey with!

This post ran last week on the Triskele Books blog. I reversed the two halves, so that you could find out about them first, and edited the introductions a bit to avoid total duplication.

 

TRISKELE BOOKS: QUESTIONS FROM FIVE DIRECTIONS PRESS

Five Directions Press: How did your publishing cooperative come together, and what made you decide to establish it? How many of you are there?

Triskele Books: There were three original members: JJ Marsh, Gillian Hamer, and Liza Perrat. We met via an online writing group and “knew” each other virtually for a few years beforehand, critiquing each other’s work. At the end of 2011, two of us had agents who were unable to sell our manuscripts, but none of us was keen on self-publishing individually. We got together and discussed the idea of a team collaboration, to make the process more feasible and less scary, and decided to form the Triskele Books author collective—a brand to promote our ideals of quality writing, presentation, and design. We have since taken on more members—Catriona Troth and JD Smith—so we currently have a core group of five with a few extras on the sidelines, supporting and promoting us. The other authors we met through the same online writing group.

FDP: Where does the Triskele name come from? Does a Triskele book have an identifiable style that sets it apart?

TB: Triskele comes from the fact there were three of us in the beginning. It has Celtic connotations, a tie-in with one of our author’s settings. The circles of the logo resemble three scrolls and represent the joining of these three independent circles to create something entirely new. As regards style, “location” is an important theme to our brand. All of us share an enthusiasm for “place,” and we try to evoke that in our stories. We all use the same cover designer and formatter, JD Smith, whose gorgeous matte-finish covers are praised by readers.

 

FDP: How does your setup differ from ours? How do you select a Triskele author? Do you interact in person, or mostly online?

TB: Triskele Books operates very similarly to Five Directions Press. Each author retains her own rights, is responsible for publishing her own books, choosing between e-books, paperbacks, and hardbacks, and commissioning her own quality design. We critique and edit each other’s work and comment on covers. We all employ a professional proofreader, as well as cover designer and formatter. We mostly interact online, via a private Facebook group, as we live in different places, from London to Birmingham, the Lakes District, Lyon, and Zürich. We get together in London every six months for the launch of the latest releases, which is always a great occasion for fun, chit-chat, and champagne.

One area which is hard work, but we consider a benefit, is that we constantly evaluate ourselves. We check we’re still going in the right direction, especially when new challenges throw up questions and we have to refer back to our fundamental principles in order to make plans for the future. This would be much harder if we weren’t (a) a small group, (b) communicative and (c) willing to listen to other ideas.

 

FDP: What books have you published, and what do you plan to publish over the next year or two?

TB: We have published nine books so far, with another three due for release in November 2013.

June 2012 releases 

The Charter by Gillian Hamer
Behind Closed Doors by JJ Marsh (first in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat

December 2012 releases 

Closure by Gillian Hamer
Raw Material by JJ Marsh (second in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
The Open Arms of the Sea by Jasper Dorgan

June 2013 releases 

Complicit by Gillian Hamer
Tread Softly by JJ Marsh (third in the Beatrice Stubbs series)
Tristan and Iseult by JD Smith (novella)
Gift of the Raven by Catriona Troth (novella)
 

FUTURE RELEASES

November 2013

Wolfsangel by Liza Perrat

Overlord I by JD Smith

Ghost Town by Catriona Troth

May 2014

The Crossing by Gillian Hamer

Cold Pressed by JJ Marsh (fourth in the Beatrice Stubbs series)

Overlord II by JD Smith 

FDP: What is the situation in commercial publishing in the UK at present? Do you encounter the same problems in finding representation and publication that we do here in the US?

TB: We certainly did encounter the same problems finding representation and publication in the UK, as in the US. At the beginning of Triskele Books, Gillian Hamer and Liza Perrat both had agents, who were unable to sell their manuscripts despite much praise. JJ Marsh’s international crime series was said to be “too cerebral.” Basically, it was the same story: publishers liked our stories, but couldn’t see where to slot them in commercially.

 

FDP: How has publishing changed in the UK, and how do you anticipate it will develop over the next few years?

Gillian Hamer: To me, publishers in the UK seem slow to catch up with current market trends and they seem for the most part, unwilling to look at the opportunities the rise in indie publishing offers. A few are now starting to think about foreign rights and looking to utilize the work authors are putting in regarding self-promotion and marketing. Many of us have felt that agents have taken a very old-fashioned approach for years—for example, many still only accept written submissions as if email was something out of a sci-fi movie! I feel everyone involved in publishing will have to change up a gear and accept and embrace the technology around today. E-books are only the start. Those that don’t will lose opportunities and be left behind. 

Catriona Troth: One change I have observed over the past ten years or so is that as so many of the smaller agents and publishers get swallowed up by big multinationals, much less time is given for debut authors to develop. For most traditionally published writers these days, if they don’t make the big time with their first book—or if they are very lucky, their second— that’s the end of their career. One thing that self-publishing does is to give writers the time to build a following gradually and organically—the way all writers could expect to, at one time.

JJ Marsh: UK publishing is similar to the US in that it’s marketing-led, in the main. Smaller presses, bookshops, and agents who are willing to develop authors are suffering from the heavyweights’ advantages. It’s interesting to see agents such as Andrew Lownie and Rogue Reader taking the agent-assisted self-publishing model, which seems advantageous for both. People are beginning to wake up to the opportunities offered by the DIY route and to realize that readers are highly discerning. Collectives such as Five Directions Press and Triskele Books, among others, have an opportunity here to act as a hallmark of quality.

Our thanks and best wishes to Five Directions Press for a successful career in indie publishing through the author collective. Books from Five Directions Press are available here.

 

FIVE DIRECTIONS PRESS: QUESTIONS FROM TRISKELE BOOKS

The FDP members—Ariadne Apostolou, Courtney J. Hall, Diana Holquist, and C.P. Lesley—answer questions about the rise of their author collective and indie publishing in general.

 

TB: What brought you girls together? And any particular reason why your collective is named Five Directions Press?

FDP: Three of us formed a local writers’ group five years ago and have met regularly ever since. Diana and C.P. have been writing buddies and friends for even longer. Diana has published commercially; she mostly writes contemporary romance under her own name and as Sophie Gunn. But her parenting memoir appealed to a different audience, and she decided to publish it herself. When we set up our own press, we invited Diana to join us. We reformatted and reissued her book last year.

The Five Directions Press name grows out of C.P.’s series, Legends of the Five Directions. In Chinese cosmology, which the Mongolians and Turkic tribes of Central Asia adopted, the center is considered a fifth direction that brings the four cardinal points into harmony. Since we have a range of books—historical fiction (C.P. and Courtney), contemporary fiction (Ariadne), and memoir (Diana)—it seemed like a nice image of unity derived from diversity. We don’t quite have five directions yet, but that leaves us room to expand.

 

TB: What factors triggered your decision to go indie?

FDP: In part, the difficulty of breaking into publishing as an unknown author, especially if one is writing books that don’t fit neatly into a commercial slot. We came up with the idea after C.P. had sent both her books to literary agents and reached the point where she was getting comments along the lines of “I love this, but I don’t know who I’d sell it to.” In the meantime, self-publishing was exploding. But if commercial publishing has too many gatekeepers who operate too rigidly, self-publishing has too few. So the four of us decided to pool our skills, work together to ensure quality control on each book, and set up the cooperative as an intermediary. Our hope is that Five Directions Press can build a long-term reputation for books worth reading. Of course, that will take a while.

 

TB: Like Triskele Books authors, do you each retain the rights to your own books, pay the costs of publication, and receive the full royalties? What elements are done collectively?

FDP: Yes, to all of the above. So far, because we are so small, we have an arrangement where no money changes hands. Five Directions Press is a name and a group website rather than a business. What makes it work is that we have a good combination of skills: C.P. has 20+ years experience in academic publishing, including copy editing and typesetting, so she handles the actual book production. Courtney runs a graphic design business, so she works on covers and website design (she produced our logo, for example). Ariadne is the best of us at spotting flaws in story structure and characterization. Diana has a background in advertising and has published commercially, so she brings that experience to our joint enterprise. So both the writing and the production are, to some extent, a collective effort.

 

TB: What do you see as the key benefits of being in a collective? Any disadvantages?

FDP: We really don’t see any disadvantages, so long as the people in the collective are positive and helpful in their attitudes. We were very lucky to find people who were a good fit from the beginning. We have learned so much from one another in terms of improving our writing. For the press, the main advantages are having other people to brainstorm with and having people who can fill in the gaps in one’s own experience. No one can be an expert at everything.

 

TB: Do you share a designer? And do you try and go for a shared look or feel?

FDP: C.P. designs the books, with input from the collective. Usually, we work together on the covers, although if an author wants to bring in her own cover, that’s fine. We would fuss only if the new cover deviated too much from the Five Directions Press style.
 
We do try to go for a shared look and feel. Most of the covers have a textured beige back (which contrasts well with our umber logo), and we strive for a consistent layout on the back cover and spine. The interiors usually use the same header and footer style and similar layouts, although fonts and type ornaments vary. All our historical novels use Garamond, for example—a nice old font with a long history. The modern novels use modern fonts (Minion Pro, usually). Display fonts (chapter headings and cover type) are individual to each book—although the Legends of the Five Directions series, for example, will use the same fonts throughout to establish a consistent look for the series.

 

TB: How do you know whether an author is a good “fit” for Five Directions Press?

FDP: Well, the primary qualification, besides the person having something to contribute (see next question), is to write well. Because we are trying to establish a reputation for the press as a whole, we need to involve writers who already have a solid grasp of the craft, even if their work does not appeal to a literary agent or commercial publisher for whatever reason. In addition, this is a “sweat equity” operation, so the person needs to be willing to put in the time, rather than approaching publication as a client, and have a generally positive outlook. Last, the book itself has to blend with the ones we already have, since the point of operating as a group is to achieve a certain level of cross-fertilization. Even though we have historical and contemporary novels, as well as novellas and a memoir, all our books can be considered some variety of women’s fiction. I don’t think there would be any advantage to us or to a prospective author to take on a physics textbook, but a historical mystery featuring a female detective would probably work fine.

 

TB: Are you actively seeking new members? And if so, what sort of criteria must new authors meet, to become part of Five Directions Press?

FDP: We are not actively seeking new members, but we are not averse to considering new members. At the moment, we have just one person to handle the copy editing and proofing; it would be nice to have another writer who has worked as an editor. Someone experienced in book publicity would also be useful, since none of us really has the contacts needed to publicize the books as much as they need and deserve. Publicity is our greatest difficulty, as it is for most independent and self-published writers, so that’s probably the area where we could use the most help. Hence the criteria would be those listed in my previous answer: good writing, good fit, willingness to participate, and skills that supplement those we already have.

 

TB: What are your plans for 2013 and beyond?

FDP: We have at least three books in the pipeline for fall and winter 2013. C.P.’s The Winged Horse (Legends of the Five Directions 2: East), is on track for release in November or December. Courtney’s Saving Easton should come out around the same time. Ariadne is working on a series of three novellas; we expect to release those one by one as e-books, then together in print, over the next year. We also need to get the e-book versions of Seeking Sophia up within the next few months. Beyond that, we have to see. But we all expect to keep writing, so there should be a slow but steady stream of books.

 

TB: How do you see the future of publishing generally?

FDP: It seems obvious that publishing is in flux. The current model, in which a few companies (five, here in the United States) control the bulk of the commercial market while millions of self-published books pour out through online and e-bookstores—most of them poorly written, edited, and designed; most of them unread—appears unsustainable. Some new system of gatekeepers will emerge, whether it is cooperatives like ours or review boards that can confer a seal of approval or an expansion of Amazon.com’s invitation-only publishing arm. As bookstores disappear, the advantages of commercial publishing also lessen, but the big houses still dominate access to premier publications such as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. That will have to change before self-publishing and indie publishing can really take off. It’s also clear that people selling services to writers (editing, typesetting, marketing) are doing well and will continue to do well. Avoiding those expenses was part of the reason we decided to set up Five Directions Press.

Or (this is more of a doomsday scenario) Amazon.com will knock everyone else out of the market, at which point it may become much less hospitable to self-publishers and small presses like ours. On the whole, though, I think it’s a very exciting time to be a writer, because so many options for publication exist that did not a few years ago.

Our thanks to Triskele Books for initiating this discussion. We found it useful to have this opportunity to articulate our mission, and we hope that it will give other authors some ideas about alternative ways to get their work out in this new and rapidly changing publishing environment. For full information on these Triskele titles and authors, as well as UK links to their books, see the Triskele Books site.

 

Playing with Words

What do editors do? I think it’s fair to say that the popular perception of editors—especially among writers who have not worked with one (and maybe a few who have)—is of a martinet whacking away at punctuation and spelling errors and generating ghastly Word documents covered in the virtual equivalent of red ink. Like the stereotyped librarian of legend, this imagined editor is stern, unyielding, and hovering on the edge of cuckoo. Definitely not the kind of person anyone wants to hang out with at neighborhood parties. The files they generate haunt a writer’s nightmares. Oh no, not the Comma Wars!

Well, it’s true, correcting punctuation, spelling, and usage is part of editing. We’re talking about copy editors here, not the many other kinds of editors who work at publishing houses. And the rules governing house style, in particular, often seem arcane. One publisher capitalizes where another does not. One writes out numbers under a hundred; the next uses arabic numerals for everything over ten. Tranquility or tranquillity? It’s anyone’s guess. The invocation of semi-magical authorities—in the United States, these are Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style—has stopped many a writer’s protest in its tracks. Even then, there are always exceptions. The copy editor must remember the rules, not just in general but for each specific house. The baffled author has to hang on and hope it  all makes sense someday.

But fixing grammatical and spelling errors is a small part of editing. And thank goodness, because it’s a job that bores most editors, too. We do it—because someone has to, or the publisher looks sloppy—but 450 pages of misplaced commas exhaust the editor every bit as much as they do the author staring at red ants marching through his or her text. After about four hours, my brain starts spinning, and I can’t see anything. My eyes roll around in my head like a Looney Tunes character. I have to do something else for the rest of the day. And I’ve been editing for twenty years.

So editors don’t love punctuation, especially. We love words. More than words, we love language—language as a means of conveying ideas. Developmental editors (book doctors) overhaul fictional prose in a big way, moving entire passages and chapters, demanding that authors observe the basic structural principles of story and characterization. Copy editors (also called line editors) work paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word to ensure that every syllable counts, every thought achieves its fullest and most elegant expression. English possesses an amazing vocabulary, in which a single well-chosen word can encapsulate an image that requires entire phrases in other languages. Although novelists do need to worry about jerking their readers out of their fictional worlds to hunt for a dictionary, used judiciously that vast treasure trove of words—each with its own nuances and connotations—is a writer’s most precious resource. Editors find the word that zings: the verb strong enough to stand without an adverb; the adjective that pinpoints a character; the combination that sounds natural without descending into cliché.

Many editors also write—and when we write, we look for editors who can prune our prose where it counts and add the telling phrase that explains something we’ve taken for granted. Editors who will send our prose soaring into the stratosphere. Because the editor is the author’s first and most conscientious reader. Every single one of us lives inside his or her own head, unable to imagine how the images that seem so vivid to us can fall flat on the page, failing to communicate with someone who lacks our own specific knowledge and understanding and way of looking at the world. Editors bridge that gap.

And now, my secret. Precisely because I am an editor, as a writer I am a terrible editee (to coin a phrase—bet you didn’t expect that!). I hate people touching my prose. When I see those red ants, my skin crawls. I have to force myself to stop and think about whether, in fact, the person editing me has spotted an ambiguity that escaped me, solved a problem I didn’t believe existed with a felicity that I did not (or could not) muster. Sometimes the editor hasn’t. More often, the editor has. Because she cared enough to read my draft, ponder what I wanted to say, and find a better—clearer, stronger, more beautiful—way to say it.

So yes, authors need editors. Not just editors who will fix their commas (although a misplaced comma can completely change your meaning), but editors who love their books enough to free them from the unavoidable constraints of solipsism and let them fly.

 
Images purchased from Clipart.com (nos. 20413458 and 21791704).