Who Writes Novels?

World Book Day 2016

Well, this year World Book Day isn't 23rd April, or 5th March - it's 3rd of March. They love to keep you guessing! The most regional world event ever. World Book Day, World Book and Copyright Day,  International Day of the Book - whichever name you know it by, it's a day to celebrate that seductive tangle of forest, glue and ink that is the book.

Follow along on #WorldBookDay

As with last year, I thought I'd mention a few of my favourite reads and paperback romps. 

Not to mention, all this week, Ghostwoods Books have my novel Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran on special offer for Kindle, and a fun photo competition to enter before 15 March. All details here.

The book  I have just finished reading:

Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

(review)

Living in Africa, I realised that I really haven't read much African-authored fiction. I decided to change that, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the results. This is a fantastic whodunnit based in Ghana. I'd also recommend Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor.

The book I am currently reading:

The Hummingbird's Tear by CM Kerley

Every now and then a cover design floats past on Twitter and I can't help myself. Sadly, the content doesn't always match the quality of the artwork. This one does, however. A solidly written fantasy series. Beautifully poetic opening and imaginative, detailed world.

Author crush of the year:

Kate Evans

(review of Red Rosa)

My aunt bought me this for Christmas. It's a graphic novel of the life of revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. It's absolutely fab, and Kate Evans brings her story to life brilliantly.

Top of my TBR pile:

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch

Translated from German, this book just looks enticingly dark and kookie. Really looking forward to cracking the spine.

Poetry:

Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames by Luis d'Antin van Rooten

(review)

Discovered in a charity shop with a friend, this is perhaps the maddest poetry book ever invented. Traditional English nursery rhymes phonetically read in a thick French accent, then back-translated to find meaning. Has to be read to be believed.

Reading lists:

Samhain Horror 

If you like your fiction dark and bloody, here's a fun reading list to keep you awake at night.







Mother's Day 

Three sumptuous, complex novels to enchant any mother on Mothering Sunday.

Charity Shop List (AKA The Blue List)

A set of highly diverse books I picked up on a whim in a charity shop in Scotland. By coincidence, they are mostly blue.

Aleister Crowley

Slightly mental reading list pertaining to the occult icon Aleister Crowley, from biography to fiction.

And, finally, a shout out to my publishers: Ghostwoods Books, Green Sunset Books and Netherworld Books.

More juicy reads here.

Fun Things With Ghostwoods

Just some fun stuff.

My publisher Ghostwoods Books has a promotion running on the Kindle version of my novel Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran, this week only. US Link ($2.99) / UK Link (£2.16).

Also, you can win a copy of their latest release Cthulhu Lies Dreaming, and a pack of Shrieking Toad coffee from The Coffee Shop of Horrors, by entering their Coffee and a Book competition. Just send in a picture of your cup of coffee (or a hot beverage) and a book you're either reading or recommending.

All the details on their website. Enter before March 15th.

Secrets Laid Bare

Really? Was it really only five months ago I was doing this for Swan Song? 

Blimey. 

Thus begins the author's edit of Secret Order of the Literati. It's far shorter than Children of Lir: 79,100 (293 pages) to CoL's 123,000 (308 pages). CoL is heavier on word count for the pages because there's more descriptive. Secret Order is faster-paced, so more dialogue and line breaks.

The editing process for this one is very different. For the first time ever, I've written a book so complex I require flip chart paper and an assortment of multicoloured sticky tabs to figure it out.

I always have been, and undoubtedly always will be, a 'pantser'. Someone who writes by the seat of their pants, without thinking too far ahead in the plot (which would make me a 'plotter').

Usually this works really well for me. But this time, the book is so fast-paced, and involves so many inter-related characters, I've slightly lost myself. The action was all happening a little faster than I could think about it, so I'm having to go back and make sure that I've got a grip on everything.

I have three revision sheets on the go:

1. Character details. That's the one below with all the sticky tabs. Making sure a character doesn't have green eyes on one page and blue on the next. Jotting down details about them and making sure I have a continuous reference for how to spell names and places. 
   
   
2. The sheet after that is a timeline. The plot has chronology craters wide enough to warrant 'Please mind the gap' signs in flashing neon lights. It was more important to get the action down in whatever order it came to me than to decide whether it made sense in the grand order of things. Because the story follows several different characters, it's not always going to work in a linear time frame, but you can't go having someone murdered one minute and down the shops the next. This isn't a zombie novel.
   
   
3. Finally, my WTF? page. This is where I can chalk up any questions that come to mind whilst reading through. Any dangling threads that the kitten of literary destruction can bat at to unravel the entirety of the plot. I can't stop to ponder each WTF bullet-point as I go, otherwise I'd lose the train of the novel, but these are things I need to find answers for somewhere along the line.

It's not going too badly. I've just hit the 100 page mark. Entering the in-between territory. I tend to remember writing the beginnings and endings of my books quite well, but the bits in between sometimes feel like someone else wrote it. That game where you draw the head, fold the paper, someone else draws the body, etc. You only really see the full picture at the very end, when you unfold everything in the edit. So it does start to feel like a voyage of self-discovery.

So far, I'm happy with it. I guess I wonder whether I've introduced too many characters, but it seems to be holding together. I think people nowadays are more comfortable with multi-character books. It's also interesting for me, as this is the first third-person novel I've completed since Lucid - which was the first novel I ever wrote. Seems strange that over the past eight years I've strongly favoured first-person.

I think because it's third-person, you can, as a writer, feel slightly more detached from the story. I was so hell-bent on writing it, that I don't think I've had time to sit back and enjoy it until now. Through editing, I'm starting to see things in it that I really like. Even made myself laugh at one point, which is a good sign. I'm nervous about letting anyone else see this one because I'm hoping to pin two more books on the end of it. If it's a flunk, it's a flunk. But I'm starting to hope it's a goer. 

Chris Cobb's Adobe Rainbow

There's a tweet that caught my eye recently. You've probably seen it? It's about a bookshop in San Francisco where all the books are ordered by colour. It looks absolutely incredible.

I decided to look it up.

There's a really nice write-up about it on Superhero Journal, along with more pictures.

Although the address is slightly different, it appears to be Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative (click the red book top left to enter the main site).

Unfortunately, colour coordinated book shopping isn't a permanent feature, it was a project by local artist Chris Cobb back in 2004-05 involving over 20,000 books. The title of the project was: There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World.

There's a really nice video of it all being put together and an interview with Chris Cobb over on KQED.

VATMOSS - What a Mess

This is absolutely evil.

Last year, a new EU tax law came into place which is completely destructive to small online businesses.

I only learned about this last week through an authors' forum, where a small press was explaining why they couldn't use online ebook sales to generate income unless they sold the books through a third party, like Amazon. As though Amazon don't already rule the world.

The reason they couldn't sell the books themselves, and keep the profit without a middle company, is because of  #VATMOSS, or, as it's become better known on Twitter: #VATMESS.

As I understand it, having had this explained to me by said peeved publisher, it means that any company in the EU must pay VAT on one-time digital products. 

Yes, that needs some explaining.

A one-time digital product is something you create once (an e-book, album, website template) and sell multiple times to more than one person or company. 

If it's a bespoke product like a website, or a jingle, or a YouTube documentary that you have designed specifically for one person or company, that - as far as I understand it - doesn't count.

VATMOSS stands for VAT Mini One Stop Shop (presumably there's a superstore down the road?).

You'd do well to be confused about this. Usually you're not liable to pay VAT as a UK company until you break the £82,000 threshold. How many self-publishing authors or small press can claim that achievement?

But, even though you're earning £40 a quarter from selling your book online via your website, you've still got to sign up for VAT, charge it on your product, and file your quarterly returns with HMRC. The only way out of it is to use third party companies like Amazon, who automatically deal with the tax for you.

Which is ironic, as it's Amazon and Co. who are cited for this law being introduced - forcing them to pay VAT on digital items in the country of sale, rather than the corporation's country of operation.

That's not a bad idea, but the problem is that VATMOSS is being applied indiscriminately - to all sellers, whether multi-billion pound online giants, or your Aunty Ruth who's always enjoyed publishing her stories online and wanted to make a couple of extra quid for cat food.

It is so atrociously thought through that even HMRC seems to admit it's causing a headache:

HMRC has started to de-register 3,000 small businesses from the VAT MOSS system, treating them as ‘hobbyists’ rather than businesses in line with recent guidance.

It's already led to one high-profile walkout: Digital platform Ghost leaves the EU thanks to #VATMOSS

For anyone not familiar with the implications: we had to rewrite our entire billing system twice, charge many of our customers more money, and submit to woefully complex and inadequate new accounting requirements. All of which had been put in place to stop multibillion-dollar corporations like Apple and Google from tax-avoidance in Europe. All of this was a constant, constant source of pain…

In a bid to prevent online tax-dodging monopolies, this move rather seems to support them, as it means no one without sufficient funds to afford a tax-whizz is going to be able to trade for themselves. We'll all have to go through the big companies who understand the tax system, and no doubt have already found a way around it.

VATMESS just seems to be a massive headache for everyone.

Well done whoever thought that one up.

Last Secrets

Well, I didn't make my word count this week.

Instead of 10,000 I fell 863 words short - because I finished.

79,137 and 293 pages.

It's a shorty.

But I fully expect the word count to go up in the edit. I plan to give myself three weeks to work on this. I know you shouldn't go direct from completion into edit, but I have another novel to write and it's excruciatingly difficult to try to write one novel whilst editing another. In switching your head between two entirely separate worlds, you're likely to leave half your brain behind.

I just need to get this one to a position where someone else can comb through. There's some major plot mishaps, and things I only learned about characters towards the end that need fixing in the beginning for continuity. I actually think this might be the hardest edit I've ever tackled. It's a real slippery fish of a novel.

Anyhoo. 

Fetch me my red marker!