In the meantime, I want to point everyone to an interview I did with Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. Pat contacted my UK editor a few days ago, and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview. I do a lot of trolling around the internet, looking at what people are saying about my work on blogs and forums, and I was interested to see that on the Westeros forum (shame on you if you don’t know what it’s named after) there was a pretty active thread about The Painted Man, which included some comments from Pat himself, who has been really friendly.

I’ve done a half dozen interviews by now, and felt a lot of them were a little stiff, and that I was just regurgitating some of the same answers over and over, so I tried really hard this time to relax into the interview and just be my usual dorky self. It was pretty fun. I need to keep reminding myself that author interviews are not job interviews. I don’t need to wear a shirt & tie.

Anyway, time to bathe and pack up the baby. Have a good weekend, all.

I set a writing quota for myself every day: One thousand words. It may sound like a lot, but really, it’s a very modest goal, about three and a half double-spaced pages. Some weeks I don’t even come close, and other weeks I greatly exceed it. I consider >10,000 words a “good” week, and <5,000 a bad one. It balances out, more or less.Your average novel is somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words. Fantasy novels tend to be longer, but theoretically, at that rate, you could still write two 150,00 word books a year, with time left for editing.

Theoretically.

The reality, though, is quite different. First of all, I tend to write more than I use. The Painted Man was around 180,000 words when I first started shopping it around. It took some heavy editing for me to trim it down to it’s sleek final 154,000. Some of the stuff I cut was for pacing and tone, and while much of it is, in my opinion, as good as the rest, the book as a whole is better without it. When my site redesign is done and I have my deleted scene blog, I will discuss some of these in detail and put the text up for people to see and judge for themselves. I also excised thousands of redundant and/or unnecessary sentences and words throughout, tightening up the prose into the clipped, active style that I have settled upon.

But even more than overwriting of prose, I have to take into account the fact that about 70% of what I write is notes.

I am a meticulous planner. I maintain two separate versions of every book or story I write as independent MSWord files. One is the prose version, and the other is the stepsheet or story skeleton. In the stepsheet version, every scene is broken down by section into bulleted lists detailing what the action is, the pertinent worldbuilding information, and copious notes on what the characters are feeling and their motivations. It’s a lot like political talking point lists, but less evil.

More often than not, there is FAR more information in the stepsheet than I need for the scene. I may write several paragraphs on the politics of a situation, or the complex cultural rules guiding the characters’ actions, and then sum it all up in one carefully crafted line of dialogue, or not use it at all, saving the information in my vast archive against future need.

I will usually plot out an entire book thusly before I start writing the prose. Sometimes prose just comes to me in a rush and I go back and reverse engineer the stepsheet, but that is much less common. There are always vague sections in the stepsheet, of course, but all the major story points and motivations are covered.

The problem is, once you start writing the prose, things change. Characters develop their own voices and personalities, and are no longer willing to conform with how the stepsheet tells them to behave, and I need to go into the skeleton and break a few bones to get things smooth again. Kind of like a nose job for my story.

It’s a grinding, exhausting, tedious process that takes up more mental RAM than I really have to spare. I know most writers don’t have my level of OCPD and operate much more freely, but I have settled on this method, and it seems to work for me. My goal is to tell an extremely complex story in as simple a manner as possible, and keeping all that straight requires lists, lists, lists.

There are plenty of writers that just make the story up as they go along, all in prose, and never look back, or even too far forward. They have skilled copyeditors who worry about all those little complexities and straighten them out after the fact, fixing logic flaws in fictional cultures or systems of magic or whatever. That’s fine, I guess, but I could never trust another person with that level of responsibility in MY fictional world, and MY characters. They are far too precious to me.

What does this say in the end? That I can theoretically write about one book a year.

Theoretically.

Ye gods! Ten languages! I don’t even know how to process it. Two years ago, the thought of it even being published in English was just a pipe dream.

I used to listen to my high school girlfriend talk to her grandmother in Portuguese, feeling entirely left out of the conversation and wondering if she was telling my girlfriend that I wasn’t good enough for her. Who could have imagined that 17 years later I’d be publishing in that language? Amazing.

I feel so blessed with good fortune these days, I don’t know what to do with myself. After years of untreatable chronic pain, jobs that made The Office seem like a documentary, and horrible loss, suddenly I have things like this in my life:

I mean really. What else can compare?

In other news, an interview I did for SFsite.com was posted yesterday, as well, in Sandy Auden’s genre news spotlight column. You can find the interview here, but you have to scroll down the page a bit to get to it; there is no direct link. There are some other great bits in the column, as well. I’ve heard good things about Stan Nichols, who is interviewed just above me.

Also, The Painted Man now has a Wikipedia entry! I dunno who created it, but that is awesome. You haven’t arrived until you’re wikied. It’s a bare bones entry now, but hopefully readers will add to it over time.

I would also like to note that acclaimed ward-designer and Arlen portraiter Lauren Cannon, aka Navate, was interviewed recently on Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Review site. Check it out. Lauren is awesome.

Okay, that’s it for now. My next post will actually be about the writing process, if I ever get around to finishing it. I guess that says something about my writing process right there…

Exciting news just in from Poland. The Painted Man, which translates into Polish as Malowany Czlowiek, will be published there on November 28th, 2008 from Fabryka Slow. If you’re excited to read the book and were waiting for it to come out in Polish, here’s your chance!

Fabryka has my world conquest map up on their main page now, and made a nice design out of the wards and cover art for their author and book pages.

It’s a very strange feeling, seeing my work translated into different languages and looking at what the designers in different countries/cultures take from it and how they interpret the work visually. Fabryka used the UK cover by Larry Rostant, but their site design is very different and I really dig it, just like I love the Japanese version. I can’t wait to see what some of the other markets do!

So it’s looking now like the US release of the book in March of 2009 will be the fourth market the book comes out in, which is ironic since they are my home market and were the first to buy. I guess what they say is true: No man becomes a prophet in his own land…

I have no idea who nominated me, but bless their little heart. My book is one of 28 nominees this year, and I am unfamiliar with many of the entries, so I have no idea what my odds of winning are. However, it looks as if the voting is free and open to the general public. Let the internets decide!

Voting begins December 26, but if you’ve read and enjoyed The Painted Man and would like to show some love in the meantime, please head on over to their Painted Man Discussion Forum and tell others why they should vote Arlen this December! Registering with the site takes only seconds and requires no personal information other than a valid e-mail address, and you can request that they send you no bulletins if you prefer. You dont even need to register to vote, just to comment on the forums.

I’ll post another announcement when actual voting opens up.

More exciting news to come later this week! One thing at a time…

Also, a review of the book came out in Black Magazine, an Australian publication covering the darker side of pop culture. I’ve pasted it below:

But then reality sets in, and you are faced with the cold hard reality that there is more to life than sitting at the computer ranting about nonsense, and frankly, you don’t have as much to say as you thought you did.

So I am going back to my old ways of only posting when I actually DO have something to say, or to promote, or to show the world.

Like today.

Did you know that The Painted Man, which has been on the Amazon UK fantasy bestseller chart for like 2 weeks, is available in Japanese?

What? You didn’t? Well as of today, it is! Hayakawa publishing in Japan has finished their translation and released the book for a mere 777 yen, which by my currency converter is only $7.34! A steal! And did I mention the awesome cover featuring Arlen and One-Arm? Bad ass.

So if you speak Japanese and have the yen to spare, why not buy a copy? Heck, buy a bunch and give them out as stocking stuffers this holiday season. You can find the book page here. For a laugh, ask google to translate it for you.

**UPDATE: Also find it here on Amazon.jp. There’s no picture, but I checked the ISBN and they match.**

In other news, here’s a screen shot of my web traffic from this morning. Notice how I left two armies in Australia (always key), and then cut across the Middle East to conquer Europe. Then I sent my armies across to America to begin their conquest there.

It’s funny how I can’t look at a map of the world without thinking in RISK terms anymore…

Oh, wait… I just posted.

I’ll try not to cheat like this tomorrow.

The reviewer of my book, Nyssa, also took the time to write to my Australian publisher and ask if she could send me some interview questions, which I was happy to answer. Nyssa was delightfully enthusiastic about the book, and very friendly. If you’re interested, you can find the full text of the interview here.

Okay, I know that was a short entry, but I have to head back down into the salt mine. The Desert Spear ain’t gonna write itself!