It’s been a while since I last blogged, so I thought I’d just update you on what’s been going on. The first thing is that after I realised that the Queen of the May Kickstarter project wasn’t going to work out, I did a bit of thinking about what it was I was trying to achieve. I realised – and this is something that I probably should have thought about earlier – that what I really need to do is just fishing up the two novellas I’ve got in progress and get them out there.

So that’s my plan, and what a simple, elegant plan it is too! I am being very strict and spending time every day working on Queen of the May, primarily on preparing for what is going to be a significant rewrite. I will produce a handful of hand-bound books once it is finished, so you will be able to get your hands on a physical copy. 

I also realised that actually a big motivator for doing the Kickstarter project when I did it was, not to put too fine a point on it, money. As a freelance, it can be a bit scary when the work diary is a little sparse and after a big client was afflicted by budget cuts, I felt possibly a bit more pressure to ramp up the crowdfunding. Ach, well, live and learn, no harm no foul, and other platitudes. 

My blogging over on Forbes is taking up quite a lot of the headspace that I would have used on blogging here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – the Forbes blog is proving to be quite good for profile-raising, which is what I need right now. I’m also getting quite a bit of contact from crowdfunding platforms and seeing research and information that I otherwise wouldn’t. Very useful! 

Finally, I just got diagnosed with a not inconsequential ovarian cyst which is currently some 8cm across. So I’m permanently a little bit achy, a little bit tired, and a little bit needing a pee. It’ll be a while before I get a judgement on whether they’re going to remove it or do something else – given my poor bladder is currently squished up into a boomerang shape, I really hope they chop it out. I’m not massively worried about it, as ovarian cysts are common and treatment is pretty routine, but I will be happy to have it gone. 

So, despite the quietude here, things are proceeding apace and hopefully I’ll have more concrete news on the ETA for Queen of the May once I’ve got my teeth properly into the rewrite. Patience, as they say, is its own reward.

Until the end of the 19th Century, the faerie and human realms overlapped quite considerably. The soft places, where the skilled can walk two paths at once, were once common. Clearings in the woods, hilltop earthworks, faerie rings and even the bottoms of gardens hid gateways to the Summer Lands through which faeries came and went quite freely. Such effortless access meant that human children could be easily replaced with faerie changelings and human adults lured or tricked into crossing the border into Faerie, mostly never to return. (Those who did came back… changed. Just look at Byron.)

But in 1867, Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio in America was granted a patent on his invention of barbed wire and, in helping farmers around the world parcel up their land, so Smith cut the faeries off from the human world. As the barbed wire went up across the country, the faeries found their way blocked. The glades where they would slip from world to world were now surrounded by strands of galvanised steel that formed a barrier as impenetrable as a curtain of fire. As every child knows, faeries cannot abide the touch of iron and what is steel but iron with bits in?

The invention of the barbed wire fence did more to divide humans from faeries than any other single invention in history. And because we barely knew the faeries were there, they fell into myth and legend, their visits to our world put down as hoaxes or the tales of the over-imaginative, stories told to children to make them behave.

And over the last century or so, of course, us humans have become less and less likely to go a-wandering, less likely to stumble into those few remaining soft places and there lose our way. We might go walking up that hill, but never cross the barbed wire fence that keeps us out of the ancient tree-ringed circle at the top. We might wander through the woods but never leave the path to sit and daydream in that sun-dappled dell.

There are a few places where the Summer Lands still intrude upon our world. Little enclaves of the faeries’ world overlain on our own, where the link betwixt is strong enough to survive the encroachment of modern living. Places where the faeries are bounded on our side by iron, but where the the path to their lands can still be walked by those who know how.

We must be careful in these soft places. The faeries are quite capable of walking amongst us entirely unseen. A simple glamour can make us think that they are human or, indeed, that they aren’t there at all. And in the crush of city life, do we pay attention to the tall, beautiful lady in the park, sitting on the oak bench and watching our comings and goings? And when she offers us a buttercup, we should stay the hand that wants so much to betray us by automatically accepting. With faeries, a gift is never just a gift.

Support Queen of the May, a story about faeries, botany and the scientific method, on Kickstarter now!

At last, Queen of the May is up on Kickstarter and ready your support! We have 31 days to raise $10,000, and already have $1071 pledged. Even if you choose the lowest support level, which is $3, please do consider taking part as every little helps!

You can also help immensely by telling your friends about it. No matter how focused your own personal network, every mention of the project helps. Here are a few things you can do:

Use your social networks
Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn statuses, or leave a message on any other social network you use. Kickstarter provide a Tweet button that allows you to log in to Twitter and send a pre-written Tweet which says:

Queen of the May by Suw Charman-Anderson — Kickstarter http://kck.st/zv4p1f via @kickstarter

If you think that’s a bit boring, you can always try:

I’m supporting @Suw’s Queen of the May on @kickstarter and you should too! http://kck.st/zv4p1f (please RT!)

Or, of course, you can write whatever you like, just remember the URL: http://kck.st/zv4p1f

Kickstarter also has a Facebook Like button, which you can use to post to your Facebook timeline, but again, an original, personalised message will be more interesting to your friends. 

Write a blog post
If you want to write a blog post about the project, you can quote any of the stuff that I’ve written on the Kickstarter page or here to be part of your post. You can also embed the video if you like. The code is:

<iframe frameborder=”0″ height=”360px” src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/suw/queen-of-the-may/widget/video.html” width=”480px”></iframe>

If you want to ask me specific questions or do an interview, please feel free to email me.

Tell your friends
If you have friends that you think might enjoy Queen of the May, why not just send them a quick email to tell them about it? Equally, if you’re on any mailing lists, forums etc. and feel like they might like to know about it, please do let them know. 

Share the link
If you’re a member of social sharing sites like Delicious, Pinterest, Metafilter, StumbleUpon etc. please do share a link to the Kickstarter project page. The biggest challenge for any crowdfunded project is to reach enough people and social sharing sites can be important sources of new supporters.

Every little really does help
It’s tempting to think that you have to famous to have an effect, but that’s not true and there’s evidence to prove it! Buzzfeed’s Jack Krawczyk and StumbleUpon’s Jon Steinberg recently collaborated on a project to analyse how links were shared across their networks. They said:

Our data show that online sharing, even at viral scale, takes place through many small groups, not via the single status post or tweet of a few influencers. While influential people may be able to reach a wide audience, their impact is short-lived. Content goes viral when it spreads beyond a particular sphere of influence and spreads across the social web via ordinarily people sharing with their friends.

[...] Even the largest stories on Facebook are the product of lots of intimate sharing — not one person sharing and hundreds of thousands of people clicking.

In short, lots of people sharing the link with just a few good friends is at the heart of what makes a project like this succeed, however counter-intuitive that might seem. I’ll write more about this in due course.

In the meantime, if you like the look of Queen of the May, do keep an eye out for updates from me on Twitter, as well as here on the blog and on Kickstarter. And here, for your delectation is the pitch video. Enjoy!

This is Part 4 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked, Part 2: Rewards, Part 3: Budgeting.

Whilst there is, for me at least, some pleasure to be derived from working out reward levels and toying with Excel spreadsheets in working out my budget, the idea of promoting my own project makes my blood run cold. I never have been one of the world’s natural bigmouths, and in all honesty, I dread the promotional work i’m going to have to do for Queen of the May.

I would love it if the world automatically rewarded hard work and quality, but it doesn’t. You have to get out there and tell the world that you’ve done something worth looking at. Here are few thoughts about promoting your Kickstarter project.

1. You have to do your own promo
Much as it would be lovely to just put stuff up on Kickstarter and let the community organically find you, that is just not how it works. There are lots and lots of projects on Kickstarter and, whilst a few people might trawl through the site looking for interesting stuff to back, you can’t assume that will result in enough people to fund your project.

You have to have a plan to promote your project and be willing to go outside of the Kickstarter community to do so. If you simply put up a project and cross your fingers, you will almost certainly fail.

2. Build your community before you crowdfund
By the time you’re ready to launch your project, it’s too late to build a fanbase around your work. You have to start collecting fans early. Whatever tools you favour, start now, because it takes a long time to build up a following and when your project starts you simply don’t have that time spare. Even social tools like Twitter and Facebook, often erroneously billed as a silver bullet, are not instantaneous and it takes time to connect with those people who are interested in your work.

3. You need a big, big fanbase
A rule of thumb for direct marketing is that between 0.1% and 1% of people that you contact will be interested in what you’re selling them. My mum teaches exercise and no matter what advertising or marketing we try to increase her class sizes, it comes in at around 1%. That means you should aim to reach about 100 or even 1000 times the number of people you need to fund your project.

So, if I think I need 200 people to fund Queen of the May, I need to reach between 20,000 and 200,000 people to find enough who are actually interested in what I’m proposing. That’s a lot of people.

4. Run an opt-In newsletter
One way to reduce the number of people you need to reach is to run an opt-in newsletter that people choose to receive. The idea is that if people are already interested in you and your work, then they’ll be more likely to act when you tell them about your new project. Giving them the ability to get regular news from you is a good way to keep in touch, but don’t expect everyone on your mailing list to read your emails. It’s common for even opt-in lists to have an open rate of less than 20% so if you have 100 people on your list, only 20 will actually read your emails. But, and it’s a big but, those people will be more likely to back your project than random Joes off the street.

5. Engage with social media
The amazing thing about Twitter is not that it’s an easy way to talk to people but that it’s a network of networks. If I send a tweet, someone in my network can send it on to their network, and someone in their network can send it even further. We’re out of the hub-and-spoke model of a newsletter and into the network-of-networks model of social media. That can really help news of your project spread outside of your immediate circle of friends and into the wider community.

Of course, you have to invest time in social media, whether that’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or something else, prior to launch. It does take a long time to build up a Twitter following, for example, so get going, get following and be talkative. I’m not going to write a full-on guide to social media in this post, but just remember to give more than you take.

6. Assess your channels
Do you know how many people you can reach, roughly speaking, through each of your promo channels? How many people follow you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus? Do you know what level of overlap there is? Spend some time working out how many people you can reach directly, and then ask if it’s enough. If you only have a small network, that might have an impact on what makes a sensible crowdfunding target.

7. Time your announcements
Research has shown that there are four key times in the day when people are most active in email: on arrival at work, just before lunch, just after lunch, and just before they go home. Sending an email at one of these times increases the chances it will be opened and read. Equally, sending a Tweet in the UK morning will mean that Americans don’t see it as they will be asleep at the time.

So think about when you’re sending out emails and Tweets and Facebook updates, and try to make sure that you send at a time when your message is most likely to be received. If you have a blog, pay attention to what time people visit by installing a traffic monitoring package like Statcounter or Google Analytics. My blog seems to peak each day around lunchtime, so that’s a good time to post something new.

8. Co-ordinate across your channels
If you have several places you can promote your project, make sure that you think about how they work together.  If you’re writing blog posts about your project, make sure you post them on Twitter and Facebook, for example. Don’t just link to your crowdfunding page, but to discussion about it.

9. Don’t overdo it
I probably underdo it, but really, seriously, don’t overdo the self-promotion. Nothing puts people off a project more than someone who does nothing else but whitter on about it all the time.

10. Make it easy for people to help
When I’ve been promoting Ada Lovelace Day in the past, I’ve noticed that people really do like it when you give them a pre-written tweet to copy and paste, or write an email that they can forward. People are generally willing to help you get the word out, but the easier you can make it for them the more likely they are to take action.

11. Ask friends, but don’t impose
It’s well worth tapping friends up for help, especially if they have bigger networks than you. But if you do, make sure that you don’t impose on them. Give them a heads-up on what you’re doing and the opportunity to help if they want to, but don’t put them in a position where they feel obliged – it might backfire.

Self-promotion for most people is really hard. It’s well worth thinking ahead about how you’re going to promote stuff in a way that you’re comfortable with, and how you can co-ordinate it to make the most of every bit of activity. Whatever you decide, you can’t escape the fact that a good promotion plan could make or break your project.

This is Part 3 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked and Part 2: Rewards.

Budgeting. For many people, budgeting is the worst part of any project. The tedium of researching suppliers, figuring out numbers, minimum runs, working out overheads, it’s all a massive pain in the neck. It’s also utterly essential if your crowdfunded project is to make, instead of cost, you money. So here are a few tips for making budgeting easier.

1. Use a spreadsheet
I’m in the middle of working out budgets for Queen of the May, which means that I have a spreadsheet with all my costs in one sheet, and three other sheets with my reward levels and backer projections so that I can see how many people I’ll potentially need to reach different targets. The sheets are interlinked so as I refine my reward costs, that’s reflected in my projections. It’s relatively easy to do that in programs like Excel, so if you don’t know to do formulae in spreadsheets then now is a good time to go and find out.

2. Use scenarios
You should explore difference scenarios in your spreadsheet. How many rewards do you need to sell in order to meet your goal? What would happen to your numbers if you saw runaway success? How would that affect the number of rewards that you’d need to make or have made? How would that affect fulfilment and admin costs? If you don’t know what will happen in different scenarios you open yourself up to problems.

3. Know your reward costs
It can be difficult to pin down reward costs without precise order numbers, but you have to do your best. You need to know how much each reward costs so that you set your prices at a level higher than your expenditure. That might seem blindingly obvious, but it’s far too easy to set the reward levels at what you think people will be willing to pay, rather than what you need to earn to make the project at least break even. A miscalculation on your reward costs can end up losing you money, so be very careful.

4. Remember P&P
Don’t just run the numbers on your materials. You need to know the cost of packaging and postage as well, which means knowing how you are going to send your rewards out. In a box? A padded bag? Wrapped somehow?

Many crowdfunded projects ask international supporters to add a certain amount for the extra postage, so make sure you know how much that is. However, please do tell what you mean by ‘international’! You can’t assume that everyone knows where you are.

5. Understand your minimum runs
For many items that you could be ordering, there are either minimum runs or short runs become very expensive. You should know exactly what minimum runs are and how much they cost. Don’t do your calculations purely on the pro rata cost per item.

For example, if you’re buying postcards and the minimum run is 100 for £50, then even if only one person selects the postcard reward you’ll still have to shell out £50.

6. Don’t forget fixed costs
Once you’ve calculated the costs of your rewards, you need to calculate your fixed costs, ie ones that don’t go up depending on how many rewards are ordered. This is stuff like design costs, prototyping costs, or software. Just like your minimum run costs, these costs won’t go down, so you need to make sure that your goal covers them.

7. If you can’t cost something, set a limit
Sometimes it’s impossible to figure out an exact cost. For example, I can’t get a cost for the leather-bound editions of Queen of the May without knowing how many have been ordered and exactly what the design is. I won’t know that until the project is funded and the design completed, so instead, I have set a limit which I won’t exceed. I know I can get them made for less than that limit, but exactly how much they will cost will remain up in the air until the project is funded.

8. Wages
If you want to work on your project full time when your fundraising drive is complete, you’ll want to factor in wages. This does mean having some idea of how long things will take, which is tricky estimate accurately, and then figuring out how much you need to cover your wages for that period. Be generous in your estimates as it’s only too easy for things to take a lot longer than anticipated!

9. Leave some wiggle room
You’ve carefully worked out reward costs, know your minimum runs, understand your fixed costs and have set limits for rewards you can’t cost properly. Sadly, it’s almost certain that you’ll forget something! It’s important, therefore, to leave some room between your combined costs and the reward levels you set in Kickstarter. This wiggle room gives you a cushion in case costs go up unexpectedly, or in case you underestimated something.

With Argleton, my printing costs doubled because the paperback book had to be stitched as well as glued. Luckily, although I hadn’t costed this in, I had over-funded and so had a bit of spare cash. Wiggle room isn’t a luxury, it’s an essential.

As tedious as it is, working out your budget in detail will help you avoid nasty surprises once your fundraising drive has completed. Once the money’s in, you are committed to providing the rewards you have promised, whether you are covering your costs or not. Don’t let a small miscalculation turn your project into a white elephant.

It’s amazing how much you can achieve through creative procrastination. I finished up the first draft of my next novelette, currently titled Queen of the May although that might change. The transcription from my handwriting wasn’t too bad, but it has resulted in a lot of errors because my writing has a tendency to get a bit scrawly when I get over-excited. The first first draft came in at 21,673 words, a number which is steadily decreasing as I tidy up the copy.

But I have to confess that editing out weird typos is not exactly the most thrilling of pastimes, so I’ve been putting a lot of energy into planning my next Kickstarter project and, this time, getting my costings spot on. I’m talking to Oldacres in Hatton Garden again for printing as they did such a great job last time, and between us we’re trying to figure out how to do a better job on the paper cover for the hardback.

Last time, we used just normal paper stock with a laminate finish. It looked really good, but it was a bitch to work with when binding. Not only did I have to deal with the paper fibres swelling, as is their wont, but the lamination worsened the problem meaning that I had to tape down each sheet in order to work with it. Since then I’ve done a couple of bookbinding courses at Falkiners, both of which were fantastic. I learnt some new techniques and got to play with some materials that I’d never have used on my own, and that experience has altered my thinking on how to bind the next set of books.

Firstly, I want to use Japanese paper for the paper-covered hardbacks. Japanese paper is made differently to western paper and because its fibres are random, rather than being all lined up as in our usual paper, it doesn’t curl when wet. This makes it a joy to work with. Japanese papers are also stronger, so you can work with a thinner stock which allows you to get much crisper, cleaner lines. But when you buy decorative Japanese paper, it has usually been screen printed, so although we can buy white sheets, how we print it is something that we’re still trying to work on. Oldacres are currently experimenting for me with some samples from John Purcell Paper, a wholesaler. I am very anxiously awaiting the results!

Secondly, the methodology I used for the silk covers last year turned out to be horribly, painfully time-consuming. I translated my “design” into blocks of colour, cut the right shapes out from appropriately coloured dupion silk, bonded them together and then sewed over the joins with embroidery. A very time-consuming process. The embroidery alone took 16 hours per cover. Beautifully as they came out, I cannot go through that again! So now I’m looking at the possibility of screenprinting, or maybe just doing a simpler embroidered design. This is going to require some serious and careful thought as it will have a big impact on the cover design. (You’ll be glad to hear that I’m not going to be doing the design myself this time!)

I’m also looking into possibilities for a leather-bound version. I’m talking to a number of binderies about my options, both for them to provide the binding service, and to explore whether there is any way that I can work on the leather bindings myself, under supervision. Whilst I worked with leather in my second Falkiners course, I have neither the equipment or the experience to do the leather versions myself. BInding in leather, even if it’s just an A6 novelette, is going to be far from cheap, but the results will be stunning.

Soon, I’ll have my costings nailed down and then I’ll be in the right position to start my next Kickstarter project. I have had a few ideas for exclusive rewards that I’ll be listing, but their numbers will be very limited indeed. I’ll be announcing the project through my mailing list first so if you want to be amongst the first people to know when it goes live, join the mailing list now! I send out very few emails and I manage the list using Mailchimp so you can set your preferences for type of email and can unsubscribe at any time without any risk of your email address winding up in the wrong hands.

I’m very excited to be planning my second Kickstarter project. It’s been 18 months since I put Argleton up, and the Kickstarter community has expanded dramatically over that time, so I’m eager to see what sort of support it’s possible to get now. My goal will certainly have to be a bit higher than last time in order to pay for a designer and my time: If writing is to be sustainable, it has to provide me with a modest living, and I would be very happy indeed if it could do that independent of the behemoth that is Amazon.

In the meantime, though, there’s only so long I can put off doing that edit!

Nick Mamatas says it better than I ever could: Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers.

Last month there was a great blog post by Anne Allen about how important Amazon reviews are to new authors:

[...] Amazon reviews, which were only mildly significant three years ago, now have a make-or-break impact on an author’s sales.

When you’re buying an ebook, there’s no helpful bookstore clerk to tell you what might be appropriate for your nine-year old niece, or if there are any new cozy mysteries you might enjoy, or whether the new Janet Evanovich is up to her usual standards.

Instead, you check reader reviews and Amazon’s “also bought” suggestions. These are all generated by consumers, which gives the ordinary reader immense power.

The post then goes through some really good guidelines for people who might want to leave an Amazon review for an author they like. It’s well worth a read, even if you’re familiar with Amazon, because Anne gives a very clear idea of how the whole review system works.

I didn’t quite understand the power of Amazon reviews until I started publishing in the Kindle stores. I have books available now in six stores:

• Kindle UK
• Kindle US
• Kindle France
• Kindle Germany
• Kindle Spain
• Kindle Italy

The only store in which I have any reviews so far is the UK store and sales in that are way ahead of every other store, even the US store. Now admittedly there are potential language issues in the French, German, Spanish and Italian stores, as the buyers there might not be so interested in an English language book. But that shouldn’t be the case with the US and, in fact, the majority of my Kickstarter supporters were from the US so in theory I should have a good showing there. But so far, I do not.

I think this is down to reviews. I have three good reviews so far on Amazon UK, none in the US. It’s a shame that reviews don’t cross-pollinate stores, but there we go.

So if you’re feeling generous this festive season and you have read a book by a new author that you liked, it would be a wonderful thing for them if you took 10 minutes to write even a short review, or just give a star rating. Four and five star ratings are particularly useful as Anne explains:

Anything less than 4 stars means “NOT RECOMMENDED.” Don’t expect an author to be pleased with 2 or 3 stars, no matter how much you rave in the text. Those stars are the primary way a book is judged. Without a 4 or 5 star rating, a book doesn’t get picked up in the Amazon algorithms for things like “also bought” suggestions. Giving 1 or 2 stars to a book that doesn’t have many reviews is taking money out of the author’s pocket, so don’t do it unless you really think the author should take up a new line of work.

If a friend asks you to review something you found amateurish, or wasn’t your cup of tea, just tell her you don’t feel you can review it. That happens all the time and we appreciate it.

On the other hand, a 4-star review that recommends the book even though you have a few reservations, will earn you eternal gratitude from the author.

In fact, 4-star reviews can often be the most helpful. If a reader sees something like, “I loved this mystery, but the humor is pretty farcical. If you’re looking for a standard whodunit, this isn’t it,” or “this is awfully intellectual for something called chick lit.” Those offer honest information to buyers, without telling them not to buy.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be giving 1-3 star reviews. I’m just saying that on Amazon (not all review sites) 3-Stars is usually taken as a negative rating. If you intend to be positive, then 4 stars will better convey that sentiment.

This was certainly something I hadn’t really thought about in detail before reading Anne’s post.

So if you have a favourite author who’s either just starting out or hovering around in the midlist, why not take a few moments over the Christmas holidays and leave them a review?

A couple of weeks ago I offered a few copies of Argleton to any libraries who wanted to claim them. I ended up with 15 libraries showing interest, so decided to simply say yes to all of them and send out 15 copies. So if you want to borrow a copy of Argleton you will soon be able to do so at these illustrious institutions:

Public libraries

• Harford County Public Library, MD, USA
• Boyce Ditto Public Library TX, USA
• Richmondtown: New York Public Library NY, USA
• Camrose Public Library, AB, Canada
• Thomas Ford Memorial Library, IL, USA
• Escondido Public Library, CA, USA
• Kinmel Bay Library, Wales
• Carnoustie Library, Scotland
• Laurens County Library, SC, USA
• Dexter District Library, MI, USA
• Darcy Library of Beulah, MI, USA

Schools and university libraries

• Royal Masonic School for Girls, Rickmansworth, England
• Sheffield Hallam University Library, England
• Cirkulationsbiblioteket (from where it will end up at a suitable school library in Stockholm), Sweden
• Pocahontas High School Classroom Library, AR, USA

Thank you all so much for your support of Argleton!

I was talking to a friend about my upcoming writing projects, one of which includes novelising Tag, the screenplay I wrote seven years ago. I got to thinking about some of the pitfalls of a taking a script as a basis of a novel. I have already had one stab at writing the novel version of Tag, three or four years ago, but wasn’t quite in the right mental space for it.

But starting to think about it again, I had a flash of understanding: What is shown in a script can only too easily be told in its novelisation. Authors alway say “Show, don’t tell”, but what is showing in one medium may mutate into telling in another.

A script is a starting point, a sketch, which a whole host of other people turn into a fully-fledged story. A script just has to say “An English soldier crouches in a WWI trench, up to his ankles in fetid water”; the scene itself is realised by the set designer, the costumer designer, the actor, the lighting designer, the director of photography, the sound designer… All these people, and more, affect how this single line comes across on screen.

In a novelisation, the very worst thing one could do would be to simply write, “An English soldier crouches in a WWI trench, up to his ankles in fetid water” and then move on to the next line. What is sufficient in a script may need significant unpacking in a novel. What does the soldier feel? What can he smell? How does the water feel seeping into his boots? Can he hear the enemy nearby? Or his comrades, recently wounded, screaming in agony?

This might all sound blindingly obvious, but I think it’s an easy pit to fall into. It’s also a thought that I suspect will make novelising Tag a lot easier when I finally get round to it.

Suzannah Windsor Freeman, writer of Write It Sideways, has a post about how important it is to avoid cliché in writing. She splits clichés into three main types:

• Overused expressions
• Hackneyed plots
• Stereotypical characters

And she gives her readers some good advice on how to avoid them.

But clichés aren’t all bad. The human brain uses heuristics – rules of thumb – to help it efficiently deal with the world without having to work everything through from first principles. For example, if someone throws a ball at you, you don’t do differential calculus in your brain to figure out where you need to be in order to catch it, you just keep your eye on the ball and your brain figures it out. This is the ‘gaze heuristic’.

Wikipedia says:

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.

Clichés are a kind of heuristic: They are shortcuts to an understanding of the world that is roughly in line with reality. Clichés becomes clichés because we see a nugget of truth in them.

For example, Suzannah says:

Common sayings (or idioms) like “All’s fair in love and war” and “Blood is thicker than water” are cliched. They once held truth and meaning, but through overuse have become meaningless.

Now, “All’s fair in love and war” and “Blood is thicker than water” might be overused, but they do still have meaning and we all instantaneously understand what the writer is trying to say when using them. The problem is not so much with the phrases themselves, but with the context in which they are used. In a quotidian context, quotidian phrases fall flat. In a compelling context, quotidian phrases can move the story along quickly and seamlessly, and the reader won’t even notice that they’ve just been run over by a cliché.

(As an aside, I’ll note that some of Suzannah’s examples, such as “Needless to say,” “At this point in time,” “Each and every one,” are actually pleonasms, or needless phrases, rather than straight clichés. Allan Guthrie has the most awesome tipsheet on pleonasms which every writers should read.)

In rejecting cliché, there’s a serious risk that the inexperienced writer concocts something even worse to replace it with. Instead of “The sun set behind the hawthorn” you end up with “The golden orb had almost disappeared behind the interlacing fingers of the hawthorn”. If a cliché doesn’t interrupt the flow of reading, if it’s not noticeable, or if a replacement would be worse, then there’s nothing wrong with letting a sleeping cliché lie.

Clichés of character, aka stereotypes, are similar: the buxom barmaid, the ornery farmer, the dashing young man. They are heuristics which exist because there’s some reality in them. Buxom barmaids may not be the only type of barmaid, but they’re the type that most men (and probably a lot of women) will remember. Farmers are stubborn and ornery because so are cattle. And dashing young men dash because they are young and male (cf barmaids and selective memory).

By themselves, even stereotypes are no bad thing when you’re drawing a cartoon of a character, rather than a painting a portrait. In the right context, and with the right characterisation, stereotypes can even be fascinating central characters in their own right.

Take wizards. You have the wise, white-haired, long-bearded types like Gandalf, and you have the ditzy, inept, self-aggrandising types like Ridcully, and you have the kindly, paternal, caring type like Dumbledore. These three archetypal wizards are all stereotypes (they are actually stereotypes of academics with added magic), but in the right places, these stereotypes work. You might argue that these characters themselves created the stereotypes, and you might be right, but if you’re writing a wizard character now, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a completely unique take on the wizard format, because the chances are someone has done it already.

Again, that’s no big deal, because although someone might already have written a wizard a bit like your wizard, they haven’t written your story, with your wizard, his dialogue, his backstory, his character arc. So long as he fits into the story as he should, it’s all good.

Indeed, the search for the unique again often results in the painful. The young boy coming into his powers as an Old One amidst a loving and supportive family might seem trite and clichéd. But when you turn that character’s family into an arguing, divided, sullen mess, you actually undermine the very qualities that make Will Stanton capable of success and turn him into the kind of stereotype that makes Susan Cooper fans want to tear their eyes out.

Furthermore, if you subsume your storytelling into a search for the unique, well, you’re fucked. The unique is as attainable as The Way of the Dao De Jing – it is only possible to find The Way if you are not looking for it. The Story is as The Way. You cannot seek to be ‘different’ and ‘unique’ and find The Story. Only in telling The Story as it demands to be told may you perhaps find something different and unique.

Finally, clichéd plot. Well, let’s be brutally honest here. If you want to sell, a bit of clichéd plot can go a long way towards your success. Not everyone wants to have their preconceptions challenged, and some of the most successful books have some of the most hackneyed plots. And as you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, some of those books have the most hackneyed characters and prose too.

We might look down on some of these books, but there’s no denying that an easy, fast read which is compelling enough to keep you turning pages does not have to have unique characters, does not have to have plot that’s different, and can be written in the clunkiest prose, and still sell well. Truth is that, so long as you’re not too egregious, or at least not so egregious that a publisher can’t look past the cliché and see the pound signs, you should be fine.

I’m reminded at this point of the advice I was giving by my photography tutor a many years back: No professional photographer is surprised by what’s in the background of his/her photographs, because s/he has seen it all through the lens before the photo was taken. No professional writer should be surprised by the clichés they read in their own work, because they should have been aware of them as they were writing or on first read through.

The question is not, “Is it a cliché?”, but “Does this piece of writing seamlessly serve a purpose?” If the cliché works, it’s not a cliché.

I always used to think that blogging was for the terminally under-employed or the terminally not-very-happy-with-life-right-now’ed. Certainly that was true of me when I started this blog and at various stages throughout its history. Indeed, I often combined both conditions into one great big fugue of skint unhappiness, and was verbose with it.

These days, I seem to only blog when I have something to say. Back in the day, I had a lot less to say but seemed to say it more often. The last few years, since ORG really, I’ve busy with work and, since meeting T’Other, my life is several orders of magnitude happier. Somehow this seems to mean that I’m less likely to blog, due to having a lot less to whine about. Indeed, I am in awe of my friends who still blog enthusiastically despite being both over-employed and deliriously happy.

I still have those little moments where I think “Oh, I could write about that on my blog”, but by the time evening has come, my brain and fingers feel like they have had enough and that what they’d really like to be doing is nothing. I write a lot – a 15k word report here, a 35k word report there – and it can be hard to whip up the enthusiasm to find another few hundred words at the end of the day. It’s easier to say, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will blog.”

But I can feel an inflection point coming on. Change is in the air. I can smell it. What’s more, I want it.

I’m wary of talking about plans, because the future is one slippery little motherfucker. Kevin and I have made many plans but the ground keeps shifting under our feet. Actually, we keep making the same plan, over and over again, each coming from a slightly different angle, each one falling over at the first hurdle. The nub of the plan never changes, however, and is this: Leave London. But like a psychotic partner who makes your life hell but who’s still just enough fun to make you pause, London is a bitch to break up with.

For the first time in my life, I have a social circle, friends I see regularly and can just go hang out with. Friends within walking distance (a rarity in London). I have clients both here and at the other end of a flight from Heathrow. Favourite restaurants and pubs. Opportunities. Contacts. Cats. A life. (Compare and contrast my time in Reading, where I lived for three years, knowing no one.)

But the one thing that’s missing is the one thing London can’t give me, not on my earnings anyway. Space. Peace. Quiet. A view. A slower, more considered life. Time to write what I want to write and the money to do so. It would take a miracle for that to happen in London. Specifically, a miracle that involved a very, very large deposit into my bank account.

There are other places that are nicer, quieter, cheaper, with better views, although the downside is that I’ll be leaving my friends behind and starting my life anew in a strange land. (Don’t ask me where, because I don’t know yet.) It’s exciting, but nerve wracking. But the decision is made.

Place isn’t the only thing that needs to change, but meaning too: The meaning of me. I’ve always been someone whose self-identity was tightly bound to what I do. Being a music journalist may have broken the bank, but it was a fun persona to try on for a while. Being a musician or a stand-up comic were interesting and sometimes even enjoyable experiments.

Being a digital rights activist or social media consultant connected a bit more deeply with who I am, because ultimately it was a form of story-telling, the sort of story-telling that involves us creating a better world in our imagination and then fighting to make it come true. But who I really am, who I’ve always been, has been the Suw who wrote Argleton and the Books of Hay and Tag. It’s just that at times, wearing these other careers like coats, I might have fooled you. Or maybe I was trying to fool myself.

A few years ago, after Tag but before Argleton and the Books of Hay, I was having dinner with a writer friend. He’s quite good, this writer friend, and I confess I’m still a bit in awe of him, despite us having shared sushi and he having witnessed my meal fighting back in a most embarrassing fashion. I mentioned something about truly, madly, deeply wanting to write and the words he kindly didn’t say were, “Well, get on with it then.”

That night, I lay in bed, thinking about what I would write about if I was going to write something that no one would read but me. At some time around 3am, I realised that it would have magic, and cats, and probably some scenes in Wales, and dragons if I could crowbar them in. The next day, I started writing the Book of Hay. It was supposed to be stupid, whimsical and just for me, but it turned out to be quite good, even though it doesn’t have dragons in it.

Just before I finished the Books of Hay, which was turning out to be 30k words longer than the short story I had anticipated, I had the idea for Argleton. Egged on by friends, I put down the Books of Hay and focused on what was supposed to be a short story but which came in at novelette length instead. Well over a year later, Argleton is nearly done. Not the story – that’s been done for ages – but the project that the story evolved into. And as part of that evolution, something became very clear to me: I can be, and have the skills to be, the kind of writer I want to be.

I’ve always been somewhat put off by the traditional route that writers used to take. The idea of sending of my works into the cold, harsh unknown and waiting weeks, if not months, for a rejection letter, filled me with dread. I just don’t have the patience for it. I’d rather just put my stuff out there and see what people think. Novelettes are a great length for a piece of work – long enough to be a bit meaty, not so long that they take forever to edit. In fact, I’ve fallen in love with that format, with the idea of a little book not so tiny as to be accidentally inhaled, but certainly bite-sized.

And in the years of my procrastination, of wandering aimlessly through the creative desert, the world changed. Pivoted. In a way that is now essential to my plan. Five years ago, I could have distributed Argleton for free quite easily, but whilst free is lovely for readers, it’s tricky for writers who need to do things like eat and sleep under a roof that’s not leaking and wear clothes that aren’t threadbare. But now we have crowdfunding. Now I have a Plan.

The Plan is this: When I have finished making all the Argleton books and have sent them out, and the backers have had their PDFs for a couple of weeks so that they get to enjoy the story that they funded first and exclusively, after all that, it will go up here for free. Then I will crowdfund the prequel to the Books of Hay, which will likely be in the form of a newspaper. Then I will crowdfund the Books of Hay, which is another novelette. And hopefully, by then, I will have my 1000 True Fans, and I will have, with them, a living.

Because I’m frankly shit at doing this thing that other people manage to do where they balance writing and working and get both done equally well. I need to find a way to do that for now, through this transition, so Dear Clients, I still love you and want you and need you. But this is what I need to do to be me, because I’m not happy when I’m not me. I don’t want to wear a coat anymore. I want to feel the sun on my skin, feel the grass between my toes, and feel everyone staring as I dance through the meadow in my white dress like that chick out of the Timotei advert.

I’m writing this biog post not on my laptop, or my iPad, or on my iPhone, but with a pen in a notebook. As I write, the pen tracks my movements by referring to a special pattern of dots on the paper, and when I plug it in to my computer it will upload an exact copy of each page. I can even use handwriting recognition software to turn my scrawl into editable text.

My Livescribe Echo pen was a Christmas present from Kevin, along with some journals and a carry case that his family gave me. It has the potential to change forever the way I write by letting me write both longhand and digitally at once. So far, I love it. I’ve already written pages of research notes for my next fiction project and have successfully transferred them to Scrivener for future reference. It has let me work in places where getting even an iPad would be a little awkward, e.g. in A&E, and in a way that would be difficult with a laptop, e.g. taking notes from a book as I’m reading it.

There’s just one drawback: It is difficult to get hold of the special dotted paper that the pen requires in order to work. In the UK, only three types of notebooks are available and all of them are lined. I prefer to use unlined notebooks: A5 for desk notes, A6 for taking out and about. I dislike using lined paper, but although plain notebooks are available in the US, I have yet to find a supplier in the UK. Kevin can probably get me a few next time he’s on the other side of the Pond, but even in the US, there are only a few types of notebook for sale.

This strikes me as a bit bonkers. It’s like inventing the world’s best razor and not selling the blades. Livescribe should be all over the stationery aspect of their business, with lots of choice and wide availability. After all, the success of their pen depends on users having access to lots and lots of paper.

They should also provide more choice for the pen itself. Right now you can write with a biro… or a biro. I know a fountain pen would be too bulky, but even a gel pen would be an improvement!

Ultimately, though, this pen has the potential to revolutionise my writing life. I usually write my friction by planning and researching my story, then writing the first draft out by hand. For some reason, it comes out better that way. Maybe it’s because it slows my brain down a bit, forcing me to think things through more carefully as I write.

Once I have a complete first draft, I then have to type it up. This pen removes that stage completely and, whilst the handwriting recognition isn’t perfect, it’s at least as good as my transcription, during which I introduce errors of my own. It’s also easier to spot handwriting recognition errors as they tend to stand out – e.g. a K instead of an H, rather than ‘birth’ instead of ‘berth’.

It is possible to print dot paper from within the Livescribe software, but again it’s lined, you can only print 25 pages, and it’s the wrong size. In order to get blank paper (i.e. dots but no lines) I apparently need to download and install the SDK, download custom paper files others have put together, do something fiddly in the SDK, load them on to the pen, print them out and hope my Mac likes the end result. (The Livescribe support forums seem to say that maybe custom paper won’t work on my Mac.) That’s an awful lot of work, even if you’re used to dealing with SDKs, which I am not.

I can’t understand why Livescribe have made it so hard to get hold of their stationery, or why it’s so difficult to design one’s own. I hope this is a problem I can find a way to solve, because this pen shows promise and it would be a shame for it not to fulfil that promise for lack of stationery.

My advice to Livescribe: Hire a stationery geek and give them a big budget. A wide range of stationery is essential to the success of these digital pens – without it, they are just very heavy, very fat biros. But given enough stationery and, also importantly, an easy way to make and print my own custom paper so I can bind my own notebooks, I could be a convert. I wouldn’t just use this pen for a few months until my current stash of paper runs out, but could end up using Livescribe pens for the rest of my life.

Livescribe, it’s really up to you.

I’ve never signed up to the belief that short words are in some way inherently better than long ones. George Orwell, in his essay Politics and the English Language, said, “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” But I always felt that he was being rather unfair to long words. Even the words used to describe their origins – Anglo Saxon and Latinate – are loaded with the very characteristics he says we are supposed to admire or avoid.

Yet you can’t always substitute the Anglo Saxon for the Latinate and retain exactly the same meaning. Take ‘build’, from the Anglo Saxon (i.e. Old English) verb byldan, and ‘construct’, from the Latin verb construere. They mean the same thing and are given as synonyms, but there are – to me, at least – subtle differences.

Constructing a house implies a methodical, replicable, approach with an emphasis on paying attention to detail. Building a house implies a more human, organic approach. Building a defence implies that the defendant is quite possibly innocent and just has to gather together the evidence to prove it. But constructing a defence implies artifice and calculation, qualities more likely found in a guilty defendant.

Which word is best to use is a matter of context. Which nuances most closely fit the scenario you are writing? What implications are you hoping to make? What sort of feeling do you wish to leave with the reader?

Simply avoiding Latinate words is far too simplistic. A good writer strives to use their understanding of implicit meaning to make choices as they write. But adhering slavishly to such rules robs work of its depth.

I’m personally much more sympathetic to the late Eric Thompson’s attitude to long words, described by his widow:

Phyllida [Law] says: “Once a lady wrote to him complaining that he used too many long words in The Magic Roundabout and how were children meant to understand them?

“He got out the Oxford English Dictionary and wrote back using all the longest and most difficult words he could find, like palimpsest and oxymoron, which sounds rude but isn’t.

“He held serious conversations with babies in prams because he said they had to start somewhere. They were not to be patronised because they were little and hadn’t lived as long as he had.”

If we, as authors, don’t use long words, how on earth will anyone (including us) learn them or become familiar with using them?

But there is, of course, another side. Long words – or archaic, obscure or exotic words – shouldn’t interrupt the flow of reading. There is nothing more annoying than being jolted out of a story and back to reality by a poorly chosen word.

If an unusual word is used properly, its context gives it the meaning that the reader may otherwise lack. That gives you the choice to gloss over the unknown word and carry on if you don’t want to hunt down the definition in a dictionary. If a story is compelling, then that’s usually what I do – get the gist of it from context and carry on reading. But use too many obscure words, or use them in a way that leaves their meaning opaque, and you can ruin the reading experience.

I’m driven to write this blog post by Dan Abnett’s Triumff, Her Majesty’s Hero, which suffers this exact problem. In just two pages, he uses 16 words which jarr for one reason or another.

• galliards – from context, some sort of musical form. Dictionary says “a lively dance in triple time for two people, including complicated turns and steps.”
• rondeaus – same context as above, and whilst at least I’ve heard of a rondeau (or rondeaux), I couldn’t tell you exactly what one is. Dictionary says, “a thirteen-line poem, divided into three stanzas of 5, 3, and 5 lines, with only two rhymes throughout and with the opening words of the first line used as a refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas.”
• soused – I know this means ‘drunk’ from the context, but it’s hot on the heels of the previous two and quite jarring.
• Chatterton-esque – no idea what he’s referring to
• pinnace – something boat-related, from context, but no real idea what. Dictionary says, “a small boat, with sails or oars, forming part of the equipment of a warship or other large vessel.”
• Hawkins – again, something boat-related, but no idea what, and my dictionary is unclear.
• luggers – boat-related again. Dictionary says, “a small sailing ship with two or three masts and a lugsail on each.”
• galleasse – boat-related, yet again. Dictionary doesn’t have a clue.
• flota – understood this from context, but it’s the Spanish word from which we get diminutive ‘flotilla’. Given it’s not a widely used word, does it add anything to the narrative?
• netherstock – something to do with clothing, particularly hosiery. Dictionary says ‘Quack quack oops’
• canions – apparently they are patterned and again to do with clothing. Dictionary says nothing.
• peascod – something maybe to do with fabric, or clothing. Dictionary getting a bit sullen now.
• murray – not used as a name, but might refer to a type of fabric. Dictionary sulking in the corner.
• armillary – ok, this is finally a cool one. Dictionary leaps to its feet, stretches its hand in the air and shouts, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ It then goes on to say, “a model of the celestial globe constructed from rings and hoops representing the equator, the tropics, and other celestial circles, and able to revolve on its axis.” I sort of knew that already, but it’s good to have the detail.
• nantwich – I’m including this because it’s bloody annoying. It’s a play on the word ‘sandwich’ and is not only unnecessary, but not funny and not clever. By itself it might have been funny and clever, but not after such a slew of ridiculous words.
• Couteau Suisse – Not a clue. Dictionary back to sulking. May have been referenced earlier in the book but I really cannot be bothered to look.

The problem Abnett has is that he uses strange words as a way of world-building. Philip Pullman does this too, and it’s no less annoying. Oh, and Bruce Sterling and William Gibson did it in The Difference Engine, only one of the reasons why that book is so horrendous.

Good world-building doesn’t rely on using obscure language, writing in extreme dialect, or using impenetrable jargon. In Abnett’s case, he’s trying to illustrate that, in his world, it’s 2010 and the sun has yet to set on the British Empire, currently ruled over by Her Divine Majesty, Queen Elizabeth XXX. He could have achieved that without all but one or two of the above words. Instead, his central conceit is, well, conceited. His vocabulary seems to be more about the author proving how deeply he has researched his topic and, therefore, how clever he is, than about improving the experience for the reader.

I thought I’d have a little play with Google Scribe, so I started off with “I was walking down the” and then accepted every suggestion Scribe had to offer. This is what I got:

I was walking down the street from them and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I’ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners…

Scribe doesn’t understand context beyond a few words and has no facility for punctuation. They’ve clearly trained it on CiF commenters.

Great piece by Craig Mod about using Kickstarter as seed capital to not only ?fund a book, ?Art Space Tokyo, but also start a publishing think tank, PRE/POST. The essay is most comprehensive – with graphs! – and anyone interested in using Kickstarter to raise money should read it. I hope to be able to write something equally as detailed when my project is over!

At midnight on Wednesday, my Argleton Kickstarter project closed, funded to a level of 173%. I’m very happy and excited, and not a little bit scared! But now I am able to spend half my time working on Argleton (the rest working on client stuff).

The project’s success was largely due to the fact that Kickstarter featured it in their first weekly newsletter, which lead to a flood of new supporters. All this happened whilst I was away in the US on holiday. I would log on whenever I had both time and internet access to see how things were going and was gobsmacked one day to find half a page of Kickstarter pledge emails. Within just a few hours (during which, I confess, I was sitting in a hot tub in the Rocky Mountains with a glass of wine), we hit 100%.

I now have 150 people eagerly awaiting the arrival of a package from me, which is both exciting and terrifying. I didn’t get to write much (at all!) on holiday despite having taken my laptop so that I could do exactly that. But I did get to think through a few things about the story and I’m in the process of redrafting it now. I will continue to work on it until it’s the best I can make it. After that, all I can do is hope people like it!

I have a lot of work to do still on the design, printing and manufacture of the book, not to mention completion of the geolocation puzzle that goes with it. Looking back, I wonder if that last wasn’t overegging the pudding somewhat. I suppose it speaks to my insecurity about how attractive the rest of the package sounded. Still, we only learn by doing, and I’ve certainly learnt that what I thought was a small project is actually an awful lot to chew on!

Finally, before I went away on holiday, Thursday Bram kindly asked me a few questions about the Argleton project, which I answered on her blog, Constructively Productive. Enjoy!

?Just a quick note to let you know that my Kickstarter project, Argleton, is going to close in 12 hours so if you want to be a part of it, join up now! We’ve already reached 100% so the project is definitely going ahead, but the more people get involved, the merrier!

It’s very exciting to say that, due to being included in Kickstarter’s first newsletter, my Argleton project is now fully funded! Yay! There are seven days to go, however, so if you’d like to be involved and receive a copy of the finished book, you can still pre-order any of the different packages.

If you’d like to read more about the project then the previous post here has the first scene, there’s an article I wrote for Un:Bound about it, and questions I answered for Thursday Bram over at Constructively Productive.

If you join up now, don’t forget to look through the Kickstarter updates, especially the ones for backers only – there’s some important information there for you!