Heirs of War Blog Tour Kick Off!

Today kicks of the Heirs of War blog tour! I am so excited! There are so many great stops along the way, and I am so thrilled by how many people signed up to host.

As some of you might already know, I decided to push back my release date from today to October 13. Before I share the blog tour calendar with you, I'd like to let you know why. Put simply: Kriscinda Everitt is an amazing editor who has a knack for knowing exactly how to get through this hard head of mine. One of the biggest problems with Heirs of War has been POV. At first, it was head jumping. After I fixed that, I still had too many POVs. Some people had issue with this, but others didn't. On my last rewrite, I narrowed it down to eleven POVs. Eleven.

That's still pretty crazy. Unless you are George RR Martin. (Hint: I'm not.) I didn't know what to do with this problem. Write it off as "to each his own"? Rewriting would ruin all the little suspenseful tidbits I feed the readers through POVs like the Cynewards and Kyle.

Only...those POVs might be ruining that suspense. There is such a thing as giving the readers too much information, as it turns out. And I am definitely guilty of this. Kriscinda explained it all very well, and she gave me the choice of keeping the book as is to meet my release date, or rewriting it to narrow down the POVs to just the five girls (Terrena, Isauria, Rhaya, Zelene, and Ariana). I chose the latter because I agree that this will make the book so much better.

So there you have it. I did my rewrites during Dragon Con (sometimes waiting in line for hours can be a good thing for productivity). I'm applying the previous edits now, and then Kriscinda will get another go at it. Come October 13, a much better book will be released.

Up until the release, I have some very cool tour stops planned. I would like to take this moment to thank each and every one of my hosts and reviewers for taking part. You guys are awesome, and I am overwhelmed by the amount of support I have behind me as I move forward.

Heirs of War is on Goodreads and available for preorder on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. It will be available through Amazon and other retailers after the release date. You can still find the previous version, with all eleven POVs, on Wattpad.

And now, the tour calendar:

Striking a Writerly Balance with Editing

Wow, it really has been a minute since I've blogged about my own writerly exploits, hasn't it? Well, I have been hosting quite a few blog tour stops, which are incredibly exciting. I love interviewing these authors and hearing all about their new books. The downside to this is that my reading list has been growing exponentially, but I have hope that one day I will get around to reading them all.

The other thing keeping me from personal blogging has been the very personal--and very trying--editing journey I've been on since November. I have learned so much over these past couple months to make my novel even better. Here are just a few nuggets of wisdom I'd like to share:

1. Be very wary of the words "that" and "of" as most of the time they are filler words.
2. Don't head jump. If you have a story told from multiple POVs, stick to one person's head per chapter. If you can't do that (which I have discovered I can't since so many people are involved in mine), try to stick to one person's POV per scene. Abiding by this rule cut my 149k manuscript down to 119k easily. 
3. Try to get your hands on a Style Guide. This will make editing so much easier. Belle Bridge Books has a basic one on their site, but I would recommend checking out misused words and passive sentences.
4. Don't think you know everything about comma usage. Finding out you don't will be very humbling.
5. Don't be discouraged! Editing is a tough and time consuming process that all writers have to go through. They don't lie when they say writing the first draft is half the battle. Realistically, the first draft is probably only a quarter of the battle when you factor in editing, querying, and marketing in general.

This last one is easier said than done, and it is something I've been struggling with since I started the hardcore process of editing Heirs of War. Here's the thing: I always say that I am a far better storyteller than I am writer. My prose is weak at best, but I have a knack for creating characters that jump off the page and storylines that twist and turn. So when I really take a look at my prose, I tend to be more than a little shamed by it. I have no flourish with words. I'm no George RR Martin and if I reread Tolkien right now I would probably cry. I would actually describe my prose as dry, to be completely honest.

Now, before you start arguing that you are you're your own worse critic, hear me out. I had a bit of an epiphany tonight. My manuscript was 149k long before I started editing. Even now at 119k, some might argue that it is still too long. If I try to flourish, first of all it won't be me. I have my own style (which some have called "conversational", I think meaning my writing seems like I am telling you the story), and flourish isn't part of it. Not to mention the fact that I am pretty sure I would be bad at it. Second of all, my wordcount would go up exponentially. Again. And that would definitely be bad.

So what is the biggest lesson that I have learned throughout this whole editing process? My writing style is just that--mine. And that is okay. At the end of the day, I still love my characters and the stories they have and I want to share them. So I will continue to push through what I am now considering to be my first round of major edits so that I can do exactly that--share them.

The good news is that I am almost done with said round of edits. Going through misused and compound words, then running each chapter through Autocrit (Best. Writerly. Investment. Ever.) and I will be back to sending the manuscript off (provided certain possibilities on the horizon don't pan out, but I still have my secretive fingers crossed).

Writerly Birthdays (And Presents!)

Birthdays are a time to reflect on the past year and look at all you have managed to accomplish. For me, that means writing two books (and continuing to edit the hell out of the first), coming up with my first idea outside of the fantasy series I've been working on for 1/3 of my life, and making some amazing connections. All in all, a very good writerly year.

But you know what else birthdays mean? PRESENTS. And that's the real reason I am stopping in today.

I received the best writerly birthday present ever this year. My husband got me a year's subscription to autocrit.com and I have not been able to pry myself from it! The site acts as a sort of editing wizard. You paste your scene or chapter (depending on your subscription level) and the wizard will point out overused words (and highlight them to make them easy to find--you can even highlight just one overused word at a time), cliches and redundancies, initial pronouns, summarize your phrases and the amount of times you use them (example: "she said with a" shows up twice in chapter two for me), and much more that I still haven't played around with yet. The repeated words is a big help to me because it will tell you how many occurences you have and how many you need to get rid of. The wizard even spots ly adverbs.

I am not a natural editor by any means, so this tool has been a big help to me. I almost want to skip the obligatory drinks after work tonight (gotta ring in the last year of my twenties the right way!) so I can play with it some more. I'm only on chapter two of my MS but now that I am getting the hang of it, it is going much faster. So again: Best. Writerly. Birthday. Present. EVER!

After the birthday shenanigans are done tonight (and recovery in the morning), stop back by to see an interview with Mike Robinson, author of The Green-Eyed Monster!

The Writerly Chopping Block (AKA: Editing)

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you probably already know that I am doing some serious edits on Heirs of War right now. I have been lucky enough to get some great advice from a published author who has taken a bit of interest in the book. One of my biggest issues: POV switches. What does that mean? Well, I like to switch between different characters' perspectives.

In the same scene.

I was calling it third person omniscient, but you might have also heard it referred to as the head-bounce. This term is probably a bit more accurate. Omniscient is a breeze to write in for me. I, obviously, know what is going on in each of my characters' heads, whether major or minor characters. That's the beauty of being the god of this little fictional world I've created (and getting to smite people, but that's for a later blog).

As it turns out, writing in third person limited is much less confusing for the readers. Let that be Lesson Number One for you. Hopefully before you start writing your book because I will say that trying to fix that is a bitch and a half.

Another piece of advice I was given--and have been given frequently--was to cut back on how many characters' perspectives I write from. With five girls in the prophecy, I write from all five of their perspectives. And some other characters as well because they have important roles or because the scene just makes more sense when viewed from their eyes.

And this is where I am having the problem...I tried cutting two of the girls out tonight. Not even looking at the other scenes written from other characters' perspectives. Just focusing on the five main characters and how I can narrow that down for this book. And I can't.

You might be saying "Can't? Or Won't?" Well, to be honest, it's a little of both. Theoretically I could cut Terrena and Isauria's stories completely from this book and the book as a whole would make sense. But this is the trouble with writing a series. What I cut from this book messes up the next one. I know people say that you can fix that, but I honestly have no idea how. I would have to do flashbacks for Terrena. And for Isauria, there would just be no connection to her character whatsoever and she plays a much bigger role in book 2. So essentially I would be waiting to introduce one of my main characters until the second book.

Which leads me to this question: How much do you compromise your story when trying to make it marketable? I've said this before and I will say it again loudly: My goal is not to become a famous or successful published author. My goal has been and will always be to share the story of these five girls that have grown so close to my heart with other people. Why publish at all? Because I do have some business sense and this is actual work that I am doing.

That being said, I really don't want to be one of those authors that refuses to compromise anything because they think they already have the best thing since sliced bread. I like to think of myself as pretty open-minded and willing to accept criticisms. But what do I do if I feel like cutting those POVs entirely makes my book less-than? Do I compromise? Because I know the advice makes complete and absolute sense. One of the biggest complaints my beta-readers all had was that there were too many characters and it was hard to keep up with them all. Will ceasing the head-bouncing help this a little? Probably. Would limiting the story to only Zelene, Ariana, and Rhaya's perspectives help even more? Hell yes.

But would it be the same story? That, my friends, I am not so sure about.

I suppose that answer is for another day, though. Until then, I am going to keep the girls in and use a header for each POV change to see if that helps clear confusion. Wish me luck!

Word Count: The New Bane of My Writerly Existence!

A few weeks ago the bane of my writerly existence was synopses, shortly followed by query letters. Now? Well, now it is just word count. You would think that words of any sort--counted or not--would be a writer's best friend. Right? Wrong. At least, not when you are writing something that falls into the Young Adult category and have a word count that is over 70k.

Like, way over 70k. Twice that to be precise.

Self Publishing Too Soon

I get it. I completely understand how this happens. It has been one of my biggest complaints in reading self publishing works as well as one of the biggest cons I have seen in articles about self publishing. You can always tell when an author published their work before it was truly ready for public consumption. You can see it in the typos, the formatting, the cover art, and sometimes in how the story is presented as a whole. Editing and cover art are the two issues I am going to touch on because they are the ones I am struggling with right now.

From what I understand of the traditional publishing world (which is admittedly very little as I am still peering over the cliff that is publishing before making that leap), a manuscript is usually not only given a copy editor but a content editor as well. And from what I understand, typically you have more than one copy editor. They are given (or create, little confused there) a style sheet that is basically a cheat sheet to you and your work and then they get to editing.