May Day, Map Day

Return the map! It will bring you great danger.

The map is not the story, but if your characters leave the house and wander around at all, you'll need a map. You can have it before you begin, or you can draw it as you go, but you need a sense of location or you'll get lost, and no one likes it when the author -- the tour guide, after all -- can't find their way around.

My maps are minimal. High Fantasy has a history of being extravagant with unnecessary details, and I resist that -- I tend to follow the maxim "Cut out all the parts that aren't interesting" (Ray Vukcevich, to Jay Lake, as related here)

So, yes, I have my maps. Right by my computer so I can see where the action is happening and where my people are going. Check that it all makes sense.

Still, somehow, it didn't occur to me that the reader might also like to know where the action was happening and where the characters were going. So I was surprised when my editor said, "we'll need your map, of course."

Need my map? But... but... I'm not a map person. I just have these sketches...

No problem, my editor says, we have a guy for that.

I do a little research on their guy and I'm suitably impressed; he's discussed with reverence and awe. His job is to take my map and make it look good. I provide the raw materials and he makes it sparkle and shine.

I slowly exhale. I don't have to worry about the map after all.

Well, wait -- I have to give him something, and it has to be correct. I take a closer look at the sketch I'm planning to send him, and I realize some of the details are, ahem, not quite right.

Oh, not the book -- the narrative itself is flawless, as to places and directions. Ahem. But primarily it's my map that needs fixing. Provinces where they should be. Villages and cities moved to the right -- if general -- location. Major rivers inserted. Show the Great Road. Things that if you're going to bother with a map at all, need to be present and correct enough to elucidate rather than befuddle.

Here we go into the warm part of the year. The well-lit part of the year. Good light by which to draw.

Map Day.

The Seer: Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I've been waiting until today to tell you what happened two weeks ago. Before I do that, let's back up a bit.

Early last year Baen Books told me that, yes, they were interested in my novel, The Seer, but that they wanted changes. Big changes. In a long conversation, they outlined the revisions they wanted. Totally understand, they said, if you'd rather not.

Thing was, they were right. The editors had, essentially, called me out on all my short-cuts, weak characterizations, arcs that needed to go farther, an ending that needed more closure.

Yeah, I said: count me in. I'm in. All in.

Then I went to work. The revisions they wanted were huge -- plot-changing, character wrenching -- and in many cases they did not play nicely with each other. I realized that I needed to find new ways to tell a story that was fast becoming more complicated than anything I had laid hands on before. Bluntly, this story was going to require a better writer than I was to finish it. Somehow, I had to become that better writer.

I wish I could tell you it all blossomed in magic born of necessity, and there were some rare times when the words just flowed and it felt like some kind of magic, but most of the time it was me just reviewing plot-lines, checking maps, consulting my experts, and putting one finger in front of the other to write what too often felt like the clumsiest prose I'd ever fashioned.

I took out a lot of words. All the way through and in the final rewrites. My outtakes file is about half the size of the final manuscript, and that isn't short. (Though, I hasten to add, shorter than Game of Thrones. Ha!)

But most of the time what got me through the current scene or chapter was something akin to terror: I had signed a contract -- I had taken real money -- I had a deadline. Sure, I could quit, but then I'd have to flee the country and live in shame under an assumed name for the rest of my life.

There were moments where that seemed the better option.

I lined up some powerful allies. First readers. Friends. Experts. Advisers. My Muse. My Reader Advocate. (I'll explain later.) I warned them all that there would be times when I would loose faith in my ability, and that their job was to get me to the finish line. And they did. Wow, did they. More on that in another post.

As a writer I took a lot of risks with this book, with the story-line, characters, tensions, symbol choices, and so on -- things I hope my reader never notices consciously. I had no idea if the publisher would like what I'd done.

Sometimes I would lie there trying to sleep and think about all the risky things I'd done that they could object to, all the strange twists and turns I'd made, all the ways in which I'd incorporated the changes they wanted, but gone a fair bit beyond what might have been enough, all in order to tell the story that needed to be told.

In the last two months before the deadline, it came to me -- in my gut, not intellectually -- that I had to write the story the best I possibly could -- so that, if the publisher did not like it after all, I would know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it wasn't because I'd held back.

I didn't hold back.

Then, the last day of March -- two weeks ago -- I shipped it. That's what I wanted to tell you.

I was surprisingly calm about it. I had, after all, given it everything I had. If it wasn't good enough, well, so be it; I knew I hadn't taken any shortcuts.

Today my editor at Baen wrote me back. He said he'd finished the book. The fixes he wants are minor.

He called it wonderful. He called it excellent. He said I'd made all the changes he'd hoped for and more. He said he was proud to be publishing it.

Me, too. Very much so. The Seer is scheduled to hit ink in spring of 2016.