In which we obtain an editor/editors.

You’re writing and writing. Maybe you have a couple of chapters done, following your synopsis (see my series on writing a novel). Maybe you’re halfway through your book. When you go for editing help, and how?

If you’re using Google Docs per my earlier suggestion, sending a book out for edit is really simple. In Drive, multi-select all the chapters that you’re ready to have edited, right click on them and choose Share. In the dialog that pops up, enter the email addresses of the people who will be editing your work.

Change the widget on the right from Can Edit to Can Comment. This will let your editor add comments as well as to suggest inline edits, which is the way that the pros do it.

Add a little message so the person knows what they’re getting, hit Send and off you go. You can communicate with your editor entirely through the comments system within docs.

In the next installment, we’ll look taking all of your edited chapter docs and putting them together into a single .epub, followed by a .mobi.

(Parts 1 and 2 of this series)

You need to choose your writing tool. It has to satisfy certain requirements:

1. Accessible from anywhere so you’re not tied to single location or device on which to write
2. Version control, for recovering older stuff that maybe was better than the newer stuff
3. Revision pipeline for editors
4. Compatibility with later becoming an eBook

To meet all of these, I chose Google Docs. You can pick something else, but the rest of the articles in this series will use Docs as the writing environment of choice.

Don’t just start with a Doc though. You need to organize first.

Within Drive (which is where your Docs live), make a new folder that’s called the title of your book. I have a folder in my Drive called “lincoln fox and bad dog”. Inside there, make a couple more folders: manuscript, notes, cover, public, published.

Then, go inside the manuscript folder and make a new Doc called something like Your Title: Chapter 01. For my book, I abbreviated it as LFBD: Chapter 01. Make sure to put the leading “0” on the chapter number so that the filenames sort properly when alphabetized. If you don’t, you’ll find that Chapter 2 comes after Chapter 10 in drive. It doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s annoying.

Open that first doc, but don’t just start writing.

The fonts and styles that you choose won’t matter all that much once your book is in Kindle format, but here are tips that will save you grief down the line:

1. Don’t use TAB for indents at the beginning of a paragraph. Set the first-line margin to something like 0.625″ or 0.5″. This will give you a nice indent. Using TAB may look good in your doc, but can get crushed when converting to ebook.
2. If you want to include bigger text for something like a chapter heading, use a Style instead of just changing the font and size “by hand”. This will work better when you move to ebook/Kindle.
3. Remember that things like multiple blank lines (i.e. hitting Enter Enter Enter), various fancy spacing and effects you apply probably won’t show up in Kindle.

The Kindle likes to manage the flow of text by itself. If your book is going to depend on very careful typesetting, then these instructions are not for you.

So set a first line indent, pick a style you don’t mind reading, and start working.

Personally, I prefer Georgia at 11pt in my docs. It becomes the regular Kindle serif font once it’s converted, and looks “right” to me on my screen while I’m working.

When I was in high school and then college, it was kind of a thing to have a Favorite Author. I ended up picking Roger Zelazny. I always liked how he would blend tech and magic in his stories. The tech usually had fantasy aspects, and when he’d go for magic it followed rigid technical constraints. In college (Creative Writing program at UPenn) I did my senior thesis on him and his work and received an A+ on it from Nebula and Hugo award finalist Judith Moffett, my writing advisor. I didn’t realize how much of an influence his work was on me until I’d finished LFBD.

All of the hallmarks of Zelazny are there:

• Technical magic
• First person storytelling
• Deities taking unexpected forms
• Trippy sections that take place in altered or different worlds, told in a stream-of-consciousness manner
• Blending the “low/physical” with the high/mental

The only thing I didn’t incorporate was his major theme of world hopping. In Zelazny, you gain power by crossing worlds. Those who live in one world are okay, but the true power lies in the ability to move between worlds. It held for almost all of his books.

I think that’s right, though. He’s an influence in style and image, but I have my own themes. The biology/behavior loop. How we act in a world of insufficient information. How external influences change our behaviors without our knowledge.

That’s the stuff that I’m working with, and I’m sometimes using his toolset to do it.

There’s a bit at the end of his Isle of the Dead that I think about when I’m writing. It’s not his greatest work, but one of my personal favorites. The main character has fought all the battles, etc., and has returned to spirit-walk his old friend and mentor through what is basically the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It scares the shit out of him, but it’s his duty so he does it. The characters in the story are sort of person-gods who use a combination of technology and raw spiritual power to terraform planets.

As he does this in a kind of despair, he sees a parade of his worlds before him…

…I stared into that blackness, sans stars, comets, meteors, anything.

But suddenly there was something there.

New Indiana hung in the void. It seemed a million miles away, all its features distinct, cameo-cut, glowing. It moved slowly to the right, until the rock blocked it from my view. By then, however, Cocytus had come into sight. It crossed, was followed by all the others: St. Martin, Buningrad, Dismal, M-2, Honkeytonk, Mercy, Summit, Tangia, Illyria, Roden’s Folly, Homefree, Castor, Pollux, Centralia, Dandy, and so on.

For some stupid reason my eyes filled with tears at this passage. Every world I had designed and built moved by me…

…Where there had been darkness, I had hung my worlds. They were my answer. When I finally walked the Valley, they would remain after me. Whatever the Bay claimed, I had mode some replacements, to thumb my nose at it.

I always think of that, and it is good.

Cheers, Mr. Zelazny.