Sequel to Hidden Stars

[Jeremyf]

Would you consider releasing some of your out of print books as ebooks? Multiformat books at Fictionwise.com are very nice.

[aarti]

Oh, I think I've heard of that, actually. Or of a company that will print one book for you at a time, rather than going through a publisher and doing the number crunching. If they had a pretty dust jacket or cover, I'd very seriously consider getting another edition of several of your books, Teresa! Though I also like the ones I have now, that were signed by you. And there's just something special about keeping the original copy that you read, I think. But duplicates are fine with me!

[Teresa Edgerton]

I'm not so interested in ebooks just now, because my big goal is to get physical copies of the books again. For instance, I'm down to my last few copies of Goblin Moon.

And being an (almost) senior citizen, set in my ways, it just isn't a book unless it's on paper.

Although, I should mention (continuing this conversation and yet bringing the thread back on topic in one clever move) that HarperCollins is supposed to be releasing The Hidden Stars in electronic format very soon, and I suppose they will want to do the same for the sequel.

[Pyar]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

Well, it depends, Pyar. If the editor asks for a revision, then I revise it. The revisions may be very minor, or they may be fairly significant. I've never been asked to do a really major revision. But the editor just points out the problems, suggests ways to fix them, and leaves it up to the author how to actually go about it. The days when editors acted almost like collaborators are pretty much over. And they very rarely do much in the way of line-editing -- at least in my case they don't. I don't think that I've ever had the editor change more than a handful of sentences in an entire novel. But then comes the copy-editor.

The copy-editor is there to do two different things. One of those things is line-editing -- not for content (although there are horror stories of over-zealous copy-editors), but to fix errors in punctuation and spelling, make sure there aren't any continuity errors or factual errors, to make sure the author is consistent about certain style choices (whether to capitalize titles, etc.), and other things of that nature.

But the copy-editor's other job is to put in certain marks or codes for the typesetters and the production department. So even a manuscript that doesn't need much in the way of corrections comes back pretty well marked up.

There are a handful of very famous authors with big, big sales who don't like being edited at all (they think every word they write is a priceless gem), and they can use their clout to bully editors into leaving their manuscripts alone, except for the lightest possible copy-edit. This is not always a good thing.

cool, the writing industry must be a world of its own =P

I think that the editors should only look for grammatical and spelling errors and leave the story writing to the authors. But they already do that for you.

[Teresa Edgerton]

It really does help to have someone to point out any problems (other than spelling and punctuation), Pyar. As the writer, it can be hard to distinguish between what you meant to write -- that beautiful story inside your head -- and what you actually did write. Unlike the author, readers don't have a handy built-in narrator to fill in the blanks and explain the confusing parts. The editor can see what the writer doesn't see and the reader will.

So I don't mind being edited, not at all. Of course, I may be able to say that only because I've had good editors. I do know writers who have not been so fortunate.

[Jeremyf]

I believe LULU has an option to allow distributing a book as an e-book as well as print-on-demand. Adobe is not my favorite format, but it would be better than nothing.

[Pyar]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

It really does help to have someone to point out any problems (other than spelling and punctuation), Pyar. As the writer, it can be hard to distinguish between what you meant to write -- that beautiful story inside your head -- and what you actually did write. Unlike the author, readers don't have a handy built-in narrator to fill in the blanks and explain the confusing parts. The editor can see what the writer doesn't see and the reader will.

So I don't mind being edited, not at all. Of course, I may be able to say that only because I've had good editors. I do know writers who have not been so fortunate.

Ya I guess it would be hard to remember if you are repeating something if you are writing a 500 page book. I know exactly what you mean about the story in your head, sometimes I can picture the exact point i want to make when i am writing but it is so hard to put it into words, and it just comes out meaning something different than what you intended.

I was wondering another thing. I am taking AP Literature and Composition in school right now and we are discussing syntax and rhetoric. My teacher says that every author specifically chooses the syntax and structure of every sentence to convey a meaning. And that authors use different literary devices such as symbolism, tone, foreshadow, etc. to create meaning that can be interpreted by the reader. She also took it to the next level and said that the author's life, and the historical time period in which the book was written has an impact on the book. Is this true? Do authors really think about the way they are going to order each sentence and if a coordinating conjuction should go in this place or that place? Do you think, "OMG that is the perfect expositional sentence"?

I never pay attention to this stuff when I am reading a book for fun, but when I am reading a book for class I see tons of this stuff. I'm like "thats personification, there is an allusion, wow that is obviously a foreshadow, look at the structure of that sentence.. it is so weird", etc. That would be so funny if my teacher is wrong =P, but maybe the author is doing all this stuff unconciously. idk, any insight would be cool

[j. d. worthington]

Pyar, while I assume your question was for Teresa, I'll add a bit too... No, I don't think a writer does that on a conscious level when doing the initial writing (at least, writers who do are extremely rare, and prone to mental constipation, frankly); it's in the revision process that you do the tinkering to enhance these qualities. However, any writer who is any good has tended to read a lot, and these things are picked up subconsciously and reprocessed through each writer's mental makeup, so that the particular version of them is unique to each writer and, further, to each story, for each story does, in a sense, demand its own dialect and idiom. For example: If I were writing a Victorian or Edwardian ghost story, I'd tend to use much more restraint and a more erudite vocabulary not because I was trying to show off, but because that would be the tone such a story demands to feel authentic. A prose-poem also requires much more subtle use of language, and considerably stronger use of conscious metaphor and symbolism. A contemporary tale of street life would be much more prone to slang, colloquialism, a strong peppering of telegraphic sentences, misdirection in the language, etc. These aren't (generally speaking) things a writer thinks of when writing the story ... they just "feel" right for that particular story, and it's what comes to mind. But in revising, you would eliminate any anachronisms, polish these techniques, notice where more foreshadowing might strengthen the effect; transpose sentences or words, etc., for greater impact, and so on. So I'd say they are very much there, but, as Lovecraft noted, the subconscious element in any story is really quite considerable.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Possibly very, very literary writers who expect their work to be taken apart by academics, word by word, and sentence by sentence, are that self-conscious ...

I certainly do weigh my words very carefully, and style is very, very important to me, but I go more by instinct than I do by analysis. Analysis is something I apply when something is wrong and I need to know why, in order to fix it. But I often study the writing of other authors that I particularly admire. Really, there are very few hours in the day when I'm not thinking about writing to some extent.

There is, certainly, a complicated unconscious process going on, and I think that the more writing you do the more this is true. You could say that this is where inspiration comes in. Some of the best parts in my books just come out without my thinking about them at all. (Although a lot of thought goes into deciding whether to keep them after I've got them.)

Foreshadowing, symbolism, metaphor, and all the other literary devices; I prefer to let those arise naturally, rather than as a matter of conscious artistry. Because they do come in, whether I ask them to or not, and I think they fit better than any I would put in artificially.

But I agree that the time and place an author lives and writes in does influence his or her work heavily. Even for someone like me, who is not writng about the contemporary scene, and who is drawn to a more old-fashioned style of writing. The era we live in just plays too large a part in shaping our thought processes and our world view.

However, it's not always so easy to see these influences soon after the book is first written. Ordinary readers and academics alike will take the same outside influences for granted, so that they will be essentially invisible.

Ten or twenty years later, those parts may be glaringly obvious.

[Pyar]

Thanks! That was a great read from both of you

I'd have to agree with you that most of this stuff must come naturally for writers. I guess your subconcious plays a huge part in writing. I wrote a ten page paper about the effect of parenting on Mary Shelly on her life and her works. It is insance how much of an impact her life had on here books. Most people know her most famous book, Frankenstein, was about a scientist creating this monster that kills people. What they don't know that central to her novel was parenting and the lack of it for the monster and the the lack of "fathering" on behalf of Dr. Frankenstein. This was all caused by the lack of proper parenting in her own life, her mother had died giving birth to her and her father did not care; her stepmother didn't care for her either. Her disfunctional childhood impacted every aspect of her life, including the raising of her own children. Anyway, that is just one example of the underlying subconcious effect of an author on their writing.

But some syntatical choices made by authors are on purpose, for example The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I'm sure all of you realized that there was a blatant lack of articles in the whole book. I haven't read other Heinlein books so I don't know if he does that in all his books but he must have chosen to write the book like that.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Exactly. Without knowing that about Mary Shelly, it would be easy to miss that very important theme (many people do). And yet in all her writings on the subject, I don't think she ever pointed it out. Probably, she was unaware of it herself.

When I look back on the my first three books, I can see a lot of unconcious influences from my own life, that I never noticed at the time. And few of the metaphors and symbols were intentional to begin with -- although when I recognized them, several years and several drafts later, I did continue to make use of them.

Even now, when someone asks me a question about those books, something will click and I will see a pattern or a connection I never (consciously) recognized before.

For which reason, I am rather looking forward to looking back on the present series, five or ten years from now, and finding out what was really on my mind when I was writing them. This has been a particularly difficult time in my life, and I'm sure that the contrast with my previous writing is going to be rather marked.

[Pyar]

I think im gonna go read some of your earlier books now =P
What do you reccommend?

[Teresa Edgerton]

Well, naturally, I like them all, so I may not be the best person to ask. If you are in the mood for something more in the medieval high fantasy mode, then you might want to start with the Green Lion Trilogy, beginning with Child of Saturn. If you are looking for something a little bit Steampunkish, then perhaps Goblin Moon.

[Gladestrider]

I recently read Goblin Moon and The Gnomes Engine and would strongly recommend reading both (in order of course). You'll have to find them used however. My favorite source for used books is http://www.abebooks.com/.

Jeff

[aarti]

I agree with the suggestion for Goblin Moon and The Gnome's Engine- I love them both!

And Teresa, someone just requested my extra copy of Child of Saturn, but she seems to be a real fantasy lover, so I'm sure the book is going to a good home :-)