Looseleaf Editorial & Production

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Kristy S. Gilbert

Leaflet Review: Thief’s Covenant by Ari Marmell

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Thief's Covenant, Ari MarmellOnce she was Adrienne Satti, an orphan with a rags-to-riches story.

Now she is Widdershins, a thief with a sharp blade, a sharper wit, and help from a secret god living in her head.

But now something horrid, something dark, is reaching out for her, a past that refuses to let her go …

This is another book that was on my “books to look for in 2012” list. (It’s also on the list of books Lou Anders convinced me to buy with alarming ease. The guy’s a freaking hypnotist.) Before I start the review, I want to share a note about the cover. The image in this post and the cover on my book are different in one way that is significant to me: the apostrophe on my book is a curly quote, not a straight one. I can no longer tell if straight quotes bother me for true aesthetic reasons or because I’ve been trained to eradicate them, but they stab my soul one way or another. However, my scanner is rubbish, and all the online images I can find have the erroneous straight quote, so do me a favor and imagine the cover is typographically flawless, because the final product is.

Now I’ll review the actual text.

Renaissance Romp

This book has several things going for it. The plot races forward at a steady clip, seamlessly shifting from one plot arc to another. Although this is a YA book, Widdershins tackles adult issues—keeping food in her belly, balancing an investment portfolio, etc.—but she still keeps a youthful attitude and likeability. The book’s topics aren’t watered down for a younger audience either. For a novel labeled dark fantasy it’s on the light and friendly side of things, but it still fits comfortably in that sub-genre. The book also benefits from a fresher milieu than many secondary world fantasies: it is neither fully modern nor fully medieval, but takes root in a renaissance-style city called Davillon.

Although dark things happen in the book, it never stops being fun. Between Widdershins and Olgun, her personal god, nearly every page is filled with an element of sarcastic joy, despite the fact that at any given moment just about everything is going wrong. The characters make for good company, no matter the circumstances, which is not something I can say for every book I’ve read.

Some Quibbles

As with most books I review, I have a few quibbles. With Thief’s Covenant, most of them are on the prose level. Sometimes the humorous prose is overwrought, straining too hard for the laugh. Even so, there were plenty of times when it hit the sweet spot and I did laugh, and humor is more subjective than most things, so for some of you the jokes I find overwrought will hit you right on the funny bone.

There are also some more grammar- and usage-related issues: some rule-breaking that doesn’t seem to serve a purpose other than confusing me; some words (like miasma) that appear more frequently than they should (in my opinion); and some sentences I had to read multiple times to follow the action of a scene.

The good news: none of these issues stopped me from enjoying the story. It was fun, fast, and flavorful. I’ll be holding onto my copy, and the sequel, False Covenant, will most likely find its way onto my bookshelf. All minor quibbles aside, I can’t keep away from an upbeat character like Widdershins.

Cover illustration by Jason Chan.

Weekly Roundup: 2/11–2/17

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The Telegraph: Fairytales Too Scary for Modern Children, Say Parents

After my last post I thought it only fair to highlight that some people don’t think fairy tales are appropriate for children. I highly disagree, of course, but I am also aware that many fairy tales only became “children’s stories” when the Grimms put them in a book called Kindermärchen. It’s interesting to read the reasons why parents reject certain stories.

Publishers Weekly: Bookstore Sales Plunged in December, Slipped for Year

An interesting explanation of why bookstores can report higher sales individually, but the industry-wide surveys show decreases.

Clay Johnson: Is SEO Killing America?

This is a talk that was given at this year’s TOC. Johnson presents some interesting ideas, and it’s worth spending a few minutes to watch.

Foil Narratives & Fairy Tales

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Ivan Bilibin's illustration of "Vasilisa the Beautiful"

Fairy tales and folktales get handed down, repurposed, and woven into new contexts and patterns every day. We see them in ads and single-panel cartoons, in similes, short stories, and novels. And yet when you ask Western people to tell you the story of, say, Little Red Riding Hood, they’ll probably come up with a lot of the same basic stuff. Some people wonder why stories so well known can continuously find new life; others bemoan the loss of variety folk traditions used to have before they became standardized by the Brothers Grimm and Disney.

But for writers, the fact that there’s a “standard” version of most popular fairy tales is a boon.

The Power of Foil Narratives

When you retell a fairy tale, or when you use a fairytale motif in a scene, chapter, or sentence, you draw on a shared cultural background with your reader. Whatever you say with your fairy tale contrasts with whatever they already know. Initially, that sounds a bit unappealing (if you retell “Beauty and the Beast,” your story gets thrown up next to a golden ball gown and a singing teapot, whether you like it or not). But it really is an immensely powerful tool.

You’ve heard of foil characters, yes? Two characters who share certain things and throw their differences into relief? Using foil characters is a good way to strengthen your characterization and drive interest. With fairy tales, you get an entire foil narrative. Even if your story or scene shares very little with an “original” fairy tale (original is such a messy word when speaking of folklore), if you have a character wearing a red hood, you can evoke an entire parallel plot line that can throw your narrative into relief. Each choice you make gains force and momentum because it contrasts with the story your reader already has in his or her head.

Stories That Rely on Foils

You can use fairy tales as foil narratives in all sorts of ways, and as I said before, you don’t have to write a story that is solely a retold fairy tale to do it. Permit me a few examples.

  • Disney’s Enchanted is only really funny because viewers have a background in Disney fairy tales. Without them, the humor is much weaker.
  • Ditto with Shrek, only it’s much funnier because it contrasts with an entire tradition of animal bridegroom stories (“Beauty and the Beast,” “The Frog Prince,” etc.).
  • Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley embedded “Sleeping Beauty” into their novel Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming. The portion of the book that is a retold tale follows the standard exactly—prince fights his way through briars, kisses the sleeping princess into wakefulness, marries her, and resolves to live happily ever after—but the frame story of a demon playing puppet master lets the standard make a statement about free will.

Using Foils in Your Stories

You can employ a foil fairytale narrative by retelling a tale or merely evoking the idea of it—your reader already has the story in his or her head, so you don’t necessarily need to lay it out explicitly for them. Whether you’re embedding an abbreviated version of a tale in a scene or chapter, retelling the whole thing, or simply setting up a pleasant metaphor, you need give only the basic motifs because the standard fairy tale can do the rest of the work for you (you can give more, of course, but it isn’t necessary).

Some more examples.

  • To evoke “Little Red Riding Hood” use motifs like a waiting wolf, a journey through the woods, a basket of goodies, a red hood, or an ugly grandmother.
  • To evoke “Cinderella” use a glass slipper, a pumpkin coach, a stroke-of-midnight time limit, or a fairy godmother.
  • To evoke “Jack and the Beanstalk” use magic beans, a giant in the sky, or a singing harp.

I’m sure you can come up with more motifs you could use to evoke a foil narrative in your writing, so share them in the comments. Also share your favorite retold tales, or even your favorite “original” versions (I’m partial to bloody animal bride/bridegroom stories, myself).

Cultivate Creativity in Your Day Job & Down Time

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Creative Color in Your Day-to-Day

Before “breaking in” to a regular income–producing readership, most novelists, poets, and essayists toil away at day jobs while wordsmithing on the side. But just because you have a day job doesn’t mean you can’t exercise your creativity during the 9–5 grind. When you cultivate creativity in your day job and down time, you can approach your creative writing with a greater capacity to generate interesting ideas to communicate and intriguing ways of communicating them.

Creativity = Problem Solving

Creativity isn’t magic. There isn’t an Idea Muse who sends you incantations that conjure eloquence onto your blank pages. Creativity, at its most basic, is problem solving. It’s looking at the materials in front of you and devising a way to make them fulfill a need or desire you have. Author John Brown and the cast of Writing Excuses talked about this in a particularly good episode about the creative process.

Recognizing creativity as problem solving takes out a lot of the mystery of exercising it. There are problems that need to be solved in every situation a human being inhabits, and there are a few main steps to creatively solving problems in any given circumstance.

Learn your materials. Understand what you have available to help you solve your problem (whether that’s scissors, humor, or tax law). Be aware of your surroundings and resources.

Acquire your target. Most times you won’t have to create problems: they’ll come to you. Whether the problem is your children’s unwillingness to eat vegetables or all your wasted time at a slow desk job, there’s bound to be one or two basic issues you have to face regularly.

Apply your materials to your target. Obvious, isn’t it? Take what you have around you and use it to solve the problem in front of you. Find a way to make your grumpy coworker laugh; improve the office filing system; create a new product that fills a niche. Every time you find a new way to solve a problem, you become a little more practiced in the skill of creativity.

Problem Solving = Creative Writing Solutions

Using the process of knowing your resources and applying them to a specific target lets you practice a process that crosses over into your writing directly. When you’re writing, there are some tools you always have in your toolbox: plot, character, genre conventions, metaphor, scene changes, chapter breaks, punctuation, etc. You can use these in conventional ways, or you can turn them to unorthodox uses. (Similarly, you can use scissors as scissors or as an extension of your arm that helps you retrieve a document from the crevice between your desk and the wall. Or, you know, as a murder weapon or something.) If you keep an awareness of your resources and your target, you can use your exercised creativity chops to find inventive solutions that will delight a reader.

In each writing project you’ll also have project-specific tools: a character’s penchant for plums, the rhyme scheme you’ve been using for four stanzas, the death-theme you began on page 1. These are probably where the day-job creativity practice is most useful, especially the practice of making yourself aware of resources. The more aware you are of the tools you’ve given yourself, the better you’ll be at adapting those tools to plot twists, character arcs, and giving your reader a rollicking reading experience.

Creativity isn’t magic: it’s your applied problem solving skill. So the next time you run into a 9–5 roadblock, ask yourself, “How creative can I be today?”

Image by Simon Howden via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Weekly Roundup: 2/4–2/10

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Jeff Norton: Follow the Editor: A Recommendation Engine for Readers

This interesting piece looks at how editors, though vital to the traditional book-making process, are unknown to readers (unlike, for example, film directors and such). Norton postulates that traditional publishers could benefit from making their content curators—their editors—more of a branded selling point than they currently are.

Marie Brennan: Anthropological Warning Signs and How to Spot Them

Fantasy author and “ex-academic” Marie Brennan sheds some light on how to evaluate your research sources. Though this isn’t super publishing-related, I thought some of you fiction writers might appreciate some pointers on how to do good research. Brennan is in the middle of researching for a new novel, and she dissects an anthropology book to show you warning signs of bad research. If you’re not familiar with anthropology, but you use it for backstory and background information, it’s a helpful read.

Joshua Blimes: Do the Math

Agent Joshua Blimes breaks down the differences in author royalties for traditionally published hardcover, mass market paperback, and electronic books. He also tackles the differences for top-tier and mid-list writers, and ends by recommending that authors access P&Ls to help them calculate what sort of advance they should be able to negotiate out of a publisher.

When Should You Hire an Editor?

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As an all-purpose freelance editor, I field projects in all stages of development: brainstorming, developmental editing, line-by-line polishing, and the final spit-shine of proofreading. However, some individuals who contact me have projects that are not ready for an editor. If I take projects in all stages of development, how can any project be unready?

It depends on the project, and it depends on the author. First and foremost, before writers hire an editor, they should do enough work to make themselves proud. There are three main reasons why you should contract outside help with your writing, and the third reason doesn’t apply to everyone.

1. You have done all you can and you want your work to reach another level.

As per the Looseleaf editorial philosophy, I believe editors should help writers become better writers. That can’t happen if you, as the writer, throw down whatever comes to mind and chuck it at an editor. Chances are, you’ll chuck over a lot of stuff you could have fixed yourself, which means the editor wastes his or her time (and yours) fixing things you already know how to handle.

If you have 20 pages of a novel and a skeletal outline, you don’t yet need an editor: you need to write. If you have a manuscript with a chapter you know how to fix, you don’t yet need an editor: you need to revise.

But if you wrote the whole thing and tightened up all the chapters and sentences you could and you still want to take it up a notch, it may be time to bring in an editor. An editor can find what you couldn’t see yourself.

2. You have a specific change you want to make, and you’re not sure how to do it on your own (or that change would be many times easier for fresh eyes).

Many people rightly hire an editor when they have a specific task they want accomplished, but aren’t sure how to go about it. Some writers need to cut thousands of words but can’t decide what needs to go. Some researchers want to repurpose their work to reach a lay audience but don’t think they can see what needs to be changed. You might also need to condense a cast of characters, streamline your argument, or find where your plot won’t hold water.

This is a good time to get outside help. You have a specific task in mind, which makes it easier for the editor to help you.

This reason also applies to tasks like copyediting and proofreading, which are much easier for fresh eyes to do. For these types of editing, your specific task is taking out grammar, punctuation, and stylistic errors, and it’s easier for an editor to do that because he or she will not already be neck deep in your prose.

3. You’ve done all the work you’re keen on doing, but you need more work done.

The third reason most often comes up with researchers and businesses that are on tight deadlines. If you’re someone who needs to write to communicate, but you don’t pride yourself on your writing, then you might write the basics of what you need and have an editor to fix it up. Could you have done the task yourself? Maybe, but then again maybe you don’t consider writing your best work. Maybe your best work is the research, the ideas behind the business, or the conceptual work. The phrase-by-phrase writing doesn’t concern you as much, so passing that part to an editor or ghostwriter frees up more of your time for the parts in which you excel. You get to do more of the work that makes you proud.

I don’t recommend this reason for individuals who pride themselves on being writers. It’s rare for this reason to apply to a novelist, for example, because novelists are known primarily for their writing. Once you’ve done all the writing work you can, then you’re ready for an editor, and you can claim your own work with pride.

Leaflet Review: The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

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The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

“Dear You,

The body you are wearing used to be mine.”

So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by dead bodies—all wearing latex gloves. With no memory of who she is or how she got there, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and escape those who want to destroy her.

She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-level operative in the Checquy, a secret government agency that protects the world against supernatural threats—from sentient fungus to stampeding ectoplasm—while keeping the populace in the dark. But now there is a mole on the inside, and this person wants Myfanwy dead. […]

Suspenseful and hilarious […] The Rook is an outrageously inventive debut novel for readers who like their espionage with a dollop of purple slime, or their supernatural thrillers with an agenda and a pencil skirt.

In my first post of the year, I said The Rook was first on my list of books I look forward to in 2012 (both chronologically and otherwise). It didn’t disappoint, and I’m glad I own it so I can reread it in the future. There were a few main reasons I had for loving the book Daniel O’Malley wrote.

Premise

The pitch for The Rook intrigued me right from the start: the premise is unique because even though it follows a relatively common setup—Myfanwy Thomas lost her memory—the book tackles the concept from a new perspective. The old Myfanwy (who the “new” Myfanwy calls Thomas) has left letters, instructions, and binders full of briefing materials to guide the new Myfanwy, and the new Myfanwy is actually substantially different than Thomas. Thomas’s personality has been erased, so although both characters occupy/ied the same body and have the same skill set, they’re different people. Not to mention the fact that Myfanwy is a high-ranking official in “Her Majesty’s Supernatural Secret Service,” so it’s not like walking into her life is a walk in the park to begin with.

Voice

Any memory-loss plot will involve a lot of information being hurled at the reader (and the amnesiac protagonist), which makes such plots prone to infodumps. However, in The Rook the infodumps are laced with another thing I love about the book: a voice so playful and engaging that even personnel dossiers are a joy to read. The voice that infuses the storyline from beginning to end is a blast.

Emotion

The voice helps The Rook walk the line between humor and heart. There’s no doubt that it is a funny book (if the bunny and the octopus in the coat of arms on the cover didn’t give it away, I’m not sure what would). However, it tugs at your heartstrings too. A lot of the tugging is done by Thomas, the old Myfanwy, in her letters. The way I felt about Thomas progressed through several stages, ending in an affection that almost led to tears for me when I read the last chapter (but I was strong and resisted impulses to let my tear ducts leak).

Character

The stages of my feelings about Thomas mirrored a masterful character arc. I expected Myfanwy to progress through the book, to grow from a personality newborn into a likeable hero who could save the day and beat the bad guys. That isn’t to say her growth wasn’t a pleasure to see—on the contrary, the way she grew to meet the demands of Thomas’s old job and new foes had me laughing and rooting for her cover to cover. But I think the growth of Thomas surprised me more, and shows the unique quality level of The Rook better. Thomas could have been a stagnant character, dispensing advice and knowledge from a static position of competency. With the playful voice, she could have been that way and I wouldn’t have minded a lick. But she went from a rather weak person who earned very little respect to a lovable, sacrificing tragic figure. I was terribly sad that the world at the end of the book couldn’t have both Thomas and Myfanwy.

There were other reasons I liked the book—it doesn’t rely on a romantic subplot, the supernatural powers were innovative and bizarre, the characters are people first and heroes/villains second, the beginning and end have a completely satisfying chiasmic structure—and I’m sure you can find plenty more. So get thyself a copy and enjoy the ride. Then join me in anticipating the sequel O’Malley has already promised.

You can also follow Myfanwy Thomas’s Twitter feed, @RookFiles. Prior to the book’s release Thomas tweeted, but now it’s Myfanwy. She doesn’t post often, but it’s always fun when she does.

Book jacket design by Lindsey Andrews

Weekly Roundup: 1/27–2/3

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I only have these two links for you this week, but they’re really good.

Kristin Nelson: The Rapidly Evolving Role of Agent

Literary agents are adapting to the changing landscape of publishing, and though some do it by introducing a conflict of interest (by becoming digital publishers), the Nelson Literary Agency has designed a platform that allows them to help their clients take advantage of electronic markets and avoid taking on the publisher role. Check it out. If you get confused on some of the finer points (Kristin is mainly giving an overview), look at Courtney Milan’s opinion on the subject (Milan is one of Kristin’s clients). She goes into some examples of how, in the NLA model, the agents act as liaisons, not as license holders.

Jane Friedman: 5 Attitudes Toward Publishing You Should Avoid

Friedman looks at five attitudes she hears people tout and that make her worry about them. She asks you to really think about the things you say and make sure you know what you want.