Now most of you know that I am what the industry considers a ‘hybrid’ author – one with works published traditionally as well as others that have been self-published. It’s quite the lucrative place to be, for if your traditionally placed work does well, then readers invariably google “What else has she written?” and discover the self-published works online, where the royalties are higher. Now for me, I’m in a strange place because my self-published books are doing well and my traditionally-published books aren’t actually published yet but still being ‘shopped’ at several big houses. So, if I’m not really a hybrid, what in the fantastical world am I?

Schizophrenic, that’s what.

I find these two extremes of the publishing process warring within me. I have a wild indie spirit and I LOVE the challenges that indie publishing brings. I love designing my own covers, finding new marketing outlets, running new campaigns. I actually love wrestling with the pros and cons of KDP Select vs diversification with Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, etc. I take inordinate glee in finding and confirming a pricing ‘sweet spot’ that results in improved sales and seeing the positive reviews mount as readers are drawn into the fantastical world of the Upper Kingdom. And you know what? I long to do the same with COLD STONE & IVY, the series that is currently out on submission with the Big 5.

Deep down, I really want to take the reins back on this baby. I long to release the tag line and the amazing cover and watch it race up the Amazon charts. I long to wait a strategic 6 months before releasing Book 2 and then wrestle with my time as to writing Book 3 or Upper Kingdom Book 4. I have to admit, I love that crazy, messy, uncharted Indie book world and want to take a deep breath and dive in with both feet.

And then, I find myself googling publishers.

Publishers for the Upper Kingdom series, publishers that accept previously self-published novels, publishers that are currently seeking new and innovative works and I wonder at my behavior. Just a few months back, my agent and I were in negotiations with a small but growing press who had made me an offer. At first I was deliriously happy – finally! Publication! But quickly, the glow faded when I realized that they’d likely change my covers, run their own promotions, do their own editing, etc, etc, etc. I realized also that I would no longer be charting my own course but would be subject to the conditions and clauses that I had agreed to. So, Jen and I decided to keep the Upper Kingdom separate for now, keep it mine until the day when a really sweet offer comes along. I was good with that. I was fine. I was relieved.

And tonight, I found myself googling publishers again.

Is it the validation I’m seeking? I only have to read a review for that. Is it the stamp of professionalism I lack? The ages-old tradition of Brick and Mortar stores, of Bestseller lists and author signings and the like? Is it the relationship between an author and a really keen editor (which is so gratifying), or the notion of a team of people who are behind me and my book, wanting to see it do well and taking it to places I can never take it on my own? Is it the possibilities of foreign rights, and movie rights and audio rights and marketing? Is it the idea of sitting down with a senior editor and putting pen to contract and shaking a hand the way it has been done for over a hundred years? Is it the simple love of a bookshop stocking my book - something that is, for the most part, denied to the world of Indie publishing? What is that deep, visceral need that keeps drawing me back to the halls of traditional publishing?

As I said, I am an Indie in my heart, but I wonder if it isn’t my head that’s traditional? I wonder if there isn’t that constant life battle between those two facets of my personality that will always be at war with each other? The heart vs the mind is an ages-old conflict, and probably one of the richest in both a literal and literary sense. Can they co-exist without destruction? Can I wear two hats - a Bohemian beret one day, then a Wall Street fedora the next? How about a Steampunk bowler? After all, I am writing two distinct series. Maybe they are meant to be published differently so maybe I am doing the right thing, walking two very different roads, wearing very different hats for both. No wonder Alice’s Hatter was Mad…

So, living as a schizophrenic, conflicted writer. Does seem rather true to type. Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, even dear Philip K. Dick, not to mention Tolstoy – just a few authors who have struggled with legitimate mental issues. Makes mine seem small and rather petty, but still. They are mine.

And I really shouldn’t complain. After all, I do have some really cool hats now.

When I’m working on revising/editing a novel, I need to have what I call the “Little Folder of Love.” It’s a folder that sits on your desktop, visible but not distracting, where you put all the scenes you’ve needed to cut. All the little bits of characterization, all those sweet or funny, poignant or thought-provoking scenes that flesh out a story but do not move it along. In a big novel big (124,000+ words) or of this nature (Epic Fantasy or Gothic thriller), you must be a butcher, cutting things that impeded the rush of the plot to its inexorable climax. In a word, you have to Kill your Darlings.

William Faulkner coined that phrase almost a century ago and it still rings true for writers today. We love these little scenes; we’ve invested such time and attention into crafting them. They are vignettes of character and mood, comedy or pathos and we love them. Sometimes even, the writing is surprisingly brilliant. So what if they have to go? What do we do with them? Can we really kill them, as Faulkner urges? Doesn’t that diminish our author’s voice, that intuitive stamp of individuality that marks our work as different from someone else’s? Are we really so callous as to highlight and delete something that may have consumed hours, if not days of our lives?

I can’t. Not yet, anyway. Hence my Little Folder of Love. My agent, Jennifer Udden, suggested it to me during a phone conversation regarding the editing process. Set up a folder to house all the scenes because you may never know when they might work somewhere else. Perhaps they will become a little novelette of their own, after the original has taken off. Imagine little snippets of story from the world of Harry Potter – scenes of Hermione and Ron agonizing over textbooks, or Hagrid feeding a happy hungry griffon, or Harry bonding with Sirius Black over tea and treacle. I could release a collection of such scenes later or on my website as little extras, or bonus material, or teasers.

So I did it. I made that Little Folder of Love and it contains scenes now from all three Upper Kingdom books as well as Cold Stone & Ivy 1 & 2. (Those I’m beginning to call the Empire of Steam, because I have many series that can/will take place in that ‘verse. It makes my world-building brain very happy.) It also came in very handy during the writing of CS&I 2: The Crown Prince, because I could move scenes where they needed to go, pick and choose snippets of conversation and manipulate the story arc in a way that made me very proud. I am growing up and so is my technique. Stephen King would be proud too. I don't know yet about Faulkner.

But sometimes I just go and look into that Little Folder. It makes me happy. I can read scenes and the characters talk to me all over again, tell me why they need to live and how I am the only one who can give them life. It makes me wonder if someday, there will be fanfic written of Kerris and Fallon the same way it’s written of Hermione and Ron. Will there be Kirah’s? (Shippers of Kirin and Sherah?) Or what about shippers of Ivy and Christien instead of Ivy and Sebastien? Will they begin to have adventures in other people’s minds and take on lives of their very own, lives that I will ultimately have no control over? Will someone be bold enough to connect the Upper Kingdom with the Empire of Steam and write something that blows even my world-building mind apart at the seams? What a Pandora’s Box this folder has become!

That’s why Faulkner killed them. He didn’t have laptops or folders other than the paper kind. He couldn’t afford the real estate that would be required to house those scenes. Easier to draw a red line through them and move on. And there are times when I have done it – highlighted an entire paragraph and hesitated a moment before clicking Delete. Then you gasp, release a deep cleansing breath and move on. It really is the best way to go, when all is said and done. But I’m not there, not yet. There is still too much residual emotion. The brain still wars with the heart.

So for now, the Little Folder sits in the top left hand corner of the screen, filled with scenes that I’m glad are still there. I can see Faulkner rolling his eyes, I can hear his long-suffering sigh but louder than these are the laughing/fighting/cursing of those characters in that folder, those extraneous scenes, those useless Darlings of my literary mind. I don’t have it in me to kill them just yet.

I may need to call on Major Ursa for that.

This will be a cross-blog with the Imagination Station because of the illustrations being featured but still, I think you'll like it. I've long been a fan of anime-inspired illustrator Neisanna. I just love her style - very deft, skilled and emotive. Since she is a friend, I asked her if she'd be interested in doing some prelim sketches of the gang of COLD STONE & IVY and she jumped at the chance. She works both with pencils and photoshop and her layering is a joy to watch.

Physically, Ivy is Welsh, with great green eyes, freckles and masses of dark wavy hair. She is short, slim and tom-boyish - with a preference for men's clothing and bowler hats. I sent Neisanna some images of actresses I see when writing Ivy's character (namely Jenna Coleman and Poppy Drayton) for her to see but mainly, I just wanted to let this amazing artist percolate the idea of Ivy in her creative brain for a while before putting pen to paper or stylus to pad! Take a look at these great results!

“By Christmas, I had an offer of publication and two agents vying for the right to represent me and by January, I had signed with Jennifer Udden of the Donald Maass Literary Agency, a small but prestigious firm specializing in SciFi/Fantasy. I had fans crying for more of the Upper Kingdom but I had work to do to get CS&I ready for the ‘Big Six.’ What to do? What to do? Could I write one novel and edit another at the same time? All of this after hours of day job, parenting, being a wife, walking my dogs, shoveling snow, etc? That was a heck of a lot of work! Could I do it?

Of course I could. I buckled down and got to work.”

So first up, edits for CS&I. It was a hard task – beefing up the character of Christien de Lacey and cutting the scenes with Davis Savage. In a novel this big, EVERYTHING needs to serve the plot, and while Davis’ scenes were very entertaining, they did not do this effectively. I put them in a folder (read the next blog entitled “Little Folder of Love”), had to reimagine how the rest of the story would be impacted and moved on. I finished the first round in two months and sent it off to Jen for approval.

At this point, I had pretty much fleshed out how SONGS would go and had been writing that on and off since January but I put it on hold to attend the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York. It was a great conference as it focused on being a hybrid author, (having works both traditionally- and self-published) and it was looking like I was falling into that category. I had the good fortune to attend a workshop with Donald Maass, the head of my literary agency, and the things he said turned my writing upside down. Immediately, I emailed Jen to tell he that, based on Donald’s input, I was revising CS&I a second time and I plowed through that like a surgeon, cutting and stitching and reimagining this Empire of Steam through Ivy’s eyes. Another two months and I sent it back to her, exhausted but pretty happy with how it was shaping up. Christien’s role was increased even more so that it was a trio of main characters now and their voices were equally strong and true.

Add into the mix, an offer for the Upper Kingdom series from PYR Publishing, a division of Prometheus Books. I had submitted them over a year ago, when I first began that new and sparkling submission process without an agent. Here, more than a year later, it was plucked out of the slush pile by a lovely young editor and she was excited to learn that I was now repped by an agent of Jen’s caliber. Less excited, however, to learn that in that year and a half of slush limbo, I had self-published the books on Amazon. Pyr had just instituted a new policy closing their doors on self-published works and that disqualified them from joining their stable. Anything else I would write, they would be delighted to look at, just not the Upper Kingdom. I was sad. Really sad. Really, really sad and second-guessed myself for weeks. Hind-sight is a killer.

But I’m not one to wallow and I needed to finish SONGS. The interesting thing about this process was the fact that I had given myself a deadline. I had never written under a deadline before. I had just started and worked on a project until it was finished and with me, that could easily have taken years. In fact, with JOURNEY it did, years and years and years. With WALK, it was quicker, only one year or so for the first draft. With CS&I, it was 7 months. It wasn’t that I was getting more efficient, it was rather the fact that I had ‘come out of the closet’ as an author and was setting aside dedicated time to write. My family was surprisingly okay with it and they knew they could always find me in the evening, sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, three happy sleepy dogs and my laptop. Every evening.

I gave myself to September. 3 months. I had already started. Surely I could write a novel of 125,000 words in 3 months. Deadlines were a reality in the publishing world. I needed to see if I could do this, if I had the chops and the discipline and the talent. And so, as August wore on, I knew SONGS would be a very different book than either of the three I had previously written. I could easily have written an entire book on Solomon, Kerris and Fallon’s journey to the New World and maybe someday I will. But pragmatically speaking, because of the differing timelines, their story was best served in flashbacks. Not generally my taste or style of writing but other than two gigantic tomes that I didn’t have time to write, SONGS needed to be lean and sharp and cinematic. Because I had a deadline. A line of dread. A Dreadline.

But finish it I did. Sent it off to beta readers, polished off that gorgeous cover and put it up on Amazon. And yes, it sold. The writing in that book (deadline constraints and all) is pure cinematic imagery and I am very proud of it, despite the fact that I would like to have had more time. Maybe, one day, I’ll rework it and publish it as a ‘Director’s Cut’, with a Book 1 and Book 2. Just a thought.

Jen had sent CS&I back for yet a 3rd round, this one requiring some serious word-count attention and some lagging middle bits. But I had just turned out a 125,000 word, 500 page novel in record time so I was hot. I was smoking. And I did it, tightening the middle (beginning of Part II) and changing the ‘quirk’ to ‘threat.’ Once again, it required some serious reconstruction and by the end of September I was completely lost inside my own head. I had read and reread, edited and re-edited to the point of confusion. It had become so blurred in my mind – what had I changed, what had I hadn’t. I had lost my handle on the story and just couldn’t keep it straight anymore. I was sure it was good, but I really couldn’t be 100% certain. Not anymore.

So I sent it off to Jen, still 144,000 words but 144,000 words of tight thrilling paranormal steampunk spookiness. The Upper Kingdom books were selling nicely and I was learning the world of marketing (something you must do if you make that decision to self-publish). I was taking webinars, writing blogs, working my FB page (which you should totally check out if you haven’t already) but still, even with all this writing work, it’s not the same as writing. It was cold, it was October with a new NaNoWriMo around the corner. COLD STONE & IVY 2 was calling…