HAPPY SEPTEMBER!!!
We’re officially in my favourite month of the year, not just because it has my birthday (thank you everyone for your kind wishes a few weeks ago!), but because it’s the first month of spring over here in Australia, and that means a perfect balance between cool, crisp nights and warm (but not too hot) sunny days. I know people in other parts of the world are enjoying the beginning of autumn (or “fall” — like, whhhhyyyy? Is it because the leaves fall? IS THAT IT?) so I hope you’re loving the transition between seasons as much as I am!
… I’ve also just realised that I opened this newsletter by talking about the weather, of all things, so I’m going to move on quickly and hope nobody notices… *Hides face*
Ahem.
So!
Last newsletter was suuuuuper long, so I’m endeavouring to keep this one at least a smidge shorter. I don’t actually have a heap of news this month, which means it’s mostly fun stuff, including:
Writing/editing/publishing update
Teaser quote
Opinion: Are tropes being overused in books and/or marketing?
Q&A (three of your questions answered!)
Events (Sunshine Coast, QLD)
What I’ve been reading and watching
And that’s it! Nice and quick! (*Laughs doubtfully*)
I’m about to jump straight in, but before I do, I want to quickly mention that I feel like a bit of a goober because I didn’t realise there was a comment option on these posts/newsletters, so sorry to anyone who has commented in the past and been met by *crickets*. I’ll try to take better note of this feature in the future!
All right, here we go!
WRITING/EDITING/PUBLISHING UPDATE:
I’m a little concerned you’re all going to start throwing things at me, but, ugh, I’M SORRY, I STILL CAN’T SHARE ANY PUBLISHING NEWS. There’s a couple of good things about this, though! The main one being that there’s now SO MUCH NEWS that has piled up over the last few months (and one thing I’ve been keeping secret for OVER A YEAR) so when I’m finally allowed to start sharing things, it’ll be like the floodgates have opened.
And another really cool thing is that, despite the delay in sharing these announcements, especially the ones relating to my next two(!!) book releasing, the actual publishing side of things has still been ticking away. Case in point: we’ve almost completely locked in the cover for my next book — it’s currently going through the very final touches — and IT IS BEAUTIFULLLLL!!! I nearly cried when I found out the name of the designer that my publishers had hired, since I absolutely love so many of their other covers, and I couldn’t believe that they would be working on one for me! BUT THEY DID! AND IT’S STUNNING! *Sobs forever*
Obviously, I can’t share any of this with you juuuuuust yet (including the name of the designer) BUT BUT BUT I’m so confident that the news must be coming soon! I’m not going to jinx it by saying “hopefully by next month’s newsletter” since, honestly, I’m clearly in a season of growing my patience (le sigh) and I’ve had to accept that I simply don’t know when things will be announced. But what I can promise is that the MOMENT I’m given the green light to start sharing things, you’ll all be the first to know! Woo!
In the meantime…
I’ve been a busy bee on my end working through the copy edits for my next book (the one the cover is nearly done for), and I’ve been absolutely loving the challenge of this edit. It’s actually more a line edit than a copy edit (kinda a combination of the two), and really the last chance for any bigger changes, so it requires a bit of a fine-tooth comb look at every word and sentence.
It’s also highly humbling (aka mortifying), and definitely the round where authors such as myself go “OMGGGGG I’M A TERRIBLE WRITER!! WHAT IS THIS TRASH!?” — and that’s because a few larger structural rounds have already gone by, so surely the manuscript should be in okay shape by now, right? RIGHT!?
Wrong!
Maybe structurally things are solid (character arcs and plot, etc., all of which are obvs important), but when it comes to individual word placement and/or sentence structure, it begs repeating: humbling and mortifying.
I’m pretty fortunate — I’ve had a lot of editors over my career comment that I’m a fairly clean writer, so there’s not usually a heap of big-picture changes that need to be done in any of my editing rounds. (Not always the case! I’m not a magical unicorn! It’s just a generalised observation over — *counts fingers* — 12 books that have released.) But that’s not to say I don’t have my own smaller writing vices, of which there are many. And in a copy edit/line edit round, they become glaringly obvious.
For example, feast your eyes on this embarrassment:
HOW MANY TIMES ARE THEY GOING TO LOOK ON THE ONE PAGE?!?! Like, seriously. Remember what I said about humbling? REMEMBER HOW I ALSO SAID MORTIFYING?!? Yep, that last one, especially.
I’m actually cringing at the thought of sharing this with you, but I’m also hoping it’ll offer encouragement to any writers out there. The books you see on shelves, the ones written by your favourite authors, they have a whole team of eagle-eyed editors who have helped make them what they are.
Thankfully, my editors (who are the absolute BEST and I will most definitely be sharing their names and singing their praises once I’m allowed to talk about this book) noted quickly with this edit that there are three words in particular that I overuse at different points throughout the manuscript — “look” (looking/looks/looked), “just,” and “even.” Any time these words were repeated within a few sentences or paragraphs, they highlighted them (as you can see above), which had the benefit of making it super obvious that I needed to make some word changes, while also made it excruciatingly painful for me to see just how poor my writing was. (Okay, I’m probably not being fair to myself by saying that. The example above has been largely redacted and doesn’t give you context — a lot of the “look” words on that specific page are things that are repeated deliberately, and many (not all) will be remaining in because of that reason. But I wanted to show you the worst example I could find so that you would hopefully be encouraged, and so that I could remind you all about how amazing good editors are!!)
So anyway, once I uncurl myself from my humiliated ball of humiliation (another example of “great” writing, right there…), I’ll be returning this finished round of edits later this week, and then —
IT’S OFF TO TYPESETTING!!!
That’s the part where it becomes an actual book (in digital form)! And from that, I’m pretty sure ARCs/proofs are being printed and sent out! OMG!! *Hyperventilating* (Also: don’t ask me who gets those. I genuinely do not know, nor can I help you get one, sorry! If I’m sent a few, I’ll do a giveaway, but that might not happen, so don’t hold your breath!)
There’s still some proofreading rounds to happen after typesetting and ARCs are sent out (that’s why they’re called “uncorrected proofs”), as well as pass pages (final reads), but all those last rounds are just to check for any missed minor things, like typos or formatting tweaks, etc. So really, once this current round is returned, all the big stuff is done! If nothing else, I’ll be able to report back about all that next month, so stay tuned to find out how everything is progressing then! (And send me all your encouraging thoughts to get me out of my humiliating ball of humiliation in the meantime…)
TEASER QUOTE:
Here’s a fun teaser from the book I just told you all about. I honestly love these characters so much and absolutely can’t wait for you to meet them!!
OPINION: ARE TROPES BEING OVERUSED IN BOOKS AND/OR MARKETING?
If you follow me on Instagram and watch my Stories, you would have seen that I put a poll up a few days ago offering four different “opinion” topics that I could discuss in this newsletter. I let you vote for your top pick, and the result was actually very close between all four — which is great, since it means the next three newsletters are going to have fun opinion pieces as well! (I’ll do the poll again next month so you can choose then, too!)
The topic of “tropes” won by a fraction (literally by only 1%!!) so that’s what I’m going to discuss today!
To start, just to make sure everyone knows what I’m talking about when I use the word “trope,” think of it like a plot device or character trait or theme (etc.) that you might see included in numerous books. Some examples off the top of my head include:
When my first book came out nearly ten years ago (eeek!), times were a little different to now, and I learned the hard way that the word “trope” should be avoided at all cost. Tropes were synonymous with clichés, and they were therefore “bad writing.”
I actually have a vivid memory of being at one of my first ever writers festivals and being so nervous because I was a baby author who felt scared and unsure and alone (okay, so I still feel all those things, but without the “baby” part before the “author” now, ooof), and I was speaking on a panel with a group of literary authors (to this day, I still think there was a schedule mishap, because it’s very strange to mix genre authors with literary authors at these kinds of events — side note, here’s a handy Reddit post if you’re unsure of the difference between these two things). We’d reached the time for audience questions, and someone asked if there were any tropes in our books. It was my turn to answer first, so I enthusiastically shared a few that came to mind for my Medoran Chronicles series — found family, the Chosen One, good vs evil, reluctant hero, slow burn romance, hidden identities — and then I turned to my fellow panelists to hear what tropes they’d used.
I’m not going to share what happened next, but let’s just say I’ve never felt more out of place than I did in that moment when I realised what it meant to be the only genre writer on that panel. (Don’t worry, there was a flip-side to wanting to crawl into a hole, since the person who asked the question — and many other people in the audience — actually liked the tropes that I listed, so I got a stack of new readers that day. All the feels!)
Anyway, that was a learning experience for me, but fortunately the next event I did was at a comic-con convention, and everyone there was alllllll about the tropes (authors, attendees, organisers, everyone — all definitely my people!), and that was where I realised it was actually okay to use and talk about tropes. It’s not always the dreaded T-word-that-shall-result-in-poo-poo-expressions. Fancy that!
Even more fortunately, there’s been a shift since those early years of my career, and tropes seem to be much more widely celebrated now, not just at genre-focused conventions like comic-con. That brings us to the opinion question I’m answering, which is, funnily enough, whether we’ve swung too far in the other direction. Are tropes now being OVERused?
My opinion?
This is tricky to answer, especially given the emotional entanglements I have from my early days of feeling like I was doing something “wrong” simply for loving and using tropes. But the simple fact is, I like starting a new book knowing it’s going to have some of my favourite tropes in it, and I equally like knowing if books have tropes that I just don’t enjoy reading (things like miscommunication, cheating, and love triangles, for example, though there are always exceptions — I’ll talk more about my love triangle exceptions when I do my opinion piece on that topic in another newsletter!).
So personally, I appreciate tropes that are well-written in books, just as I appreciate how effective they can be as a means to market said books.
But.
BUT.
The thing is, I’m finding that the more people are using tropes to promote books, the more the lines are being blurred for whether those tropes are actually in their books.
Take enemies-to-lovers, for example. It’s easily one of the more popular tropes to hook readers, and therefore using it for marketing and promo helps sell books. But the problem is, the definition of “enemies” is becoming more and more watered down. I’ve lost count of how many purported “enemies-to-lovers” books I’ve read in recent years where the characters in question have (at most) vaguely disliked each other for a few pages, often for little (or no) valid reason, and then they skip straight to the lovers part — like, what is that? That is not enemies-to-lovers. Give me the actual enemies who have genuine reasons to hate each other, which means they then have to go through delicious character development over the course of entire books (sometimes even series) in order to finally come to a place where that hatred shifts into love — that’s enemies-to-lovers. Some popular examples that I feel have done this trope well include (!!SPOILERS!!) Violet and Xaden from Fourth Wing, Feyre and Rhys from ACOMAF, and Juliette and Warner from Shatter Me. Those characters all despised each other (and/or just acted it well, for their own reasons that came to light later), so it made the pay off so much more worth it when they finally ended up together.
Seriously, I can’t be the only one who has experienced this. Tell me honestly: have you ever read an “enemies-to-lovers” book that left you disappointed because they were never really enemies?
So all this is to say, in the cases where tropes are used in a misleading way just for the sake of promo and/or building hype, that’s definitely not something I think is great, since it results in false expectations and, often, disappointed readers.
But I do, however, still think tropes themselves are great (when written well), and as I mentioned earlier, I love going into books knowing some of the things I can look forward to. So I’m on the fence for this opinion piece about whether tropes are overused or not, because yes, they can be, but when they’re genuine and not just fudged for the sake of reeling in new readers, then it doesn’t matter if they’re overused, since they’re delivering what they promise.
(And just as a sneaky fun note before I open a poll to see where you stand on the yay-or-nay of tropes being overused, my next YA fantasy series has actual, genuine, legitimate enemies-to-lovers (as in, very valid and prolonged reasons for the hatred), and I had SO MUCH FUN writing the character arcs through that. Eeee, I’m so excited for you to read it when the time comes!!!)
All right, poll time!
Q&A:
Time for me to answer some more of your questions! I’m keeping it to just three this month to prevent this newsletter from becoming 500 pages long (again).
Q: How do you create maps for your fantasy worlds?
I have no shame in admitting I’m not an artist. Like, I struggle with stick figures. So map designing is not my forte.
To use an example from The Prison Healer, this is my first ever depiction of Zalindov prison, sketched out on my trusty whiteboard:
Can we all take a moment to appreciate my trees (broccoli?) in the top left corner? And my attempt at a quarry in the top right corner? Okay, so both those things suck, but I’m genuinely proud of my dogs patrolling the outer fences — they actually look doggish, with ears and tails and everything. Go me!
Overall, I think we can all agree that the above map is, um, special. And thankfully, I’m not one of those people who thinks that anything I create is incredible (the opposite, actually), so there was no way in the world that I was going to include it when I was seeking agent representation for this book, let alone going on submission to publishers for it. That meant I had to find a way to digitise it somehow, which led me to creating this:
Ignoring the fact that the quarries look like cauliflowers mixed with clouds mixed with farts (how is that combination even possible?! But you see it too, right?!), this is a much better version than my whiteboard attempt. But still, it’s nothing compared to what was created by the ridiculously talented map designer who was commissioned for this series, Francesca Baerald, who turned my above concept into this masterpiece:
Seriously, how incredible is that! She even managed to add in the underground tunnels and the aquifer!!! And her quarries definitely do not look like cauliflower cloud farts, that’s for sure!
But Francesca didn’t stop with just one map. For anyone who has read The Prison Healer series, you’ll know that it also has a second map, one showing the eight kingdoms of Wenderall.
Alas, I don’t have a copy of the whiteboard sketch I did (probably for the best, really), but this is the digitised version I created:
Again, like my digitised Zalindov map, it’s not terrible. BUT it’s absolutely nothing — NOTHING — compared to the phenomenal version that Francesca created:
I’m still absolutely obsessed with both these maps, even years later. “Stunning” doesn’t begin to describe them!!
Now to circle back to the question asked here about how I create the maps for my fantasy worlds, the answer is, the maps you see in my books are definitely not created by me. But the concepts are, since obvs I have to send through descriptions of the worlds/places in order for designers to bring them to life. That’s a completely different kind of answer, though (ie. how I envision my worlds), so I’ll save it for a future newsletter!
Q. What music do you listen to when you write?
I don’t! I work best in complete silence (I get distracted way too easily (shocker!), and also struggle any time I’m overstimulated by sounds), so that’s the environment I strive for when I’m writing. When it’s impossible, like if my neighbours are having a party or something, I use my trusty Loop earplugs (not an ad, I just love them), since they help muffle the sound. If I’m somewhere really loud or distracting, like on a plane or in an airport, I do one of two things: I listen to instrumental and/or classical music that doesn’t have lyrics (my go-tos are Ludovico Einaudi, Lindsey Stirling, Yiruma, and The Piano Guys), OR I listen to white noise (usually this one). Admittedly, I do tend to get a bit of a headache after listening to the white noise for too long, but it does the trick when I’m in any absolutely-must-get-work-done desperate situations.
Q. Do you write chronologically?
Yes, always! Though there’s the rare occasion where I might skip ahead — for example, I wrote the last few pages of The Prison Healer very early on while drafting, since I knew exactly where I wanted that book to end, and needed to have it down on paper so I could work towards it with careful foreshadowing.
There are other times where I might jump a little ahead, too, like if there’s a fun, bantery conversation I want to include, or a specific dialogue line comes to me that I want to make happen… but for the most part, I almost always find that I struggle to make the writing flow seamlessly to incorporate these moments, and I have to be careful to not make them feel forced. Usually, I end up re-writing them in one way or another once I actually reach the point where they belong, so it’s not a very productive thing for me to do overall, which is why I avoid it when I can. Chronological writing works best for my brain, so that’s what I try to stick with!
EVENTS:
SUNSHINE COAST: Here’s your final reminder that I’ll be attending the inaugural Sunshine Coast Hinterland Writers Festival (SCHWF) in early October for a solo in-conversation session followed by a book signing. Full details can be found here, but to summarise:
Date/Time: Saturday 12th October at 12:30pm (the convo will be approx 6o mins including audience Q&A at the end — bring your questions!)
Signing: Straight after the talk concludes, in the same venue. A bookseller will be on site for you to buy books, or you can bring your own from home.
Cost: Tickets for my session are $16.75 and you can buy them here (scroll to the bottom to find my event listing, but def check out all the others as well since there are so many cool sessions happening!)
Fun fact: I recently found out that fellow Aus author pal (and publishing house sister? Is that a thing?) Stacey McEwan is going to be at this festival, and while we’ve been following each other over socials for ages, we’ve never actually met in person. So I’m def hoping our paths finally cross! (Related side note: the final book in her adult fantasy romance trilogy just released, so for anyone like me who can’t handle waiting between books, now’s the time to jump into these beauties. I sure will be!)
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:
I was actually meant to be on an editing deadline over my birthday, but my lovely publishing team at (REDACTED UNTIL I CAN ANNOUNCE) moved the dates around to let me have some time off (awwww! You have no idea how much that meant to me!!)… and during that time, I finally read Penn Cole’s Kindred’s Curse books (or at least the three that are already out). I’ve been seeing these everywhere over social media, so I was keen to discover why people are loving them so much!
To be honest, there were times when I wanted to shake the main character (like, hard), but overall I found this an easy-to-read and enjoyable romantasy series with some cool worldbuilding and characters. And I absolutely loved Sorae the gryvern! I WANT ONE!! I wish the final book was out since it would have been nice to binge all four in a row, but it was still fun to sink into a fantasy world over the course of a few books, which is something I haven’t done in a while.
(Note: these are adult/NA books, not YA, so warning for any younger peeps reading this, since there is explicit content and other triggers, etc.)
WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING:
Movies:
I actually enjoyed all of these??? (I say it as a question, since that’s so rare for me!) If we’re talking re-watchability, then Twisters probably comes out on top (it was such a fun nostalgic throwback to the original!), followed by IF (I ugly-cried at the end, though I’m still not sure why?!?), then Uglies (I always love a good YA dystopian!). I probs wouldn’t re-watch The Union, but that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it — just less than the other three, comparatively!
As for TV shows:
I wouldn’t say I super-loved any of these, but if I had to pick a favourite, it’d definitely be the final season of The Umbrella Academy, if only because the characters are familiar by now and you’re rooting for them after everything they’ve been through (which is a lot, yikes). The show itself is real gritty though, so not the kind of thing I’d sit down and be like, aww, this’ll be a cute, fun watch. Nope nope nope.
And speaking of gritty, ooof, Kaos was difficult to stomach at times. I pushed through because the concept is so cool, the production value was awesome, and Jeff Goldblum is always fun to watch (it’s like he was born for this role), plus I managed to get invested in the lives of a lot of the characters (LIKE THE KITTEN — *SOBS*). But still, I was def uncomfortable at times while watching. Not for the faint of heart, this one!
As for The Perfect Couple, it was fine, but I guessed who the murderer was by like the second episode, so I probably would have found more enjoyment in it if that hadn’t happened. It’s also not for the faint-hearted, given its numerous triggering/problematic/dysfunctional themes, so keep that in mind!
(I feel like I should note here that the above are just my candid opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt. Watch what you want to watch! Love what you want to love! That’s the whole point of “entertainment”!!)
Aaaaaand we’ve come to the end of another newsletter ! (So much for it being shorter this time, yeeesh. That’s clearly something I still need to work on!)
Catch you next month!
As someone who has listened to your past 3 newsletters I love your random rambles there also is fun to listen to and I love hearing your thought process as you edit the newsletter and I’m genuinely so excited to go to your event at the sunny coast on the 12th
i dunno about everyone else but i love the long newsletters! very personable and fun to read (almost lol) every month!!