A copy of Duck Blood Soup was given to an artist-friend yesterday so that he can begin work on the cover art as well as a map of the countries of Ozeanchor and Eizenfeng. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. After I get the artwork back, I will do the cover lettering and finish up the formatting for the Kindle submission.
We considered adding a small picture at the start of each chapter, but not sure how popular that is on the eReaders like Kindle.
After a lot of research and conversations with agents and advisers, we’ve decided to move forward with creating a Kindle version of Duck Blood Soup. This means a lot of time working on formatting, another pass on editing, and getting with an artist friend to create the cover art and a map of our world.
Look for more updates coming soon.
Even though we thought we were done with this round of edits, Frank and I both had some interesting revelations. We independently decided that different sections of the State Dinner chapter needed revising, based on what we knew about the characters involved. It was one of those fun cases where previous character development influenced what happens in the book.
The second revelation for me involved a chapter where I had written the characters into a corner and we had spent several days trying to find a resolution that didn’t involve deus ex machina. I think what we had was reasonable, but I’m waiting to hear if Frank likes my revised resolution better.
For me, the funnest aspects of writing Duck Blood Soup was watching the characters take on a life of their own, and writing the characters into impossible situations and then working out the puzzle to resolve the situation, preferably without killing everyone off.
After graduating law school together, Kimberly and Jenna went off to practice law…for a while. Then Kimberly became a fudge queen while Jenna became a rock star. After having two delicious sons, in 2005 Kimberly “Momma” Reiner started a cottage industry – Momma Reiner’s Fudge – which was recently featured as one of Oprah’s Favorite Things. Also, Kimberly has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show, making her fudge right alongside Martha. Jenna has been the lead singer of all female rock group Vixen since 2001. Recently, Jenna became a mom with the birth of her scrumptious son. After many years, Jenna and Kimberly hooked up over a love of sugar and became the Sugar Mommas: life’s too short to not be sweet!
We are still churning through the latest round of editing. I think Frank has gone through almost the entire book again. I’m a little more than halfway through with my edits.
It is fun rereading the book, but editing can be tricky – there are spots where I get wound up in the story and temporarily turn off my editing filter, so then I have to go back an reread each sentence slowly to make sure it is worded as well as possible; that the sentence flow well and there is no ambiguity on who is speaking when. It also gets interesting when we start debating on word choice.
Having multiple authors collaborate on a book is not unheard of, but it isn’t exactly common either. There are a number of issues that can make coauthoring difficult. How do you split up the workload? How do you make the book sound as if it is written by one person. How do you allow creative freedom and still keep the plot on the agreed upon path?
We addressed all of these issues as we would for our day jobs. My background as a software engineer made me view the book as a large software project. Each chapter is basically a software FUNCTION. It has a set of inputs and it has an output; whatever happens in between is an implementation detail left to the programmer.
Our chapters were built much the same way. We would have a very rough idea of what had happened in the world before this chapter (inputs) and what should happen in the chapter (outputs), but we gave complete freedom to the author on how to achieve the desired outcome of the chapter. There were a few cases where chapters got away from us and ended up as multiple chapters, and other times where a chapter was tossed after it was completely written.
Once a chapter was written, it was passed to the other author for review and edits. We had to grow thick skin, but we knew that the only way the book would be publishable was if we were brutally honest with each other. In truth, if something was bad or suspect, the person who wrote it already knew that it needed work. That’s not to say that we always agreed with each other. There were times when we would pass a single sentence back and forth for days.
We split the workload by each focusing on the point of view of specific characters. After a chapter had passed between us a few times, it was difficult to remember who wrote what. Of course, that was kind of the point.
We had a number of conversations during the first few weeks of developing the plot and writing the first couple of chapters deciding exactly how magic should function in our world. Would wizards require wands or magic words? Would they spend time memorizing complex spells? Could anyone learn magic or were you born with the power and had to learn how to control it? How would we limit magic to prevent the wizards from being too powerful and completely taking over the world? Would all of the races have wizards, or only the humans?
After a lot of discussion we decided that wizards wouldn’t memorize spells or require magic words or magic wands. Instead, magic requires a deep understanding of what you want to accomplish and how you would make that happen. Magic is also limited by the wizards natural ability. Many spells take both a physical and magical toll on the spell caster, so a big spell may knock out the wizard or even kill them, and there is still no guarantee that the spell will work as imagined or even do anything at all.
As Frank said the other day, we tried to develop magic in such a way that it both leveraged and obeyed physical laws. We also tried to make each wizard use spells that match their personality, experience and ability.
It’s true that I hadn’t read much fantasy. There were some I read and liked; a vampire story by George RR Martin called Fevre Dream impressed me quite a bit, the few fantasies that Heinlein wrote, and of course anything by Harlan Ellison showed me what fantasy could be.
When deciding on a genre, I knew we wouldn’t reach those levels. But if we were going to write fantasy and break a few laws of physics, at least we could set some rules and not violate them because we wrote ourselves in to a corner.
As we were writing Duck Blood Soup, I began to think about what it would take to educate a wizard. I came to the conclusion that their education would be more of a BS or MS level in engineering or the physical sciences, with spells as a small part of their education. If you want to manipulate the physical world, even with magic, you need to understand the basics.
If there’s ever a book two, that’s where those ideas get fleshed out. But that concept was used as we developed the first book.
Any authors trying to break into this industry enviously noticed the success of the Harry Potter series and dreams of duplicating it. I doubt any author will have the success of J.K. Rowling, but we would be fools not to analyze her writings.
What makes Harry Potter so successful in my mind is the broad appeal beyond its target audience. Her readers gain an emotional attachment to the characters and her world is vivid and well developed. She does a good job of seeding solutions to later problems early in the book. And of course she loves to end chapters with a cliff hanger.
Duck Blood Soup is geared toward teen readers but the political, military, and emotional story lines appeal to a wider audience. Duck Blood Soup humanizes the antagonists, has characters that are neither invincible nor untiring, and introduces new races of creatures. Incorporating firearms, airships, and railroads rounds out the world and further differentiates Duck Blood Soup from other fantasy novels.
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