This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.
You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.
The book is complete, but there’s still one more thing to do: revise and edit! This final set of journals will follow the editing process.
Slow Going
When this post goes up, Razor Mountain will have been “in revision” for over a month. Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot to show for it. I’ve worked through the first few chapters, made some changes, and made notes for later.
In the past, I would probably have chalked that up to laziness and lack of a proper writerly work ethic. More recently, I’ve come to the understanding that if I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the writing, but not actually getting much done, it’s because I have some sort of mental block, and I need to work it out to move forward.
I suspect the problem here was a lack of accountability, or at least the lack of an audience. When I was writing chapters and posting them, there were reasons to keep up a steady pace. If I was slow with a chapter, my wife would often ask when the next one was coming. I would notice the longer-than-usual gap in my blog schedule. I had some feeling that the work was for someone.
Now that I’m revising, that dynamic has changed. I’m not reposting updated chapters, because it seems like a huge mess to track, and because they’re likely to get updated again in subsequent passes.
Luckily, since I came to this realization, I’ve gotten some new reasons to stay motivated and productive.
Progress
Let’s start with what I did get done. I spent some time reworking Chapter 2. This is the chapter that introduces God-Speaker. He has a very bad day when his mentor is unexpectedly killed by a stranger. This stranger is barely a character, and really has no clear explanation or bearing on the rest of the story. He’s just there to jump-start the plot.
No only is this not great storytelling, but it doesn’t really fit with what we know about paleolithic humans, which is that they generally worked together. War and infighting aren’t so much of a thing when everyone has to spend most of their energy just trying to survive for another season.
So, I did the obvious thing. I removed the stranger from the story, and I replaced him with a giant bear: Arctodus simus. The bear still serves the same purpose in the story, it just makes more sense and hopefully doesn’t leave the reader saying “why the heck did that happen?”
Chapter Zero?
There’s an issue that I’ve noticed in both God-Speaker and Christopher’s plot. In both cases, I wanted to start with some action and an inciting incident to drive the story forward. However, the reader hasn’t had enough time to form any attachment to either of these characters. There can only be so much tension when the reader doesn’t really care about the POV character.
One solution I’ve considered is adding earlier chapters to better show the lives of these characters before they’re knocked off-course by a cruel and uncaring universe. The challenge would be to create a new beginning to the book, still pulling the reader into the story without the benefit of all the big events that will happen in the current chapters 1 and 2.
I don’t know what I would put in those chapters yet, but I’m keeping it in mind as I work through the rest of the book.
Critiques
I got a lot of good feedback from Critters for Chapter 1, and after I was done with my bear business in Chapter 2, I submitted that as well. It takes a while to work through the queue, but the feedback came in this past week.
Additionally, I got a bite on my “request for dedicated readers,” which means I’ll have someone who can go through the whole book and provide feedback. This is much more appealing to me than slowly sending it through the standard process chapter-by-chapter, with no guarantee that anyone will follow the whole thing from beginning to end.
Along with that Critters volunteer, I’ve enlisted a handful of friends and family to serve as readers too.
Lighting a Fire
That’s all for now. Having more readers lined up lit a fire under me to do a quick read-through of the whole book and look for any high-level changes I want to make before getting that feedback. I expect that to keep me busy for the next week or two. After that, I’m sure I’ll have my hands full processing the feedback.
This August was the three-year anniversary of Words Deferred. Around that same time I also hit 10,000 views.
Is that a good amount? Who knows. It’s certainly ramped up since that first year, when I was more-or-less shouting into the void.
It’s hard to believe it has already been that long. But then, the flow of time broke sometime in 2020, so now everything gets lost in the temporal vortex.
Anyway, thanks for hanging out and talking about writing with me!
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson
Transmetropolitan has been on my radar for some time, even though I knew almost nothing about it. It was lodged in my brain alongside a bunch of other 90s-2000s non-superhero comics. I’ve recently discovered just how cheaply you can snag slightly beat-up trade paperbacks of old series at places like ThriftBooks, so I went ahead and purchased the first two volumes of the series just to see if I had any interest.
My feeling coming away from the first volume is that Transmetropolitan is weird for the sake of weird, and that particular brand of “edgy” that was popular in this era, but a little silly in retrospect. It is a depiction of the kind of cultural and technological singularity where almost everything is possible and is probably happening just down the street, but the absolutely schizophrenic nature of that kind of chaos doesn’t really jive with telling a deep or particularly coherent story.
The book begins with former journalist Spider Jerusalem living like a wild-man in a mountain-top cabin surrounded by booby-traps. He is naked, heavily tattooed, and clearly hasn’t gotten a shave or a haircut in a few years. We learn that he was the most famous journalist in a nearby city (simply known as The City), and he gave it all up to move out here. Unfortunately, he signed a contract for a book deal, overdue by five years, and now his publisher is threatening to take the money back. So off he goes, back to The City.
Spider breaks into the offices of his old newsfeed, secures a job and an apartment, removes all his hair with a chemical shower, and gets his trademark glasses out of the totally-not-a-Star-Trek-replicator in his kitchen. Then he turns on the news. There are cryogenic defrostees, people uploaded into nanite clouds, and humans surgically turning themselves into aliens and trying to succeed from The City and create their own colony. As it turns out, these will all be plots for subsequent issues.
The first volume didn’t wow me as an introduction. The chaos of The City struck me as an excuse to just throw any sort of futuristic spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. The characters all range from unpleasant to outright awful, and I have a hard time taking it seriously when the city is called The City and the protagonist has a name like Spider Jerusalem. But hey, it’s the first volume, and a lot of series don’t find their feet right away, so I started in on the next one…
Transmetropolitan (vol. 2)
Written By Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Derick Robertson
I realized partway through this volume that the post-facts world of Transmetropolitan probably seemed more science-fictiony around the year 2000. Nowadays, it’s hardly any different than world outside my window. This certainly isn’t the first piece of sci-fi to satirize politics and religion, only to find that the future went and outdid them. Being subversive and edgy is not a good way to last—yesterday’s shocks are boring to tomorrow’s audience.
I also came to the conclusion that a lot of what rubs me the wrong way about the series is that it’s packed with big, obnoxious allegory. It’s constantly winking and nudging you.
Transmetropolitan doesn’t have an ongoing arc in these first couple volumes. It’s just a series of unrelated stories. This time, we get one about Spider’s assistant’s boyfriend, who decides to download himself into a cloud of nanites. After that, it’s a cryogenically frozen woman who wakes up and discovers that the future is impossible to acclimate to, and that nobody much cares to try and help her. Then there’s Spider’s tour of the “reservations,” hermetically sealed places throughout The City that are built to preserve different cultures and ways of life. Each of these works pretty well as a stand-alone short story, but it didn’t feel like it was building to anything bigger.
Ultimately, I found that Spider Jerusalem was one of the least interesting characters in his own book. It’s possible that some of these disparate threads will eventually weave back together into a larger story, but I wasn’t feeling it after two volumes. I don’t think I’ll be continuing this series.
This is the second Witcher book that’s billed as a short story collection. And it is, but they end up feeling like more than the sum of their parts. There are bigger arcs happening across these stories, continuing the events from the first book.
In addition to the titular Witcher, Dandelion the bard and the sorceress Yennifer are the other main characters. If there is an overall theme across the book, it’s the angst between Geralt and Yennefer, who are both outcasts and troublemakers in their own ways. They each think they can’t make the other person happy, while also being unable to permanently break things off.
There is also a great deal more world-building happening here, including the first mentions of the Wild Hunt, a mysterious recurring event where ghostly warriors cross the sky and portend disaster and war. These stories are still “low to the ground,” but they incorporate a bit more about the nations and politics of the northern kingdoms.
Of course, it wouldn’t be the Witcher without stories about the interactions between humans and magical creatures, whether that be a shapeshifter stealing friends’ identities or a pompous town mayor in love with a mermaid. It also sets up the series of books to follow, as Geralt meets Ciri, the kid princess whose destiny he inadvertently entwined with his own.
Written By Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by P. Craig Russell
Much like Volume 3, Dream Country, this is a set of mostly stand-alone tales where Dream takes on a minor role. There’s a story about Emperor Norton, the real person who declared himself Emperor of the United States of America, a fable about a clan of eastern European werewolves, a tale of young Marco Polo getting lost (and eventually found) in the desert, and story of a spectacular Baghdad, greater than we ever knew it because it was traded into dreams so it might stay perfect forever.
Unlike Dream Country, there are a few things of note that tie back into the broader ongoing plot. For the first time in the series, we actually see “the prodigal,” Destruction, the one member of the Endless who has abdicated his position. We witness a retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy of Orpheus, who is an oracle, and Dream’s son. We see why Orpheus lives eternally as a severed head, and the cause of the rift between him and his father.
These events lead directly into Volume 7, and it really feels like the meandering main story is picking up steam.
The Sandman: Brief Lives (Vol. 7)
Written by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Jill Thompson
The issues of this arc are labeled as “chapters,” and this is probably the most linear and focused volume since the first. The beginning pulls together several threads from earlier stories, and the end implies a whole lot of bad things are in store for Dream.
Each chapter begins with a sequence of cryptic phrases, like this for chapter one:
Blossom for a lady
Want/not want
The view from the backs of mirrors
Not her sister
Rain in the doorway
The number you have dialed…
They turn out to be little landmarks in the story, a game where the reader can try to guess what might happen from these tidbits, and then check items off the list as they come to pass. It got me thinking how excellent the whole series is at these little things. From the surreal Dave McKean covers and interstitial art to the introductory quotes to the entertainingly themed credits, the Sandman books feel like absolutely every single element was labored over more than was really reasonable. All the little things add up.
The story of this volume centers around the duo of Dream and his youngest sister, Delirium (who used to be Delight). Delirium’s personality is somewhere between a young child and a lunatic, and you get the feeling that the rest of the oh-so-serious Endless family is perpetually humoring her. She decides to go looking for Destruction, the brother that abandoned the rest of the Endless and made it clear that he doesn’t want to be found. Delirium asks her siblings to help her, but one by one they brush her off. When she comes to Dream, the most serious of them all, it’s a surprise that he agrees to go with her. So the pair set off to find Destruction.
Eventually, we learn that Dream had ulterior motives, and never really expected to find Destruction. But he takes his responsibilities seriously, and since he promised to help Delirium, he turns to the one person who has the power to find the Endless, even when they do not want to be found: his own son, Orpheus. For this favor, Orpheus (a severed head who cannot die) asks his father to end his suffering.
The book ends with foreboding. They find Destruction, only to have him leave again. Morpheus returns to his realm, everything neatly wrapped up, and then reveals his chalk-white hands stained with his son’s blood. It’s made clear that there are consequences for the Endless when they spill family blood. The only question is what those consequences will be…
Sometimes I look at the Hitchhikers’ Guide omnibus on my shelf and I think sadly about how I’ll never be able to read another Douglas Adams story for the first time. But if there’s anyone who can compare to Adams, it has to be Terry Pratchett. I’m grateful that unlike Adams, he wrote so prolifically.
There are 41 books in the Discworld series, and I’ve been slowly going through them, picking up new ones at Half Price Books whenever I see them. I’m savoring them, because I know eventually I’ll run out.
Small Gods is about an accidental prophet named Brutha, in the desert land of Omnia, where the people worship the god Om. Omnia is a strict theocracy where the church is the central pillar of life, and it’s not uncommon for supposed sinners to have the badness tortured out of them. Faith is of the utmost importance in Omnia, so it’s especially awkward when Brutha discovers that Om is trapped in the form of a turtle with hardly any godlike powers at all, and this is because nobody besides Brutha actually believes in him anymore.
Brutha goes on a hero’s journey, and despite his best efforts he manages to overthrow the Omnian order, restore (real) belief in Om, and generally start making the country a place where people can live their lives without worrying about being randomly tortured.
Small Gods isn’t my favorite Discworld book, but it’s a parody with plenty of laughs and a few sideways glances toward our world. As usual, an average book by Terry Pratchett is quite good by anyone else’s standards.
One of the joys of being a parent is getting to share things you enjoy with your kids. One of the strange things about being a parent of several children (with a few years in-between) is that I’ve shared a bunch of those things with my eldest kids, and my youngest knows nothing about them. So, although I read the Harry Potter books to my eldest son—and my daughter was sometimes in the general vicinity of the reading—I was told that we should read them again. And now we are.
I’ll say here that I don’t agree with Rowling and the garbage she is now known for spewing on social media. I also think it’s fashionable to criticize books by authors who are deemed terrible people. Despite Rowling acting out, I think the Harry Potter books are perfectly enjoyable.
A lot of the complaints about this series are about all the unbelievable aspects of the world-building. There are a lot of problems with the Wizarding World and its interactions with the regular world that just aren’t addressed. And that’s completely true. But I also think it doesn’t really matter.
The odd thing about this series is that it grew up along with its readership. The first book is very much a children’s story, in its form and in the language it uses. It’s not worried about perfectly consistent world-building, any more than Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks is, because the shape of the story still works. Part of that is because it borrows from fairy tales, starting with the classic evil step parents (or in this case, aunt and uncle), and the orphan boy who is destined to save the world.
So shockingly, my takeaway is that a super-bestselling book that started a huge pop-culture craze and made more money than some small countries does, in fact, do a lot of things well.
What I’m Reading in September
I’ll continue working my way through the Sandman and Witcher series. I might go for a couple brand-new books about writing that I just got. I also recently compiled a list of highly-rated comics from the last 20 years, and I might start working through some of those.
In my last post, I talked about revising my novel, Razor Mountain, and I mentioned that I was using Critters.org to get some feedback on the early chapters. I was sure that I had talked about Critters previously, in my “reference desk” series about useful tools for writers, but when I went back and looked through old posts, I was shocked to discover that there was no such post. Today, I’m going to remedy that.
Online Critique
I’ve written on a couple occasions about getting reader feedback and why it’s valuable. I think most writers will naturally understand the value of beta readers, editors, and improving writing through several drafts. Revisions without feedback are needlessly hobbled.
However, there’s more than one way to get feedback. An online critique group like Critters has some disadvantages: you won’t necessarily know everyone, and you aren’t engaging with readers face-to-face. You also don’t get to pick your readers, so the feedback may not be quite as tailored as a traditional writing group.
So why use an online critique group? Well, there are some advantages too. Online critique can be asynchronous, making it easier to avoid scheduling issues, and lower-pressure. Feedback is written out, which gives you a useful artifact that you can save and consult as needed during revisions. Since the group is less formal and doesn’t meet in the real world, people can come in and out according to their personal situations. In short, an online group like Critters is less formal than many in-person groups, which can be a good or bad thing.
Critters.org
Critters.org (and its pseudonym Critique.org) is an online writing workshop that has been around since 1995, with over 300,000 critiques in that time. The main, original workshop group is focused on speculative fiction: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Since its inception, it has expanded to 17 different workshops covering most genres of fiction, mainstream and literary fiction, and other media such as comics, film, music, photography and more.
Critters is free to use, and always has been, surviving on goodwill donations. It is not exactly a svelte, modern, or flashy website. It still looks and functions a bit like a website from the 1990s—mostly text and links and a big top menu with dozens of pages. It is still maintained by the original founder, Andrew Burt, and a host of minion programs he has created. As a programmer, I feel right at home. For non-programmer writers, I imagine it’s a little bit off-putting.
The mechanics of critique are simple. Members can submit a manuscript via webpage or email by filling out some information and attaching their work. These pieces go into a queue, and each week a dozen or so are “released” to the group. Members then submit their critiques via webpage or email, and those critiques are forwarded to the authors.
To ensure that everyone gets good feedback, critiques must fulfill a minimum length (a paltry 200 words), and any member who wants their work sent out in the queue must submit a critique 75% of the time, or 3 out of every 4 weeks.
Cultivating Culture
A distributed group like this lives or dies by its culture. Plenty of message boards and chat rooms have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t moderate effectively, and became cesspools of hate speech and trolling. Critters has survived so long and continues to be successful because it has developed a culture of respectful and honest feedback.
When signing up for the group, new members are directed to several articles on the site about diplomatic language and effective critique. Authors are also warned that honest feedback can be hard to hear, and that some critiques are well-intentioned, but a little more blunt than you might like.
Members submitting critiques are also required to check a box stating that they have been diplomatic, which is obviously not hard for the malicious to overcome, but serves as a good reminder for those who are acting in good faith.
Of course, like any effective moderation policy, there are ways to escalate bigger issues. I’m sure there have been trolls in the past, but I suspect that Critters has the advantage of being a bit of a dusty niche of the internet, where troublemakers aren’t common and most people are putting forth some effort in order to improve their skills and their work.
My experience has been extremely positive. I have never had any outright problematic critiques, and I could count the number of overly-blunt or tone-deaf critiques on one hand. (Honestly, an occasional rough critique is probably good practice for being in this industry.)
Details
There are a few interesting little details about Critters that aren’t necessarily apparent unless you read through all the documentation up-front.
Partial Credits
Normally, an author submits a story and anyone who provides a critique of the minimum (200 word) length gets credit for participation that week, counting toward the 75% rule. However, if the story is short—under 2000 words—then any critiques will only count for half-credit. This is to encourage readers to critique longer stories, and not just focus on these quick reads. A half-credit does not count toward the 75% ratio until you’ve done two of them.
Critique Counts
It’s possible to see the current number of critiques submitted for each manuscript in the current week. These counts are updated in almost real time. Critters’ weeks run from Wednesday to Wednesday, and a lot of critiques come in over the weekend, so I like to look at the counts before I pick a story for critique. Sometimes one or two manuscripts will have very low counts, so I like to help those folks out. If someone already has 15 critiques, what are the odds that I’m going to be repeating things someone else has already pointed out?
In general, novel chapters get fewer critiques than complete stories, and longer stories get fewer critiques than shorter ones. So, you’re likely to get the most out of Critters if you write a lot of flash fiction, and considerably less if you write novels with long chapters.
RFDRs
RFDRs, or “Requests for Dedicated Readers” are submissions for novels, where the author is requesting volunteers to read the entire book and provide feedback. RFDRs often include chapters of the book, and anyone can still submit a critique for the submitted portion without signing up to read the whole book.
If a reader accepts an RFDR, they contact the author outside of Critters, typically by email, and coordinate the process. Because reading a whole novel is a big ask, completing an RFDR is worth one credit for every 5000 words of the book. So an 80,000-word novel, fully critiqued, would be worth 16 individual critiques! However, if the RFDR agreement is for the whole book, then the reader has to complete the whole thing to get credit. If they give up partway through, it’s up to the author whether they’ll still give credit for the work that was done.
My limited experience is that there are a lot of novels on Critters (about half of all submissions), and not very many people interested in RFDRs. This limits how much an author can get out of critique for a novel, since it takes a long time to send an entire novel through the queue, one or two chapters at a time, and not all readers will have read previous chapters to understand the full context.
Resets
The 75% participation ratio can be daunting, especially if you’re not used to critiquing. It’s easy to miss a couple weeks and fall behind.
I have been a member of Critters for years, but not continuously. I’ve taken months or years off, which will decimate the participation ratio. Luckily, this is a common issue. If you need to take time away, or you fall hopelessly behind, you can submit a request to have your participation ratio reset. You then only need to start submitting a critique each week to be back in good standing and have your work go out in the queue.
Giving and Receiving
Finally, I’ll reiterate something I mentioned on Twitter recently. It’s extremely useful to get feedback on a work in progress, but it’s equally valuable to critique the work of other authors. It’s practice for editing your own work with an unbiased eye. I have discovered problems in my own writing that were only apparent after I wrote critiques of other people’s stories. Sometimes it’s just easier to see an issue in someone else’s work than in your own.
Try It!
If you have a hard time getting a writing group together in the real world, or you simply prefer a less social, asynchronous, or easier-to-schedule option, Critters is a fantastic alternative. I’ve been using it for years, and there are plenty of professional and published authors who are members.
If you’re on the fence, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It’s as simple as submitting a story and doing a few critiques. You’ll likely get feedback from 5-20 people, and you can evaluate the quality for yourself.
Words Deferred 