It’s always a bit scary. I mean, your friends are unlikely to tell you your writing is shit, amirite?
The first review for Night’s Favour arrived online whilst I was sleeping last night. It’s a great review, I’m stoked.
Lots to like in there – not only is it a five-star, which is nice, but there’s great feedback. A good suggestion to make the synopsis a bit more useful to buyers, for example. I’ll get on to that when I’ve a few more cycles; it’ll take some thinking. I’m not used to doing Cliff Notes of my own work.
I’m impossible to be around at the moment – if you poke me, I keep saying, “FIVE STAR.”
Today, I spent my writing block tidying up Upgrade. I’ve got a bunch of tidy to do on that before I get back into cranking out words, and many scenes need to be changed after having sat on it for a bit. Mostly, I want it to be more credible, and give some of the people stronger motivations – it shouldn’t take too long, but it’s essential in my eyes to making it a better story.
I’d written a scene I’d dropped out, but I think that scene should come back in, just in a different order (and highly edited). It’ll be an interesting week next week, as some of this story juggling is devilishly complex. I learned a good lesson on Night’s Favour though: get this stuff sorted as soon as, otherwise it’s the Gordian Knot when you try and do it at the end.
See you next week.
I’ll be adding a review soon as well. Early into the book but something kept bothering me. It’s the setting. I *think* it’s meant to be set in the US but it felt Australian. Now I see why that is. Perhaps work on your setting a little more it just seems a little “vanilla city someplace in the US” at the moment.
Otherwise the story is reading pretty well so far much better then several self-pubbies I’ve read recently. I’ll have it finished by tonight and probably add a review soon after. Honestly though given what I’ve read so far you’d really need to stuff up the story to get less then 3 stars out of me.
Thanks for stopping by 🙂
This is a tricky one. The book‘s not designed to be set anywhere in particular, except in the reader’s head. It was a deliberate design decision: in the early parts of the draft, I’d played with having named places (you know, character walks into Trader Joe’s or something). After spending a bit more time considering King’s On Writing, I pulled those specific bits out.
As I understand King’s basic premise, you should describe as little about the setting as possible, as the reader fills in the blanks and this makes it more “real” for them. Having myself grown up in America, time sharing between California and New York, it was easy enough to set it with high levels of specificity. However, this would have broken the immersion to a certain extent for dudes who had no touch points in those places. Or, to put it another way, a diner is a diner to anyone, but talking about Yali’s Cafe in Berkeley has relevance only if you’ve been there (I have: it’s excellent, and seems to be periodically staffed by New Zealanders, which is awesome… Best damn place to get coffee in the Bay Area, IMO).
The setting for Night’s Favour is not a great part of the story, except to let the reader know it’s supposed to be, “ordinary.” On the great continuum of readers and opinions, I reckon this sort of thing matters more to some people than to others, and that’s fine: it’s great feedback to have, and I appreciate you stopping by to pop in a comment.