Monday Inspiration: Criticism

It may seem like an odd place to draw inspiration from. Odd but necessary, if you want to get anywhere. It is oh-so easy to tell yourself your writing is great and write a novel in a vacuum. Things get harder when you ask writing associates to critique your work and they come back with less than stellar reviews.

At first you don't want to even read all the comments. It's depressing. Then over time you think about them and realize there's a lot of value in what they said. After a few days you see how you can use that feedback to make some dramatic improvements and take your manuscript to the next level.

When you've been through all that, and polished things up as well as you can there's the gauntlet of finding an agent. If you make it that far it's easy to think you've got it made. A successful agent who makes a living by her eye for what will sell chose your manuscript out of the pile of thousands she receives every year. It's easy to get carried away at this point, imagining your book on the shelf next to some of your favorite authors. Imagining what the cover will look like. Chatting it up with fans at book signings... Ahh the life of a successful author.

I heard the author of The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon, on the radio talking about her first few months after being published. She had been nominated for a major Canadian award, but still hadn't got much money from the publisher so needed to keep her day-job working in Munro's Books in Victoria (yes, strangely enough, THAT Munro, Alice Munro's ex-husband). When a customer would bring her book to the checkout she'd offer to sign it for them. Inevitably the customer would frown, clearly thinking, "Crazy woman, why would I want you to sign my book?" She'd flip to the author's photo at the back, hold it up next to her face and try to copy her expression from the photo. The customer would redden and thank her kindly for signing the book and she'd get a giggle from the episode.

That's where the thoughts tend to run when you've got an agent. What kind of great anecdotes am I going to have when I'm a famous author?

Then your manuscript goes out to publishers, and you get feedback from an editor. It's the same process all over, but harder this time. You've probably lived with the book for a year or more now, so you're getting a bit tired of it. On top of that all your dreams of massive, rock-star success pile up in a train-wreck. One more hurdle to overcome. Another, higher bar has been set and the manuscript is not clearing it. Time to knuckle down and get back to work on it, knowing that even this is not the last edit. If you're lucky it's the penultimate overhaul of your manuscript, but if the changes are accepted it will still mean another round. Then several more rounds of minor revisions.

The only way to survive, at least for me, is to find inspiration in the critiques. I look at them and think about how much better the final product will be for all the advice and feedback I've received. Maybe I will get to be a writing rock-star one day, but I won't have done it alone. There will be a litany of people to thank for telling me what I got wrong, taking me down a peg when I needed it and inspiring me to do better.

Endings

I'm reaching the end-stage of plotting the sequel trilogy to Aetherstorm, so naturally I've been thinking a lot about endings lately. I think readers will find the ending to Aetherstorm mostly satisfying. The main conflict is resolved, but our hero, Konrad, does not exactly live happily ever after, and the antagonists are not punished in a really satisfactory way.

I plan to end the Aether Cycle on book four, the third book of the trilogy, and leave the world I've created for good. So the ending to the series has to be completely satisfying, to me and my audience.

The problem is that there are irresolvable conflicts (see the previous post). Short of genocide, there will be war in this world. I can live with that, some conflicts are not meant to end, and it gives things a certain feeling that life really does go on, unlike a fairy tale there simply is no such thing as happily ever after.

A lot of the characters will die, although it saddens me to kill them, there are some I have created who I am really going to miss, but if ya wanna make an omlette... Other characters will live of course, and I want to leave them in a better place than I found them.

The antagonists must get their comeuppance. For everyone else, life goes on, much as it was before. Anything else just wouldn't ring true to me, real life is too complicated.

...And Then vs. But and Therefore

Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park creators) crash a writing course and deliver some pointers. I think subliminally most writers know this rule, but I've never heard it spelled out in quite these terms before. Well worth the two minute watch.

Worldbuilding

I love exploring new worlds as I read. It's one of my favourite reading experiences. However I often find books which introduce me to an entirely original setting that fall completely flat because the constructed world is inherently unbelievable. Which is why I've created a few guidelines for use in my own writing to keep myself honest and my creations believable.

1) Things must have rules. I remember the first time I encountered a world where magic had rules, The Belgariad series by David Eddings. His system of magic obeys the first law of thermodynamics, you cannot create or destroy energy/matter. Before casting a spell, Garion had to learn to draw in energy from his surroundings. It was a simple rule, that had no real impact on the story, but it made the world feel far more alive to me. The rule that a sorcerer cannot destroy matter actually did have an impact on the plot of course.

2) Inventions must be more effective than the things they replace. Whether it's Science Fiction or Steampunk, I see it all the time. I suppose it's partly my military background, but when I watch a show like Star Wars or Star Trek (especially DS9) it bugs the hell out of me that their weapons are inferior to what we field today. Think about it, how often are they stuck in a corridor, shooting single shots back and forth >pew< >pew<, most of which serve only to throw some sparks from a wall. Haven't these people heard of automatic weapons? Or, better yet, hand grenades?

3) The world must have internal consistency. Obviously many things will not be 'realistic' in a made up world. Magic will always disobey fundamental laws of physics, that's the nature of magic. However, I believe it detracts from the world when the author tells, or shows the audience how magic works and then breaks those rules because they weren't paying attention, or because it was an easy way out of a plot-hole they'd written themselves into. Likewise, don't tell me one minute that an airship has static buoyancy so the weight on-board must be balanced perfectly and then later have it flying at 8,000 feet. The atmosphere is at 75% of its sea-level density at 8,000 feet, so on a static buoyancy craft you'd need an incredible amount of lift from engines or you'd have to drop 25% of your weight to fly that high. And don't get me started on how much impact 200 Kg of mass would impart on a vehicle much larger than the Hindenburg (which had a gross lift of 242 tons).

4) As much as possible, the society should reflect any changes you've made. If magic is freely available, and practitioners can cast spells with lasting effects then most households would probably have a few magical conveniences like refrigerators or fire-starters for instance. If your story is steampunkish, takes place in pre-civil-war America and you decide it's easy to build robotic constructs, then that would have a significant impact on slavery, which might mean the civil-war never happened, or the war might have been fought for entirely different reasons.

The more you apply rules and logical extrapolations upon your world the more of those satisfying worldbuilding details will come out in the end product. Even if all the details don't make it into your book, just having them in your head can't help but enrich your world. So get out there and build a cool new world that feels so real readers get lost in it. When you do, drop me a line, I'd love to read it.

First 200 words

This is my first 200 words for Blogger extrordinaire Daena Barnhart. I only found out her page through this contest, but I'll certainly be visiting her often in the future.



Title: Aetherstorm
Genre: Steampunk, 80k words
Finished, and edited, and edited, and edited. Then edited some more.

Konrad Adler wormed his lanky frame up the steam conduit, and tried to ignore the burning in his shoulders. The duct had been shut down for maintenance moments earlier and the heat was enough to suck the air straight out of his lungs. In five minutes it would be cool enough for the cleaning crew; he had that much time to sneak into Otto Dragomir's laboratory, steal a couple of vials and escape.

Sweat ran in a steady stream down his face, heat and nerves drew moisture from him like a wrung sponge. Normally Konrad avoided anything that whiffed of criminal enterprise, he picked through refuse to sell, or ran errands for half-pennies to help his father out. That would not cover it this time though, they needed some serious coin, or he and his father would be finished.

He squirmed past the sixth access hatch. The brass wheel that opened the seventh hatch, the one leading to Dragomir's laboratory, was just a floor above. Another minute of squirming through the thick, oily air brought him abreast of his destination. Konrad reached out to turn the wheel, but the metal seared his hands. He choked back a gasp of pain and rolled his sleeves over his hands to try again.

Threads

It's an old metaphor. A story is a tapestry of threads woven together. Useful to help visualise plot elements, but not completely accurate.

Threads in a novel come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are master threads, they begin at the start, and run through to the end, like the main character, an overarching theme, or the central conflict. These should run thick and strong through the entire manuscript, because they bear the bulk of the story's weight. If they fade in a portion of the book it normally means that section will be weaker, more likely to bore readers or cause them to lose interest entirely.

In fact, I would argue that any thread, once introduced, should not be ignored for too long. Either cut it and tie it off, or it must appear occasionally. For instance a character who is essential to the finale and is introduced early, cannot simply fade into the background for several chapters. Plot-threads and conflicts are the same.

All this seems obvious enough, but now that I think about it in these terms, I can see holes in my manuscript and in most of those I've read, even in many published novels. It's a surprisingly common problem. The next time you're reading a novel and you begin to lose interest part-way through, think about the threads. Most of the time they're the culprit.

High Concept

A couple of trailers I saw recently really brought home the message of a good, clear high concept. The first is for NBC's upcoming TV series Awake. Yes, after watching it, read that again, it's a network TV series. It looks absolutely fantastic and I guarantee I'll be there to watch, and I suspect once you've seen the trailer you'll be there too, the high concept is just that good.



The second is for the upcoming film Another Earth. The high concept here blows my mind as well. Both of these trailers have fantastic ideas with characters so deeply intertwined in the concept it seems almost impossible to separate them. Both concepts, when taken alone might seem a bit goofy and far-fetched, but with the character involvement they become a fantastic hook.

Curves

Every kind of emotion in a novel can fit on a graph. There is the climactic curve, which should increase steadily to each climactic point in the novel, fall and then begin building again for the next climax, like the 1812 Overture. And the G/I curve, which Kurt Vonnegut introduces below (which, combined with some beta reading I've been doing got me thinking on the subject).



Those are macro-curves, which detail an entire story, but each character should have their own emotional curves within scenes. For instance, in the first draft of Aetherstorm, I had Konrad running in fear of his life. He accidentally stumbled into a party and ended up fighting a sort of swashbuckling duel with one of the guests, complete with witty repartee. It was a great scene, but it stood out like a sore thumb, because people who are fleeing in panic don't suddenly collect their wits, pass some urbane banter and finish their opponent with urbane wit.

Which made me think of how emotions, and character development intertwine in the greater picture. Some emotions, such as fear, play out in a curve within one sequence and then after a few minutes, hours or days, the emotion is forgotten. Other emotions get reinforced by ongoing experience. The writer becomes more and more frustrated over time as he continues to face rejection (not speaking from personal experience or anything :P ). The grieving father who turns to alcohol only drives himself further into depression. If there is nothing inciting the emotion to change it will carry-on in a fairly smooth and predictable manner, only jumping erratically when something significant to that emotion comes along. Grieving father finds out it was all a mistake and his son is alive after all, or the writer catches his big break.

I think it's these bigger emotional curves that define characters and character development and having predictable emotional curves is what defines a character we can all fall in love with.

Maybe that's all obvious to some people, and maybe it's been said before, but that's what I learned about writing this week.

Character Studies

Characters are the motive force behind any good story. You can have the most amazing plot, world building, write the snappiest dialogue and create prose that makes editors shrug and say, "I have nothing to say", but if the characters are flat and lifeless the story will never succeed to any great degree.

Building good characters is essential to writing good fiction.

So, what makes a good character?

They are a living, thinking, autonomous person. One of the tests for me is that my characters don't always do as I say.

They have emotional consistency. This is one I figured out only after a pile of rejects unfortunately. I knew one of the scenes near the beginning of Aetherstorm was a little out of place, but I loved it, it was clever and witty and I couldn't really place my finger on what was wrong. Then I figured it out. On page five he has the crap scared out of him, then a scene later he's all suave and clever, it felt completely out of place.

They come across on the page. This has been the toughest one for me to learn. I thought I knew what was going on inside my character's heads before I really spent the time to focus on this. One whole edit of Aetherstorm was spent scene-by-scene putting myself inside their heads and thinking, "Okay, I'm Konrad. X just happened, how does that make me feel?"


As I went through and edited for character, I found that, with Konrad (the lead) especially, it gave me a ton of insight into who he is and he changed in nature from how I had envisioned him. In my early drafts he was essentially a nice guy, caught up in something bigger than himself.

Then I started to really think about who he was. All those Psych classes I took in college began to pay off. I thought about how he lived, and where he came from. His mother died when he was a baby, and his father raised him. His mother and father were stowaways when Himmelberg first launched so they aren't even legal citizens, which places them in a sort of permanent underclass. Add to that the fact that his father had been the product of some experimentation which made him much stronger and faster than a normal human, but he and Konrad cannot use their advantages, because non-humans are automatically labelled mortal enemies of humans and killed on sight. That makes for a mess of an adolescent. He feels he's better than everyone else, but lives as the lowest of the low. That's at the core of his personality. Obviously anger and arrogance are his biggest character flaws at the start.

Over the course of the book he does a lot of things to survive that haunt him. Guilt and the fear that he's turning into exactly the sort of monster humans believe he is keep him up at night. He turns to alcohol and starts to alienate his friends. Everything got a lot darker in the re-writes, and I think the manuscript is better for it. Konrad is certainly a lot less likeable at the end of the newer drafts than he was in the early ones, but he's also more sympathetic and more real, which I think plays well into the bittersweet ending which was inevitable once all the pieces were in motion.

[Mask picture modified from a picture found at http://bobbasset.com/, the background photo is by Charles Bodi (who has an amazing collection of beautiful abandoned factory pictures at ridemypony.com)]

Hey, What's the Big Idea?

I think the big idea, or high concept, of a story is one of the most important things for an aspiring writer to consider before setting pen to paper.

I believe there are two main ways a book sells to a publisher.

1) The author is a known quantity so the editor knows they have a saleable product.

2) The concept for the book is so catchy the editor just has to read it for themselves.

That's opinion but it seems to hold true most of the time. I've seen lots of dreck by established authors on the shelves. Unfortunately if you are not an established author so you cannot take the easy route. On the other hand if you go and find just about any debut book from a new author published in the past 5-10 years you will find the idea is usually quite original and the first quarter of the book is very engaging. Often they tend to fall off after the first book, especially in a series. IMO Derek Landy, Joseph Delaney (who had published before The Spook's Apprentice, but nothing really successful), and Brandon Mull are all good examples of what I'm talking about. To be clear, I'm not saying their follow-up books are poor, they are all very good, but the first is the best and the first quarter of a first-time author's book is normally amazingly tight.

Derek Landy - Skullduggery Pleasant, a girl falls in with a noir-style detective who happens to be a wisecracking, fireball-throwing living skeleton.

Joseph Delaney - The Spook's Apprentice, A young man is apprenticed to a witch and monster hunter in medieval times.

Brandon Mull - Fablehaven, Two young siblings spend the summer on their grandparent's nature reserve only to find out its a preserve for all variety of mythical and magical creatures.

Maybe I haven't expressed them all as well as possible, but I think you get the idea, all were created around a highly original core idea. All these are YA fantasy because that's what I've been writing and reading myself lately, but if you look at the larger picture, what are the standout books across all genres in the past ten years or so? Think about it. And what do they all have in common? An amazingly clever premise that can be summarised in a few words.

Blindness - A pandemic disease renders people blind. Scientists cannot find a cure.
The Time Traveller's Wife - Title pretty much sums it up.
Harry Potter - A young boy goes to wizarding school.
The DaVinci Code - A man finds riddles within DaVinci works that hint Jesus lived a very different life from the story in the Bible.

Even Twilight, which I know many writers love to hate, has a really engaging and original concept behind it.

It's not a new phenomenon either if you go back to older titles it holds.

The Hobbit (may not seem amazingly original now that it's been emulated a million times, but groundbreaking when it first came out)
James Bond series (as with The Hobbit, it's been copied so many times it no longer seems as original as it once was), Lolita, The Name of the Rose.

So, whatever you're writing next, if you're working towards being published make it a grand idea. Something big, bold and original.

Hooks

Hooks, for those of you who don't write, are the bits at the beginning of a book designed to reel in a prospective reader, agent or editor. If you've ever picked up a book in the store, read the first page and decided on the spot that you had to buy that book you've experienced a well written hook.

The hook is arguably the most important part of a book. Certainly for an unpublished author seeking publication it's the most important part. If I can't get an agent or editor past the first few pages it's really irrelevant how good the rest of the book is.

Since I've been getting into the querying process I've been thinking a lot about hooks lately. Because Aetherstorm has a prologue I need to have two solid hooks, one for the prologue and one for chapter 1. The way I see it there are as many hooks as there are writers, but the ones that work well fall into a few categories.

1) Action: Think about any James Bond movie. I think action hooks work really well for movies but don't work so well in print. They are commonly used though, I'd have to say this is the most frequently used hook technique I've seen while critiquing manuscripts from other aspiring authors.

2) Character: Catch 22 starts with a great character/funny opening. Yossarian is just sitting in the hospital, censoring mail from the enlisted men, but because he's bored he plays games with the mail he censors. It really gets you inside his head and rooting for him before you're done the first few pages. You care about him and want to know where he's going.

3) Mystery/suspense: A woman wakes up to a creak from downstairs. Was it the cat? The house settling? Or an intruder? Very effective hook, as long as the reader is asking the right questions and it doesn't feel contrived.

4) Shock value: Many horror genre movies and TV shows like Criminal Minds use this hook. Two young boys are fishing on a public dock, one turns to stare, goggle-eyed at the water. The other follows his gaze and proceeds to vomit. Camera turns to show their POV and we see a bloated corpse rocking gently on the waves. Effective but risks turning some readers off.

5) Comedy: Get the audience laughing and they will flip pages. Comedy is tricky though, you need a deft touch or you risk falling flat on your face.

Of course the best hooks use multiple devices. My prologue starts with character/suspense, then moves on to character/shock value. Chapter 1 starts with suspense which builds with some shock value to heighten tension, then a major shock, the lead turns and flees and things transition into an action sequence with some comedic elements.

I am sure I have missed at least a few good devices for hooking an audience. What about your experience? What are some of your favourite hooks?

Contractions

I wrote Ætherstorm almost completely without contractions, against my normal inclination and style, because I wanted to give it a bit of a feel of the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories I've been reading lately. Now I hear back from several readers that they don't like it, it makes the dialogue feel stilted and unnatural.

>sigh< Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyhow, enjoy this cute picture of a steampunk kitten while I go through and fix all the broken dialogue.

By the way, if you're ever looking for a picture to describe contractions, such as 'it's' or 'they're', don't do a google image search for 'contractions'. The bulk of the images returned have nothing to do with the shortened forms of words.

How Much is too Much?

I've been polishing away, snipping excess verbiage here, adding bits of plot there to smooth out the story. The other day I thought about adding an entirely new element to the world. It would add an some interesting world-building elements, but obviously it's not necessary to the plot. In the end I decided to let it go. If this book takes off maybe it will form the basis for a sequel.

All of which gets me thinking, at what point does editing start to make a manuscript worse instead of better? I'm never going to be 100% happy with everything, I know that. Even if it gets published I am sure there will be mistakes that make me slap my forehead, but at the same time I know that's okay.

I think it's ready. One more read-through and edit, and I'm moving on. I think I'll do a series of shorts next. I'll only come back to this one as comments trickle in to fix specific things.

The Progress Bar 6

Well, it's done. Almost exactly on my targeted word count of 75,000 (74,688 is close enough), and nearly a week ahead of schedule. There will be more edits, I am a tinkerer at heart, but I am happy with the manuscript.

This novel began with the idea of a steampunk world with flying cities that sprang into my mind in the bathroom one night while I was looking at nasal spray. Yes... saline nasal spray, in English it said, "full stream" (the manufacturer sells three different power levels), but in Canada all labelling is bilingual. In French it read, "jet fort". I found it amusing that the French version said something entirely different to an Anglophone mind so it stuck. That is honestly where the first nugget of an idea came from.

The idea sat in the back of my mind for a long time. I was working on trying to get my previous novel published, but in moments of frustration I turned to my steampunk project called, Going Down (terrible name by the way, even setting the sexual connotations aside). I had a pretty good idea of how the story went, with a few major holes when I started work in earnest about four months ago. Another week of planning and plotting and I was ready to go. A month and a half of writing, followed by two months of editing and here I am. Ready for the next stage.

I hope it's ready for prime-time. I feel alternately like a father, proud of his new creation, and like a sergeant, ordering his man over the top, into no man's land to die horribly in a hail of machine-gun fire.

Writing Advice

This has done the rounds, but I think it's a good list so I thought I'd share. Here is a list of writing advice from Gordon Silverstein.

1. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
2. Never use no double negatives.
3. Use the semicolon properly, always where it is appropriate; and never where it is not.
4. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it where it is not needed.
5. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
6. No sentence fragments.
7. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
8. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
9. When you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
10. A writer must not shift your point of view.
11. Do not overuse exclamation marks!!! (In fact, avoid them whenever possible!!!)
12. And do not start a sentence with a conjunction.
13. Place pronouns as closely as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents.
14. Hyphenate only between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
15. Write all adverbial forms correct.
16. Don't use contractions.
17. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
18. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
19. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
20. Steer clear of incorrect verb forms that have snuck into the language.
21. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.
22. Avoid modernisms that sound flaky.
23. Avoid barbarisms: they impact too forcefully.
24. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
25. Everyone should be careful to use singular pronouns with singular nouns in their writing.
26. If we've told you once, we've told you a thousand times: avoid hyperbole.
27. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
28. Do not string a large number of prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
29. Always pick on the the correct idiom.
30. "Avoid overuse of 'quotation' 'marks.'"
31. Never use more words than are necessary to get your point across: be concise.
32. Awayz check you're spelling. (Your spellchecker would only pick up one of the two errors here.)
33. Always be avoided by the passive voice.
34. Every sentence a verb.
35. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague: seek viable alternatives.

Excerpt

Well, I'm nearly there. Less than two weeks to go and I'll start sending out some queries. In the meantime I've prepared an excerpt to submit to The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and a few other places.

Here is an excerpt (from the excerpt) describing Terra do Pao, a district to the south of the volcano on the island of Pico in the Azores.

Then it was Flight Three's turn to step into the elevator. The lift swung in the breeze on the way down. Konrad's nostrils began to sting from smoke, garbage and the smell of millions of humans pressed together in close proximity.
The view was spectacular though. The setting sun cast a reddish light on the volcano to the north. The streets were already in shadow and streetlights were flickering on, illuminating the teeming masses of people and machines below.
After waving good-bye to Tinibu, Konrad, Grover and Zylphia wound their way through the busy catwalks of Terra do Pao. All manner of bizarre contraptions zipped along the streets at breakneck speed. Velocipedes, like the one Konrad had ridden north from Paris were common, some had a small carriage behind for passengers and accepted a fare for transport. There were steam cars and trucks, even a few steam-powered velocipedes which wove in and out of traffic at speeds that made Konrad fear for the drivers' lives.
Most pedestrians kept to the network of bridges and catwalks suspended about six metres above the streets. Steam pipes passed through the entire district, providing heat for the caliphos lights. In some places small leaks in the network of pipes sent shimmering clouds of mist into the night. Shops at catwalk-level sold a dizzying array of merchandise; clothes caught Konrad's eye, especially some which he felt should not be displayed in public, let alone actually worn by a woman, there was all manner of food for sale, alongside jewelry, watches, firearms, knives, swords, artwork, and a hundred other things he could not identify.

Impatience

I want to get my book out there. It is not perfect, but I am resigned to the fact that it will never be perfect.

Right now, my plan is to revise until the end of the month, then send out queries to a dozen good agents. If I don't get a very positive response (at least 2-3 full requests) I will revise further. I made the mistake last time of querying everybody before the manuscript was truly ready so I'll pull it if the response isn't good enough.

Maybe that's overly ambitious, but, if I can't attract an agent fairly quickly there must be something wrong with the book. I don't want to publish a book that sells a few thousand copies. I don't have to be the next Stephen King, but it would be nice to earn a solid living as a novelist. That's all I ask.

In the meantime I plug on, improving the manuscript a little at a time, impatiently waiting for the first round of query responses.

Maybe I'm just a rejection addict. I spent most of last year querying my previous novel, I haven't had a rejection in my inbox in a few months, it makes me antsy.

Prologue Comparison

To follow up on what I was saying yesterday. Here is a before and after on one of my prologue fixes describing a riot.

For three days the rioting continued unabated. Elsa began to worry for her baby, even though it seemed like the Institute for Science and Technology was the most secure building in Berlin. A ring of guards protected it day and night, armed with steam-guns and rifles. When the army couldn't control the violence any longer they gassed the streets. Thousands of rioting synari died alongside hundreds of humans, including the Institute guards, who had received no warning.

Simply a quick summary of events. I thought it worked but a lot of readers found it confusing and/or too distant from the action to be interesting.

Take 2 (first draft so please excuse any typos etc.)

Utte ran from the police with a crowd of fellow synari. Moments before her best friend Heinrich had been shot while trying to storm a blockade. She helped him to his feet as he stumbled, clutching at the hole in his side. She led him through the swirling mass of grey synari, up to a door stoop, out of the crowd.
“We have to get you off the street.”
“I think it is too late for me Utte.” He pulled his hand away from the wound to show her. Blood came gushing out.
“If we can get you to a doctor, I am sure they can fix that.”
“Utte, the doctors will not see me. We are all criminals to them.” He smiled at her. “They think it is only fair we should be slaves, after all we are merely sub-humans to them.”
Utte hardened her lips. “They will see who is sub-human when we storm their seats of power. They are the inferior ones. We should make them the slaves.”
Heinrich smiled. “That would be equally wrong. We should work together. Remember the first tenant of the revolution. 'All men are equal.'”
The crowd of synari in the street began to reorganize. Someone was shouting instructions at them.
Heinrich put his hand to Utte's face. “Go with them. We nearly broke through in the last attack, this time you are sure to succeed.”
“But...”
“Just go, I will die a happy man, knowing that you are about to change the world.”
Utte nodded. She wiped a stream of tears from her cheek, turned and joined the crowd as they began to advance on the barricade for one last push. She picked up several bricks that were lying at the side of the road.
The crowd began to chant, “Equality for all.” As they rounded the final corner before the barricade. They gathered momentum, picking up speed until they were running faster than a human could go.
Utte realized something was wrong. The men on the barricade were not shooting.
A moment later she realized they had fled.
Others in the crowd saw the barricade was unmanned and a great cheer arose. The headlong charge turned into a celebration. The city's last line of defense was defeated, Berlin belonged to the synari, they controlled the streets in every district.
Synari men and women cheered and danced. Utte yelled herself hoarse. She hoped that Heinrich had lived long enough to hear the celebration. He might still be alive, she decided to go see, maybe he could be saved after all.
Overhead, above the noise of the crowd she could just make out the howl of aircraft engines. She looked up to see a large aeroplane, skimming the buildings above.
Moments later she felt a spatter of liquid across her exposed face and arms, as if a sudden rainstorm had arrived. She looked up, but saw no clouds in the sky. The air suddenly smelled like a bed of geraniums.
Utte's arms itched where the liquid had hit them. She scratched and tore a strip of skin off. Her arm was blistering, the itch turned to a burning sensation as though each droplet of the liquid was on fire.
Utte coughed, she sneezed, spraying blood. She realized everyone in the crowd around her was coughing and sneezing too. A spasm of coughing wracked her body, it was so intense she fell to the ground. Blood and other things came up with each cough. All around her people fell to the ground, gasping for air. Utte choked and tried to inhale, but could not draw another breath.

To Prologue or not to Prologue

I have a three page prologue at the beginning of my current manuscript which covers approximately twenty years of family history for the lead character. It gives a bit of a world setting and sets up for some of the conflict to come.

Some beta readers love it, others hate it, so I have decided it should not stand as it is. I think the problem many readers have is that I kept it intentionally short because I didn't want to put readers off with an expansive prologue. Now I am finding that nearly all the spots in my manuscript where I breeze over things because I think the audience won't be interested in the finer details are the biggest stumbling blocks. When I go back and flesh them out into fully realized scenes the readers enjoy them much more. In my attempt to shorten things, to keep from boring my readers I have created parts that bore the readers...

So, back to the prologue. I need to figure out if it's having the same problem, perhaps instead of three pages it should be ten, or twelve. The only way to find out is to write it. Then I'll cross my fingers and hope people like it so I don't have to cut it entirely.

Anyhow, that's where I am. I hate this stage of writing, it's all second guessing myself, hoping that the changes I make are for the better. It's frustrating, because I feel sometimes like I am making less improvement to the manuscript each day that passes, but occasionally I will have a big breakthrough, or a beta reader will point to a problem I hadn't noticed before. Then I'm thankful I'm taking my time and going through it all thoroughly.

Writing Versus Editing

I have been editing lately, which I suppose is why I haven't been on here as much.

To me writing is enervating, exciting and new. I get to create and worry about polishing at a later date. I can focus exclusively on what is good in my own writing and just enjoy, knowing that any bad parts can be excised later.

Well, now it is later. Editing is when I take a cold hard look at everything I've written and I have to focus on the bad parts. After a few days it is hard to keep confidence that the book is even worth an agent or a publisher's time. Harder still, to imagine that it will actually be published one day. Fortunately the feedback I've received so far has all been extremely positive. My readers all have points they would like me to fix but every one so far has said that, overlooking some blemishes which can easily be fixed, it is something they would expect to see on the shelf of a book store. I need to hear that from time to time, as I am sure you other writers out there know all too well, writing is a lonely business.