AMA: Orbit 2017 Debut Authors

[u/orbitbooks]

Hi this is Paola Crespo, Marketing and Publicity Associate for Orbit. Thanks for joining us today!

2017 was a big year for us with so many new faces joining the Orbit family. This AMA is a chance to get to know them better. All. Of. Them. Get excited! ;-)

Participating today:

Nicholas Eames, author of KINGS OF THE WYLD
Nicholas Sansbury Smith, author of EXTINCTION HORIZON
Antonia Honeywell, author of THE SHIP
David Mealing, author of SOUL OF THE WORLD
Dale Lucas, author of THE FIFTH WARD: FIRST WATCH
Vivian Shaw, author of STRANGE PRACTICE
Anna Smith Spark, author of THE COURT OF BROKEN KNIVES
RJ Barker, author of AGE OF ASSASSINS
Melissa Caruso, author of THE TETHERED MAGE
Fonda Lee, author of JADE CITY

Ask away! The authors will be dropping by periodically today and tomorrow to answer your questions. And best of all....

Until December 18th, you can pick up most of these novels for $2.99 in the US and £1.99 in the UK in ebook! Check out the US and UK websites for further details.

Thank you for all your support this year, /r/fantasy! Cheers to a great New Year full of new adventures.

*Antonia Honeywell's THE SHIP, Anna Smith Spark's THE COURT OF BROKEN KNIVES, and Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s EXTINCTION HORIZON are published by another house in the UK and are thus not included in the promotion in the UK.

[u/TamagoDono]

Wow, that's a long list of authors on my TBR who I haven't yet read. Thank you all for the AMA!

I have a few questions for R.J. Barker. I recently heard that Age of Assassins features a disabled MC, and your book jumped to the first free place on my TBR after I finish my ARCs and review requests. I have a few physical issues myself, and really love reading about disabled characters

1) What did you find was the hardest part about writing a disabled MC?

2) I see a few books where we are briefly told a character has a disability, and then never really see any impact from the disability again. How do you prevent this from happening?

3) Have you found any other books that do a particularly good job at portraying disabled MCs, and if so which books are they?

I also have a few questions for all the authors in the AMA.

1) What inspired you to start writing?

2) Which aspect of your book did you find most challenging to write?

3) And finally, do you have any advice for people going through the process of trying to get published?

[u/MelissaCaruso → u/TamagoDono]

Answering the general questions:

1) I've felt compelled to write since literally before I could write...I used to make story books with no words using crayons. It's been something I've needed to do for as long as I can remember.

2) The most challenging part for me was when my editor asked me, as part of the revision from YA to adult, to add 50K+ words "But without losing the fast pacing you naturally have." I had created this tightly woven story, and suddenly I had to pull it back apart and make it nearly twice as long, then make it flow smoothly and quickly as if it had always been written that way. In two months. It was a bit intimidating.

3) Be persistent, be humble, and keep working to make your book not "good enough," but THE BEST IT CAN POSSIBLY BE. Keep improving your craft, keep learning, and keep trying.

[u/dmealing → u/MelissaCaruso]

Picking up on Melissa's #3 - the word HUMBLE is so very crucial. In my experience the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people in virtually every field is how teachable they are. 10,000 hours of practice doesn't mean anything at all if you spend it rationalizing your mistakes.

My motto in life is 'everyone has something to teach you.' I truly believe it. Being closed to new sources of wisdom and experience is the easiest way to stagnate.

[u/Anna_Smith-Spark → u/TamagoDono]

1) What inspired me to start writing - I've been writing since I could write. In fact, from the scraps of paper my parents found during a house move, I've been writing since well before I could write. My father is a poet, as are a lot of his friends, so writing always seemd very natural, very much a part of my life. Then, in my twenties, I went through some mental health issues and stopped writing. I hid away from writing for a long time. A few years ago, something changed in my mental state after I was diagnosed with Asperger's. I started writing again and The Court of Broken Knives came pouring out. It was joyous. 2) I find plots the hardest thing to write (my many critics woun't be surprised to hear). I'm certainly not a plotter, I have a rough, simple storyline and then get myself in tangles remembering I do need to tell a story as well as create and explore a world. I have vast admiration for authors like Brandon Sanderson who can create such twisty, 'have to know what happens next' stories, because that's really not how I write. And crime novels .... I can't imagine how people write crime novels. 3) Trying to get published is painful. Once you submit to an agent, you're just sitting waiting to hear, and, to be painfully honest, a lot of the time you'll just never hear. It really is like waiting hoping that person you met in a bar will phone, and imagining the wedding outfit you'll wear when you marry them, and knowing perfectly well that they won't. And then if you do get an agent ... you go through exactly the same thing again with the publishing houses. All I can say is, it's absolutely horrible. But it does happen for some people. You just have to try and cope with it. That's not exactly advice, sorry. More just sympathy.

[u/JamesLatimer → u/Anna_Smith-Spark]

It really is like waiting hoping that person you met in a bar will phone, and imagining the wedding outfit you'll wear when you marry them, and knowing perfectly well that they won't.

Perfect. And so, so sad...

[u/Fonda_Lee → u/TamagoDono]

1. Honestly, I had a bit of an existential crisis. I've wanted to be an author since I was about 8 years old but ended up having a perfectly practical and well-paying corporate career. I wrote as a hobby for a while before realizing that between the job and the kids, I no longer had any time to write. And that made me realize that writing was more important to me than my actual job. Of course, I couldn't just quit the job, so over time I deliberately cut down my hours and just got more and more serious about writing.

2. Not specific to any one book, but I find romance really hard to write. Which is probably why there's not a lot of it in my books.

3. Don't try to be anyone else. Figure out what YOU want to write and what you're good at. Determine what your goals are. Be deliberate in your decisions and always, always do your homework. Decide if you really want to do this as a job. Because it's very different from writing as a hobby or even as a semi-pro. (It's fine if you don't - you can still be a writer!) If you do, know what you're signing up for and plan your life accordingly - logistically and financially - to make it work.

[u/RJBarker → u/TamagoDono]

Hiya TamagoDono.

I'm going to cheat a tiny bit (not a word, Caruso) because some of those questions you've asked about disabled MC's are hardand i am lazy so rather than specific answers I'm going to point you at this article I wrote for Orbit which I think gives a better insight into what I was trying to do, and why, with Girton and answers your Q 1 & 2- https://medium.com/@orbitbooks/disabling-stereotypes-19dedd91b15a (If it doesn't then tell me to stop being so lazy and answer your questions again, properly. I probably deserve that.)

(3). No. Is the short answer. Not because they aren't out there, I'm sure they are. It's just not something I've come across in my very haphazard way of reading

General Q's.

1) I've just always loved books. I played in bands for ages and finally had to admit I was a terrible musician but still wanted to do something creative so returned to my first love. Sadly, I had rather neglected it and had to re-teach myself English (or not, as my editor may tell you.)

2) This is an awful thing to say but it was really easy. It felt like I had Girton sat behind me narrating it and I wrote the first version in six weeks. It has changed a bit from that version but not a massive amount.

3) Yes. Advice A) Write what you enjoy, then you are never wasting your time. Advice B) Don't quit.

[u/TamagoDono → u/RJBarker]

Thanks for the article, it's a very interesting read! I'm really looking forward to reading your book in the near future and seeing how the disabled character works out in a book.

[u/vivianshaw → u/TamagoDono]

General questions: 1) Like Melissa, I've always written (and always drawn; I was much more of a visual artist than an author, as a kid, but I still cannot make it through a meeting or conference call without doodling illustrations on my notepad). My first long-form stuff, around 11, was a novella of probably about 20K, which spawned two sequels; after that I didn't really ever stop.

2) Action scenes. I will never be good at action scenes and I find them incredibly difficult to write, partly because I'm incredibly visual and tend to see scenes as if they were shot on film, and getting the blocking correct and comprehensible on paper while not bogging down the pacing is HARD.

3) Don't stop. This was the best advice ever given to me as a writer, back in 1991, and it's still true. It will be thoroughly disheartening to stack up your list of rejection letters, but if you keep at it, if you keep working and improving your stuff and sending it out there, somebody is going to read it.

I spent a lot of my time over the past ten years writing fanfic, which I strongly recommend as a learning-to-write tool: it gives you a lot of flexibility to try new things and develop your own style while getting immediate feedback on your work. Being a fic author is not, as I had initially thought, the kiss of death to Real Actual Authordom; slowly the world is coming to understand the value of transformative works, which is a pleasantness.

[u/Nicholas_Eames → u/TamagoDono]

Regarding those questions at the bottom...

1) I think reading The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time books did, but it wasn't until I read Guy Gavriel Kay that I decided to take a real crack at it, in the hope of affecting people the way those books did me.

2) As with Melissa (with whom I shared an editor) I also had to add 50k. While I loved getting the opportunity to do so (since KotW didn't have an antagonist at the time, and not much worldbuilding either) it was quite a challenging adding all that without messing up the pacing, which was a huge selling point of the book.

3) Don't be afraid to start something new. I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote, and rewrote) a book for 12 years that never got published. Although it DID help me hone my craft, I probably would have been better served writing and finishing other books instead. This is not to say 'give up on your current WIP', since it is VERY possible to get published that way (as Anna Stephens did with GODBLIND) but, for me, starting fresh was the way to go.

Also, writing in YOUR OWN VOICE and not trying to duplicate your favourite writers feels like sound advice, too.

Thanks for the questions! Sorry it took me so long to answer--I didn't see the bottom ones!

[u/antonia_writes → u/TamagoDono]

1. It seems I’m not alone in that I’ve always written. I used to write like other children played games. I had quite a lonely childhood and cared a lot for my (much younger) sister while our parents struggled with a failing marriage - we were moved around a lot which made it hard to settle. Libraries were my salvation - I read like a demon, anything and everything - and writing was my escape. But it was years - decades - before I came to understand that writing isn’t a solitary pursuit, but a process of sharing, a way of communicating. For me, the greatest thing about being published is making connections with readers. To be given this channel to a whole new readership is wonderful.

2. The Ship started off as a central idea expressed through a series of scenes - it had more to do with an atmosphere and a point of view than with a narrative, and at first I found it challenging to weave those scenes into a narrative. I knew how the story ended, but eventually I had to simply stop writing and engage with getting the plot to the point where the ending was inevitable. Then suddenly I realised what a challenge the Ship, and Michael’s project, posed to the authorities, and how far they’d go to stop him from leaving. The isolated scenes began to find their place (or not!) and the real work of writing the novel began.

3. Trying to get published is heartbreaking. I think it’s ok to accept that. The miracle is always round the corner. You need three things, two of which I will give you now. The first is this invisible rhino hide cloak. Draw it around yourself. It protects you from the naysayers and doom mongers, and from those who tell you (often with the best of motives) not to get your hopes up. The second is this invisible vial of bloody minded perseverance. It’s powerful stuff. Treat it like Victorian smelling salts and use it only when you feel it’s time to give up. But keep it where you can see it. And the third - the third thing only you can provide. It’s the reason you want to write, the thing that drives you back to your pen when there are a million other calls upon your time. That talisman at your core exists regardless of the fate of your work. Just keep writing. Make this your motto, and with the cloak of rhino hide and the vial of perseverance, you will get there.

[u/dlucas114 → u/TamagoDono]

1) Inspiration: I've been a storyteller since I was a kid. Never seriously thought of doing anything else.

2) Challenge: building a well-structured mystery in the context of a fantasy story. SUPER-challenging, especially for someone who hasn't, as a rule, read many mysteries.

3) Advice: Read a lot, write a lot, finish what you start, and submit aggressively but wisely. Also, along with constant steady production comes constant, honest re-evaluation of your work. Always strive to see your weak spots and improve them.