I said she said

I'm in that fever-dash at work prior to being out Thursday and Friday for World Fantasy Con, so forgive the recent silence. But there are many things going on, so here are a couple:

Over at Tor.com, I've got a guest post about cyberpunk and steampunk. Or something. I'm sure I'm brilliant.

And Madhatter reviews The Horns of Ruin. I usually don't point to reviews because you get into dangerous self-editing, where you point to positive reviews and ignore negatives. This happens to be a fairly positive review, but it brings up something that's been bumping around in my head that I wanted to talk about.

For both Heart of Veridon and The Horns of Ruin, I get tagged for having flat secondary characters. This troubles me, simply because it's a bad thing, and I try to address bad things.

First off, I don't dispute it. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I wrote both of these books in the first person, which was a new style for me when I wrote HoV, and so all the tools I had learned to get inside a character's motivation could no longer be applied to anyone other than Jacob. There were so many other things I was grappling with stylistically in that book, that I never really got around to developing new tools.

And I think the same thing dogged me in Horns. I won't get into the decision making process about PoV and which characters to follow, but I was hoping to be able to correct a lot of that "flatness" in this one. So that's something I'm still working on, I guess, but that's the nature of writing.

Anyway. Much work to do. I'm going to be doing that now.

This is hardly a post at all. Dreadful effort.

Seriously, two weeks? Sorry about that. I'm shocked I have any readers at this rate. Comfort yourself in the knowledge that I'm cranking out wordcount. There's also a lot of stuff built up around the release of The Horns of Ruin that take up bandwidth. Interviews, a couple articles for various sites... just business. But you'd be surprised at how much attention that kind of thing takes. Wrapping a lot of it up today, but still. Busy-ness.

It's only two weeks until WFC! It's also only two weeks until Eva Forge hits shelves. I'm comfortably nervous. THoR is a considerably different book that the Veridon stuff, but there are also similarities. Not many folks read Heart of Veridon, though, so it's not like that will have a significant impact on reader reaction. Sadly.

What's weird is that I have this sprint to the end of the year, and then I'm clear for some undetermined period of time. Signed up for a discussion/forum/internetty thing for Borders in February. Going to be writing opposite Mark Hodder, Felix Gilman and Jay Lake. How's that for intimidating? It is quite sufficient for intimidating, thank you very much.

Okay, anyway. Want to finish this interview tonight. Get on it, Akers.