debut author

books in review

2024: a year in books

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According to Goodreads, I’ve glommed 172 books this year. A lot of them are ones I’ve read before (November was almost entirely comfort re-reading) but there were lots of lovely new finds mixed in as well. Here’s a round-up of the best new-to-me books of the year.

Romantasy

While this whole list is in no particular order, romantasy is probably my favourite category and these four books will all be added to the future comfort-read shelf.  

  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty: Amina is a middle-aged pirate heroine with a bung knee. This book has everything you want in an alt-history piratical romp: queer rep, found family, morally dodgy likeable characters, fantasy mixed with real world, boats, a bit of romance.
  • In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan: Elliot goes to magic school and finds himself best friends with elven warrior Serene and her partner in being-best-at-war-games Luke. Given Elliot is a sarcastic, pacifist bookworm, this makes for interesting times. It’s a play on the portal fantasy / magic school tropes and it’s beautifully done.
  • Yield Under Great Persuasion by Alexandra Rowland: Tam is a grumpy self-despising tea-shop owner who has been sleeping with Lyford for 10 years and pretending it means nothing. I loved pretty much everything about it; the magic, the characters, the quests, the emotional growth, the word “cock” in the first line, the fact it’s all about communication.
  • Swordcrossed by Freya Marske: Workaholic and family-loving Matti hires debonair con-man Luca to be the sword-wielding best man at his marriage of convenience. That goes pretty much as you’d expect…

Romance

Some lovely contemporary romances here. Three of these authors are auto-buys for me, and Jodi and Iona will probably become that now because their stories are delightful.

  • The Duke at Hazard by KJ Charles: An incognito Duke and a disgraced gentleman, chasing a thief across England. Another delightful Heyer-but-gayer romp from the master KJ Charles. Slightly sweeter than her norm—neither of the romantic leads are complete bastards and nobody dies—which worked a treat.
  • Chasing the Light by Alexis Hall: A companion novella for Waiting for the Flood, one of my favourite Alexis Hall works. It took me about two pages to go from team Edwin (Waiting for the Flood) to team Marius (Chasing the Light). Not that they’re on opposite sides, exactly. But going in I wasn’t sure that I could ever forgive Marius for leaving Edwin, but now I completely get it and am totally supportive. I mean, Marius is a complete bastard but Alexis Hall has this incredible ability to make you love characters who behave appallingly. Bring it on.
  • Funny Story by Emily Henry: Daphne wouldn’t fall in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex, would she? I loved this, maybe not as much as Book Lovers but it’s up there with Beach Read. Witty dialogue, real and flawed characters, lots of heartache and pining, some sweet sexy times.
  • Not Here to Make Friends by Jodi McAlister: Murray and Lily are both devious, scheming, manipulative bastards and I could not tell you why I love them so much but I do. This is the third in a trilogy showing the same season of Marry Me Juliet unfold, but it feels new and very different to the two previous books, and could be read as a standalone.
  • Division Bells by Iona Datt Sharma: Ari is a public servant (civil servant maybe, in England?) and Jules is a ministerial staffer, trying to get a bill through parliament. It’s a workplace romance where the work is almost the most important thing, and I’m 100% there for this given my fascination with all things politics and parliamentary procedure. The characters are delightful, the writing superb, and I cannot recommend highly enough.

Sci Fi & Fantasy

I went on a sci-fi catch-up binge early in the year, and it was totally worth it. 

  • The Ghost Brigades (Old Man’s War #2) by John Scalzi: I read the whole series and this one was the standout because of the main character, Jared. The themes were around choice and free will, and I absolutely loved how it played out even though I cried for most of the last part and ended up completely heartbroken.
  • Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde: This makes the list because it’s the sequel to Shades Of Grey and I waited FOURTEEN YEARS for it! Jasper Fforde’s imagination is extraordinary. Don’t start here; it will make no sense without reading the first one.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin: I can’t believe it’s taken me until now to read this masterpiece that was written before I was born and talks about gender and sexuality and nationalism and civilisation in ways that feel provocative today. I loved it.

Murder mystery

If I had to name my two favourite authors, it would probably be KJ Charles and Margery Allingham. Oh no, I’ve just realised Dancers In Mourning is a re-read! But I’m including it anyway because otherwise I don’t have a mystery category.

  • Death in the Spires by KJ Charles: A historical detective novel set in Oxford at the turn of the century. This is KJ Charles’ first foray into murder mystery—although as the author herself has pointed out, there’s a much lower body count here than in most of her romances—and I sincerely hope it’s not her last.
  • Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham: I did a re-read of the Campion novels at the start of the year, and this remains one of my favourites. Possibly because for the first time we see Campion vulnerable and emotionally involved, and I actually love that he gets the crime wrong. Also Lugg is brilliant; taking charge of a household, befriending a six year old girl and teaching her to pick locks and help him with the housework at the same time. I did have to put my politically correct hat aside to read these, because the misogyny, classism, intellectual snobbery and judgement on how people look is all on the nose (also racism in other books). But Allingham’s light hand with the story and her characterisations are enough for me to let that pass. Is that a good thing? I don’t know.

Sorta kinda literary

These days I just can’t cope with the misery-guts depressing shit that makes up most literary book lists (if I want to know how bad life can be I could watch the news). And while these novels were all sad, they were intriguing and beautiful and I am still thinking about them.

  • Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton: Incredibly powerful. I read a lot of it through tears; it’s deeply moving and heartbreaking. I loved the style, each chapter introduced with a drawing and a description of the work from a future art show. And we could all learn from the way our heroine makes decisions; “I find it motiving to consider what all those people are going to one day make of my life choices… it reminds me to apply a strong sense of significance to everything I do.” There was a bit more violence than I normally like and a few too many people dying (unnecessarily?) but I can forgive that for the emotional journey it took me on
  • The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: Just goes to show it doesn’t matter if you know how the story ends; this captivated me and made me cry, and I read it in two days. I also had my phone handy to check on my who’s who of Greek mythology, mostly picked up from Percy Jackson but expanded a bit now. My only quibble is the flicking between past and present tense. What was that all about?
  • The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera: Quite extraordinary. I didn’t understand about half of what was going on, but I was still captured by Fetter and the world he lived in, and the twist at the end was terrific.

Non fiction

  • The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein: I’m not sure if one book makes a category, but let’s pretend it does because otherwise this wouldn’t get a look-in and it truly deserves to. The text interweaves stories of trauma cleaning (hoarders and murders and everything in between) with the story of Sandra Pankhust’s life. Quite traumatic to read but ultimately hopeful.

writing_editing

What it’s like to go through an editing process for the first time

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I’ve just handed the final proof-read of Thoroughly Disenchanted back to my editor at Harper Voyager. It’s been a fascinating journey to get to this point and I thought it worth sharing for those of you who are new to this as well.

There are three main stages to the editing process:

  • The Structural Edit: any big picture changes to plot, characterisation, story arcs or as the title says, structure.
  • The Copy Edit: a line by line review of the manuscript, sense checking and considering words and phrasing.
  • The Proof Read: typos and final tweaks.

I imagine each of these stages changes depending on how much and what sort of work the novel needs, and maybe with different publishers or editors. Here’s how it played out for me.

THE STRUCTURAL EDIT

I’d heard horror stories about people getting their edit letter and freaking out about the changes they were being asked to make. So it was with some trepidation that I opened the attachment and… felt absolutely SEEN. My editor and publisher obviously completely got what I was trying to do, loved my characters and the story, and I could see the rationale behind every suggestion. 

Some data:

  • My edit letter was 4 pages long (11 point font, single spaced)
  • It had 7 items to address, 6 of which were small-ish and one medium/large
  • I had about 6 weeks for my first response, then another 4 weeks going backwards and forwards with further tweaks

The most simple suggestion was to get rid of chapter titles, which were apparently “a bit too flippant compared to the tone set by the rest of the book”. I say this was the simplest suggestion, and yes it was absolutely the easiest to deal with, but actually it was the one I least wanted to action. I liked those chapter titles! But I sounded out a few trusted friends who mostly sided with the editor, and I wasn’t absolutely wedded to them so out they went.

Some other slightly more complex changes included going into more depth on one characterisation, altering the role and backstory of another character, providing more clarity on the magical system and how it all worked, and rewriting a couple of scenes.

The most complicated suggestion was to introduce a new character, one who was talked about but didn’t actually appear on the page originally. That meant significant rewrites of some parts and several new scenes. I can’t reveal the detail for spoiler purposes, but trust me, it was not a small change.

My editor, Shannon, was terrific. He framed the feedback in a very positive light and made sure I was aware they were just suggestions and I could do what I liked with them. He offered (and I took him up on) a brainstorming session mainly to work out how and where we should introduce the new character and what the implications of that would be.

I made myself a spreadsheet to track the suggestions, my initial thoughts on what I needed to do to address those, and the actual changes I made in the manuscript. I then bit each change off piece by piece, easiest to most complicated. It was actually much easier than I expected and not as daunting as I feared.           

THE COPY EDIT

I’d kind of presumed the editing rounds got smaller as they went on, so the structural edit would be the biggest, the copy edit would be more manageable and the proof-read I’d be able to knock over in a night.

Boy was I wrong!

I got a heads up when Shannon messaged to say the copy-editor had some structural suggestions. We had a phone call to talk through them and they all made sense, so that was cool. And then a few weeks later his email sending through the changes, came with a reminder to look after my mental health as I was going through it…

Some facts:

  • The marked up manuscript was accompanied by a 5 page cover letter—so longer than my structural edit letter—with 17 sub-headings.
  • There were OVER 700 COMMENTS in the document, and many more marked up changes.
  • I had to get an initial response back within a week for us to send the ARCs to print (which I knew about in advance, and had agreed to) but then I had a further 3 weeks to review and make final changes.

This was quite a different process to the structural edits, and in some ways it was easier because the suggestions were marked up in the document. So I didn’t have to decide where and how to make the suggested change, just whether I wanted to or not.

The 700+ comments fell broadly into these categories:

  • Explaining why she’d made a word or phrase change.
  • Asking a simple question (Did you mean to use this word?)
  • Asking a complicated question (This doesn’t make sense; what are you trying to achieve?)
  • Suggestion for where something needed to be reworked, and why.

I agreed with by far the majority of the changes, and I was impressed with the attention to detail. Here’s one example, explaining a very simple marked up change:

“Suggest tweak to make language sound more natural and not too explanatory. Also to avoid repeating the ‘intellectual and emotional connection’ reference that’s already been brought up on page 4 and is coming up soon again on page 16.”

But even though I agreed with the changes, and honestly believe my book is significantly better because of them, the sheer scale of the task was overwhelming. Plus there’s something about looking at a sea of red mark-ups that hurts your soul.

It also involved a lot of work; we’d created some plot holes with the structural edit that needed fixing, and other parts required rewrites and new scenes. It wasn’t just clicking “accept all” on the changes.

So, I found this much more draining than the structural edit. A part of that is expectation—I’d thought it would be easier—but I do think it was also more work. 

THE PROOF READ

That part was fun to start with. Shannon sent me a printout of the formatted manuscript, so I read it in hardcopy rather than online, and marked up changes with a pen. I found a few changes but they were minor; words and phrases rather than anything structural. I had heaps of time, too, so I put it aside for a month and came back to it with slightly fresh eyes.

Shannon combined my markups with the changes from the proofreader and sent it back to me for one absolutely final review. 

Some facts:

  • There were a further 490 comments! Apparently that’s quite light on, and that 800 would have been quite normal. But still…
  • I had about three weeks to turn this around. 

These were all quite minor changes and yet, I found myself saying “no” to more of them than I had in previous rounds. I stopped myself a couple of times and stepped away from the computer, went for a walk and made a cup of tea, and came back to it with a fresh mind. If my instinct was to say no, I made myself read the original text and then the changed text out loud to see if it scanned better. If I still preferred my original wording, I tried to articulate why, just to make sure I wasn’t being pedantic.

Shannon reassured me every step of the way that it was my book, my words, and I didn’t have to make any changes I didn’t want. But maybe because I’m a debut author, I was nervous about rejecting something that might be legitimate feedback, that I was just not ready to hear. Hence if I rejected something, I had to have a really good reason why.

I ended up saying “no” to quite a lot of suggestions; particularly those that I thought changed my voice, or the cadence or rhythm of the text, and most of the dialogue amendments (I don’t care if it’s grammatically incorrect, that’s how she speaks!)

I accepted quite a few changes that I didn’t really agree with, but I felt they were so minor that it didn’t really matter. That was a deliberate decision to focus on the things that mattered most to me, and let the small stuff go. 

I thought the proof read would be super quick, but actually I took nearly my allotted three weeks to get the final response. This was mainly because I knew I had time, so I didn’t rush. But it’s also because I had to think about nearly every suggestion, and take lots of mental health breaks. 

* * *

So there you have it, the editing process with a trad publisher through the eyes of a first-time author.

It took 7 months from the time I got my structural edit letter in January, to finalising the proof read in August. I’ve been told this is longer than normal (it was certainly longer than I expected). I was always clear on what I had to do by when, and the time frames were reasonable and flexible if needed.

I’ve been enormously lucky to have such great support and commitment from Harper Voyager, and I’m very excited about where Thoroughly Disenchanted has landed.

Happy writing!

 

Note: KJ Charles has an excellent blog about how writers and editors deal with disagreement.

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