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I recently finished reading Songlines, the first Young Adult book I’ve read in a long time. It’s a genre that I’ve always loved, and conveniently I have younger siblings who quit that age group much more recently than I did to keep me abreast of what’s good in the YA field. Like everything though, I phase in and out of it. I’ve been focussing on reading a lot more in my own genre this year (Historical Fiction/Women’s fiction) and it was nice to pick up a book to read for reading’s sake alone again.

Songlines is the story of Lainie, a country girl who is just trying to finish year twelve. But there’s a problem. When a big mining company starts exploring on Lainie’s sheep farm, strange things start happening, to Lainie and to the people around her. Suddenly year twelve is the least of her problems as she has to come to grips with a family secret that is about to change the whole course of her life.

I could not put this book down (not strictly true, I did put it down to feed the children and sleep occasionally, but I wasn’t happy about it) and once I was finished I immediately stalked Carolyn to find out when the next one would be out — which happily, is soon-ish. April 2017! The main character Lainie is such fun company and her growing tribe of fellow victims of the mining interruption are an endearing bunch to spend your days with. Carolyn has taken a fantasy theme and layered it in casual rural Australiana to produce a story that is a compelling mix of intensity and laid-back humour.

The more time I spend in the Australian bush, the more I realise that this is a country made for fantasy stories of raw power and brutal passions, and Carolyn has captured that perfectly in her debut novel Songlines.

If you would like a taste of Lainie’s world, there is a free prequel Barramundi Triangle Available to read. There is also a book trailer for Songlines available to view via YouTube.

I had a chat with Carolyn after I’d finished Songlines, just to make sure that she was working hard to get the next book out, and to find out some more about her and her writing. The details of that chat are below, but first, a little about Carolyn herself:

Carolyn lives on a small hobby farm on the outskirts of Melbourne. She has a science degree, far too many pets and a fear of the ocean that makes her Mauritian mother roll her eyes. Somehow between her mortgage-broking job, driving her kids crazy (mostly by asking their friends’ opinions about the Singularity) and feeding 63 baby axolotls, she has managed to write short stories for Aurealis and Andromeda Spaceways magazines. She is currently working to complete the fourth and final book in The Sentinels of Eden and after that she has promised that she will finally vacuum the bedrooms.

Carolyn, when did the idea for the Sentinels of Eden first occur to you? Did you think it would be just one book or were you always planning a series?

 It’s so hard to pinpoint an exact moment when random thought turns into an ‘idea’. I was having many discussions with my brother regarding Christian apologetics at the same time as I was trying to encourage my daughter to write a spec fiction story. Thinking through what a perfect God (whose nature is the very definition of Love) would have intended for the human race… who wouldn’t get caught up in the possibilities? And no, at the start I wasn’t even confident that my ramblings would turn into a whole story, let alone a series. I was just trying to get my girl started. Whoops.

What sort of research did you have to undertake to write this book?

Other than a crash course (by pulling other books off the shelf) in how to structure my writing, the research took me all sorts of places. Farm life – I live on a small acreage, so that part was easy and fun to explore (although my first editor did say it sounded like it was set on a hobby farm – I wonder why?) Aboriginal culture – I never set out to write about it, but I quickly realised it would be an unforgiveable tragedy to disregard. Certainly that research made me ask questions that every Australian should be asking. Get curious. Ask questions, share stories appropriately, keep those complex and beautiful cultures as relevant as possible.

How long did it take you to write your first book?

The first draft took me just a few weeks to finish. Then four years to get right!

What was your biggest learning curve?

Mastering all those apps, platforms and marketing tools. I think I created about 20 new accounts in the space of 2 months. All easy to learn, but there were just so many. 

What was the biggest surprise about writing?

How addictive it can be. And embarassing. Yeah, when someone asks how your day has been and you reply with: ‘Stressful! You wouldn’t believe what Noah did last night!’

What is your favourite thing about being a writer?

 Playing out conversations in your head between characters you’ve made up. If only I could control both sides of real life conversations the same way. Life would be much more interesting.

And your least favourite?  

Self-doubt. Happens to everyone. It will make me a better writer though, so it’s necessary. Just keep swimming.

I really enjoyed reading this story through Lainie’s perspective, she cracks me up. Is her character inspired by anyone?

 Not intentionally, but she does have a lot of similarities to my eldest daughter. Also to me, so I’ve been told. It worries me a little, because it’s important to write characters with their own ‘voice’, but what if Lainie has my voice and all future characters I write just end up sounding like me too? Good thing I’m so likeable…

How do you manage to juggle your family, your work, your farm and your writing?

 Badly! I can smell the scent of burning gnocchi as we speak… Or is that simply my secret way of encouraging the kids to start helping out with dinner more often? The truth is, you will always find time for the things you enjoy, and that’s exactly as it should be.

Have your kids read your book? What do they think of it?

 They hounded me for each new chapter of the first draft – four years ago, but apparently the novelty has since worn off. Possibly because this journey has turned them into talented editors. Oh… I’ve ruined reading for them forever! (Sob) So much for my original intention.

The note in the back of Songlines mentions that you are working on the final book of Eden, What’s next?

 That’s easy. I’m hanging out to sink my teeth into a fresh story. First draft of book 1 is done, but remember, it took me years to get Songlines right. Hopefully I’ve learnt enough that it will be a bit quicker now. I hope so, because this post-singularity-time-distortion-romance-adventure needs to be out in the world. Or at least out of my head.

And finally, when can we get our hands on book two?

Release is scheduled for April 2017. First I need my amazing beta-readers to tell me things like ‘wattle trees don’t flower at that time of year’ and ‘myna bird populations haven’t spread that far north yet, pick a different species’. Yeah, I am blessed with some very clever (and patient) helpers.

If you have any questions of your own for Carolyn, or if you would like to keep an eye on Carolyn’s progress you can find her at the following places:

carolyndenman.com

Facebook: Carolyn J Denman

Twitter: @CDenmanAuthor

Email: carolyn@carolyndenman.com

Songlines is available in paperback or ebook form and can be purchased from Amazon.    

It is a truth universally (if somewhat despairingly) acknowledged that a manuscript once written is no more fit for the eyes of a publisher or agent than a manuscript half written. One does not get to hit the send button simply because one has slogged it out until typing The End. The simple (and occasionally depressing) fact is that just because it is written, does not mean that it is finished. There are the edits.

What are these edits that everyone talks about with hushed voices and glazed stares? What makes them so daunting and universally loathed? Well, there is of course the structural edit, there might be something more after that, and then there is the line edit, see?

No? I didn’t either.

Since finishing my second draft (an almost complete re-write of the first) I’ve been trawling the internet and doing a bit of poking about in my various writing books to try and discover what is involved in this horrible task of editing that lies ahead of me.

I decided to start with the purpose of the edits. What exactly am I trying to achieve by reading my manuscript over and over and over until I’m heartily sick of the thing? In the introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Other Works Nicholas Seager describes Austen’s revision process as ‘the art of controlling readers’ responses to characters and situations’. He gives some examples of Austen’s edits to show the power of choosing the right words for a given situation. In an excerpt from The Watsons (an unfinished manuscript by Austen) there is a line in which a woman is shown ‘stifling her own angry feelings [mortification]’. There is a wealth of differing information in the two choices of phrasing. A woman who is mortified suggests and entirely different social situation than a woman who is angry. Nicholas Seager makes the point that you can be angered by your inferiors, but not your superiors. Which goes on to change our opinion, not only of the victim, but of the perpetrator as well. To anger someone is different, and perhaps more forgivable than to mortify them.

So, I had an aim: to control responses to the characters and situations I had created, but how to go about it exactly? I had lots of little scraps of information about things that needed to be cut from first (or second first) drafts, but the whole thing was still a terribly confusing mass of formless information that was as overwhelming as the edits I was supposed – somehow — to be doing.

That was when I stumbled upon a gem of a blog post by Zachery Petit on writersdigest.com called What to Look for When Editing Your Manuscript. In it he details a list of edits (and I mean details) that need to be considered before sending your work off to an agent or publisher. The list is not his own, he got it from the Crime Writer Patricia Gussin, and I am in turn stealing it from him. I won’t give the full details of the list here, for that you should check out the blog post, but I’ll give a brief overview of what is involved. The editing method is called the 5 Reread Program, in which you re-read your manuscript five separate times looking for specific flaws and doing specific edits each time.

Read 1: The content (I think this is what is also known as structural edit. Does your manuscript make sense? What can you cut out of it?)

Read 2: The enhancement (this will be the part where I’ll be cracking out the Thesaurus of Emotions so that my characters can show surprise by more than a lift of their eyebrows every second page)

Read 3: The sentence level (also known as a line edit. Do you really mean that sentence? Do you? Can it be said any better? Agonise over it… and repeat. For Every Sentence. Just like Jane did.)

Read 4: The little things (I have a Margaret who somehow became a Moira by the end of the book — stuff like that)

Read 5: Read out loud (my husband can’t wait for this one, although I suspect it will be my new little baby who will be the privileged recipient of most of this edit.)

The original list is much more extensive, there is a beautiful structure to it and I love having a game plan once more, rather the vague aim of ‘making this manuscript better’. I highly recommend checking it out if you’d like to demystify the editing process.

Today I started Read 1 in earnest. I have already completed bits and pieces of this one along the way, so I’m hoping it won’t be too painful. My aim is to cut a whole lot of words and iron out some time-line issues that have cropped up along the way. There are also quite a few notes peppered throughout my manuscript to the tune of ‘insert vital-yet-to-be-determined piece of information here’, so hopefully I work those out while I’m at it. I would like to get Read 1 finished by the end of January. Any fingers crossed on my behalf would be very much appreciated!

Next week on the blog is my very first Author Interview! I’ll be interviewing Carolyn Denman, the super talented author of Songlines, a YA novel, the first in the Sentinels of Eden series, and a cracking great read. To make sure you don’t miss it, or any of my posts, be sure to subscribe to my blog using the box at the bottom of the home page. If you’d like to get in touch between posts, or take a peek into the world of my writing, reading and mothering, then you can find me most days on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Happy New Year everyone, I’ll see you next week!

Writing in code is an old art. Apparently human beings have had secrets and intrigue right from the start. There is a large scale fascination with cryptography and cryptanalysis, and the root of this fascination lies in the fact that codes are secrets and secrets were made to be discovered. The breaking of codes, without the help of a computer or a savant has always seemed impossible to me. Like Columbus and his egg, I just can’t comprehend how it can be done until someone shows me the way.

I have always loved codes. In my box of mementos I still have the collections of fabulous substitution ciphers my friends and I devised to send each other our classroom secrets. There is one cipher that is made up of a particularly elaborate system of symbols, and another that looks like the love-child of shorthand and hieroglyphics. The hours we put into devising our codes and encrypting our (not overly exciting) messages!

When we were feeling less artistic or inventive, my friends and I often reverted to the simple alphabet shift ciphers (or Caesar Shifts as I have since learnt they are called). Though these codes still appeared difficult, I could see how, with a bit of perseverance, they could be broken. We just trusted to the fact that, if found, none of our teachers or classmates would invest the required time to crack them. The substitution codes though, with their captivatingly confusing array of dots and lines and squiggles were, we thought, much more sophisticated and impossible to break.

However, in the course of writing my current novel, I’ve done a bit of research on codes, and it would appear that these substitution ciphers are amongst the easiest to crack. The undoing of these codes is down to the Muslim scholars of the Islamic culture golden age (which lasted from about 750CE to the thirteenth century). They realised that letters in any language appear with regular and reliable frequency and so they developed a technique to crack substitution ciphers called Frequency Analysis. This process was explained beautifully in my go-to code resource; Codebreaker: The History of Secret Communication by Stephen Pincock and Mark Frary. I’ve used it as a reference for an earlier blogpost, Chapel of Secrets and as a guide for the secret writings in my novel. Below I’ve summarised the method of breaking a substitution cipher.

Basically, as explained above, there is a certain frequency followed by the English alphabet as to how often each letter will appear in a body of text. E makes the most regular appearance, coming in at 12 percent of all the letters in any given piece of writing, followed by T at 9 percent and A at 8 percent. The expected relative frequencies of the whole English alphabet are shown in the table below.

Now, if you have an encrypted piece of text, one which has been encrypted using a substitution cypher, you can make your own record of how often each letter or symbol appears by using a similar chart to the one above. Say for example we have the text (encrypted using www.braingle.com) :

Znoy oy znk vuckx, otjkkj znk cnurk vuotz ul zngz zoxkj urj (haz tkbkxznkrkyy zxak) sgtzxg ‘ynuc jut’z zkrr’. Ol eua igt ynuc payz ktuamn yu zngz euax gajoktik corr lorr ot znk mgvy znksykrbky, znke corr zgqk ut g qotj ul uctkxynov ul euax yzuxe. Euax gajoktik hkiusky otbkyzkj ot g cge zngz qkkvy znks iruyk zu znk yzuxe, grsuyz g vgxz ul oz.

Then the corresponding graph would look like this:

A similar shape to our original expected frequencies graph, only shifted. So, comparing our two graphs, it would seem that the letter K has been substituted for the letter E. Which means that G has been substituted for A, and H for B and so on. And following this through, you get the decrypted cipher (from last week’s blog post) reading:

This is the power, indeed the whole point of that tired old (but nevertheless true) mantra ‘show don’t tell’. If you can show just enough so that your audience will fill in the gaps themselves, they will take on a kind of ownership of your story. Your audience becomes invested in a way that keeps them close to the story, almost a part of it.

So there you have it, quite simple once you know how, isn’t it? Of course, this technique only works for monoalphabetic cyphers, which are cyphers that use a single substitution for each letter of the alphabet. Polyalphabetic cyphers, in which each letter of the alphabet can be represented by a number of different letters, numerals or symbols, are a different story. I’ll tell you more about them some other day.

In case you’re itching to have a go at this, I’ll leave you with this coded piece of text from one of my favourite authors. Let me know the name of the author in the comments below if you manage to break it (but leave the text a secret so that everyone can enjoy the fun). NB: I’ve taken out all the punctuation for this piece to make it more realistic.

ro cdyzzon k zkccsxq qekbn led nsnxd nkbo woxdsyx zvkdpybw xsxo kxn drboo aekbdobc dro qekbn rkn xofob rokbn yp ryqgkbdc kxn grox rkbbi myevnxd ofox dovv rsw grsmr zkbd yp dro myexdbi sd gkc sx ro cdkbdon dy qod kxxyion kc dryeqr rkbbi gkc losxq cdezsn yx zebzyco

If you’d like a peek into the world of my writing, reading and mothering, you can find me most days on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Until then, I’ll see you next week, happy cryptanalysis!

There is a black and white photograph of a tired Parisian street in 1963. The day looks to be just beginning, empty chairs are clustered outside a café where the curtains are still drawn, mobile kerbside market stalls have their wares under cover and shutters are still closed on the apartments above the stores.

In the centre of the photo is a bride striding across the street, the sole person in the frame. Her head bent, a bouquet grasped tightly in one gloved hand, she is wearing a lace gown with three quarter length sleeves, the ballerina style skirt ending at the knee, showing off her thin calves and white pointed stilettos. She wears a communion length veil that has a fine detail picked out along the edge and her dark hair is piled on top of her head. She is completely alone.

Her lack of attendants and family and fuss is exacerbated by the slightly shabby feel of the street. Uneven awnings hang limply over one of the street stalls, another has someone’s forgotten coat and a page from a newspaper littering the top of it. One of the stalls is a hand cart, another appears to be on the back of a small truck and the third is simply a few boards sat atop some upturned crates.

The bride walks with great determination, the photographer (xx) has caught her mid stride, the moment that both her feet clear the ground. She has about her the air of someone very much set on where she is going, a woman with a job to do.

This is not your typical romantic bridal shot, no bridesmaids, no glossy car, no softly lit church, and no adoring groom. But then perhaps the solitary bride, making her way unattended through the unkempt streets of Paris in the early morning to her wedding is the most romantic figure of all. Perhaps she is marrying despite the lack of support of her friends and family because she truly loves this man, and she can’t afford to wait any more on the convenience of others.

What I love about this photo is the absolute certainty of the bride. The early sixties were still a relatively conservative period, Woodstock was still six years away from the time of this photo, and women bucking social trends was not the norm. This woman is in charge of her destiny, and she is off to meet her groom, with or without anyone’s blessing.

There is a certain romance to this shot too. My favourite movie wedding scene is the one from Braveheart where William Wallace and his bride meet in a forest clearing in the middle of the night with only a priest to witness their marriage. It is a beautifully poignant and romantic moment. That these two people have decided to marry, despite the danger that doing so will put them in, means that for those few hours in the forest all that matters is the promises they make to each other. The decision they have made that what they build together in love will be more than what they could do apart. I love those stolen, tender moments.

What do you think about this bride? Is she off to a happy marriage, a prosperous future, a life of love? Or is her decision to go her wedding alone a portent of a lonely life? Let me know in the comments below, and if you’d like a peek into the world of my writing, reading and mothering, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Until then, I’ll see you in a week!