All together now...

The collected stories of the Empire of Steam are now available as both ebook and print HERE.

Red Mercury, Neptune Rising, and Titan's Fire - all three novels available in one single edition.

I've totally revised all three of them (and practically rewritten Red Mercury!) for this edition and I'm delighted with how they're now looking.

If you fancy some good old-fashioned adventure, with a dash of steam-driven sci-fi then please give it a go!

4 steps to punchier, better writing...

I recently ran into a writing exercise on a marketing training course at work: we had to write a story in as few words as possible. This was to help us develop the skills to craft pithy, punchy brand positioning statements. The writing muscles this exercise made me flex reminded me of when the editing and rewriting process goes well, and I thought it would be worth sharing here.

My partner in the exercise and I were given a setting, the jungle, and told to get going. We kicked around a few ideas and settled on this as our first effort...

The lion was really angry because nobody had told him that the party was supposed to be fancy dress.

OK, not exactly Kipling, but it made us smile. I think we liked it because it hinted at a bigger world beyond what the reader actually reads, one where lions go to parties for a start. At this point, the editing and rewriting kicked in and we started trying to make it better.

Step 1 - useless words and adverbs

Straight away, look for the -ly words, a sure signpost of a flabby sentence. Did 'really' add anything? Is 'really angry' more angry than 'angry'? Maybe, but not much.

And look hard at every instance of 'that'. You probably don't need them. We didn't here.

The lion was angry because nobody had told him the party was supposed to be fancy dress.

Already it's better.

Step 2 - challenge the flabby bits

'Nobody had told him'? Hmm. Do we need the 'had'?

And 'supposed to be'? Hmm once again. Did we need any of that?

The lion was angry because nobody told him the party was fancy dress.

Ooh, much nicer. Much tighter. But still not quite right.

Step 3 - emphasise the emotion

Yes, we know the lion was angry, but it doesn't exactly leap off the page. And we'd already killed the idea of 'really angry'. Could we make it feel stronger? How about 'The lion was raging'? Much nicer.

And if you're getting into the land of anger and rage, you want short, clipped sentences, making things feel harsher and sharper. So we split our sentence into two and got rid of another word into the bargain. 'Because' is regularly another of those filler words - it feels essential in your first draft, but can often disappear in the rewrites.

The lion was raging. Nobody told him the party was fancy dress.

Much, much better.

Step 4 - add real character

The one thing still lacking for me was any character. Our lion is 'the lion', which is the equivalent of saying 'a lion' - any old lion, one lion of many. Was there a way to give him a bit more spark and interest?

How about we drop the 'The'?

Lion was raging. Nobody told him the party was fancy dress.

Boom. There we have it. Not just 'the lion', no. Suddenly this is a story about 'Lion' - a figure immediately invested with character. No longer a description, Lion has become a name.

In twenty minutes we went from:
The lion was really angry because nobody had told him that the party was supposed to be fancy dress.
To:
Lion was raging. Nobody told him the party was fancy dress.

I know which version I prefer. The second one is 8 words shorter, but is invested with at least 8 times the character and intrigue. And I think it's much funnier too.


I'd recommend any budding writers to give this exercise a go. It's a good way of sharpening your skills and getting practice at honing your words into lethal weapons.

There is a famous story about Hemingway being challenged to write a story in only six words. He apparently thought for a moment and then scribbled the following on a back of a napkin: For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

He won the bet. Could you?

Top 5 signs of bad writing...

When I had finished my first draft of Red Mercury I wanted a bit of advice before I started trying to review and edit it. I read a whole heap of blog posts and websites on this - all really useful.

I thought I'd gather together the 5 hints and tips I found most useful. It was terrifying when I went through my first draft and found how often I'd fallen foul of these classic first-time writer pitfalls...

1 - 'Useless words'
Many words can be cut from a sentence without affecting its meaning. Classic examples are "just" and "that". I was amazed at how often the word "that" is utterly superfluous. I'd recommend doing a search of your manuscript for both these terms and challenge each and every instance. Using "that" was a particular crime of mine - I found 200 instances where I'd used it in my 40,000 word manuscript. I kept two of them.
Other examples of this are phrases like "he thought to himself". Well of course he did. He isn't going to think it to someone else (unless the novel is set in a world of telepaths). "He thought" will do just fine.

2 - Strong verbs beat adverbs, every time
"Crept" is much better than "moved quietly". "Trudged" is much better than "walked slowly".
I had been aware when I started writing that "adverbs were bad" and I tried to avoid them, but a whole bunch of them snuck in when I wasn't paying attention.
I did a search of my manuscript on "ly" and it popped them all up, one after the other, in an embarrassing but useful stream of signposts to chunks of flabby writing. I deleted almost all the adverbs I found and the manuscript was much improved as a result.

3 - Use 'Said'
Another crime I committed was to use a lot of dialogue carriers other than "said". I think I was worried that "said" was a bit boring, so I used things like "he whispered", "he shouted" etc.
Although these aren't as bad as having adverbs describe speech (see above), they're pretty bad. Maybe once in a hundred pages it's okay, but I learned my lesson when I was reviewing - stick with "said". If the speaker's tone isn't clear from the dialogue itself, rewrite the dialogue.

4 - Head-hopping
My first draft of Red Mercury had the point-of-view flipping backwards and forwards between characters with nearly every line! This isn't something I'd thought about at all while writing, but on reviewing the text it became a major distraction, and made the writing difficult to follow in places with the viewpoint character apparently thinking about things they couldn't possible know.
Big recommendation here is to start your writing aware of the perils of head-hopping. Keep the point-of-view in each scene in one person's head throughout. Starting like this will make editing much easier. The hardest part of the reviewing and rewriting of my second draft was getting rid of the head-hopping.

5 - Cut the backstory
I had a whole heap of backstory in the first draft of the book. From reviewing it myself, and from the comments of my beta-readers, it became clear to me that whilst I needed to know this stuff, the reader didn't.
My elaborate alternate history of the United States and secession of Florida was an example of this - all the reader needed to know was that Florida isn't part of the Union in this world and the two nations have an uneasy relationship. And this was something that readers could deduce from bits of dialogue and the attitudes of the characters, they definitely didn't need the page and a half of explanation I'd put in the first draft.

Hopefully those 5 pointers will help any other first-time writers out there. They certainly helped me improve the later drafts of Red Mercury. I recently re-read the first version of it again and cringed the whole way through. Whilst I make no claims that the finished publication is any kind of high literature, it's a hell of a lot better than  the first draft was!

Useful links
Here are some of the sites I visited in my quest to get some advice:

i09 - good writing advice, with a particular focus on science fiction

Mette Ivie Harrison - a good list of things to watch out for

A great Guardian article - with some lovely tips from Elmore Leonard

It's getting a little drafty...

Right, got feedback from 2 of my 3 Beta readers. The good news - they generally liked Red Mercury. One of them described it as "the kind of thrilling, pulpy yarn that I really enjoy". I was quite delighted, and more than a little relieved, at the positive reception the book got from these guys.

The other good news is that both of them had some really good feedback on how to improve the book further. I was pleased they could do that, as I would have suspected that praise unaccompanied by suggestions for improvement would have been fairly hollow.

I'm now at the tail end of my third draft of the story, taking on board their feedback and trying to address some of the points they raised.

Here are some of the pointers they gave me (not including the ones that would be plot-spoilers, obviously)...

• Visuals - Both Beta readers said that the book needed more visual description, especially of locations and characters. I suppose there's little point in setting your story in a fantastical steampunk world if you don't describe it to the reader every now and again. Now, I wanted to avoid any "stop to describe a face" moments and so cut a lot of this out of previous drafts in the interests of pace. I've gone back and spiced up the visual elements hopefully without slowing things down too much or being clunky about it.

• Villain Earlier - Again, both the guys said that the villain needed to show up earlier in the story. They felt it could do with a Bond-style "false showdown" with the main villain or his henchman early in the plot. An actual encounter has proved difficult to stage, but I've tried to introduce the idea of the villain as a malign presence hanging over the earlier stages of the story. Our heroes don't get to actually meet the villain, but he's hopefully lurking there in the back of the reader's mind. We'll see how that works.

• Characterisation - Some of the minor characters need a little more fleshing out, especially those who go on to affect the plot. I've gone back in and done what I can around this, particularly for the main supporting characters.

• Naming - One of the Beta Boys questioned the main character's name. Was it intentionally bland? Hmmm. I had hoped the name would lend him the air of an everyman called upon to do extraordinary things. But "bland" was definitely not what I was aiming for! I'm struggling a bit with this one. I'd grown quite fond of this guy, name and all, so changing it feels wrong. I'll experiment a bit more and see if anything else comes up that sounds right to me.

Overall, really useful feedback that will undoubtedly make Red Mercury a better read. One more Beta reader to come back with his thoughts and then it'll be final draft and publishing time. Eek!