Greta van der Rol

Like many of us aspiring writers, I’ve been beta-reader for a number of other people’s books and I’m about to embark on another. Which led me to reflect on why I do it, what I look for and what’s in it for me?

Why is easy. I know how hard it is to get an objective third party to read my own work. I don’t want ‘this is wonderful’, I want constructive criticism to help me improve my writing. I’ve been privileged to have the benefit of that from a number of aspiring writer friends and I think it’s incumbent on me to return the favour. I have to say, too, I get a little thrill when my input helps. And if one of those books goes on to greater glory (like the Authonomy editor’s desk or *gasp* publication), I bask in its reflection, like a stage hand peeking from the wings while the principal actor takes applause.

What I look for is more difficult. Really, I don’t look for anything. I just read and record things that don’t work for me. I have my little list of ‘gotchas’, things that will always strike me. Two in particular stand out; incorrect use of ‘ing’ words and ‘there was/were’. Very often people will write things like ‘walking across the room he opened the door’. Er, no. You can’t do both those things at once. Whereas ‘walking across the room he smoked a cigarette’ is plausible. ‘There was/were’ is perfectly acceptable – but it’s often overused and just as often can be either omitted or the sentence can be rephrased to work harder using stronger verbs. Other things I’ll note are word repetition, word echoes, slips in point of view. But the real value in reading a whole book is you can see if the characters are well drawn and behave consistently; see if transitions are smooth, the story arcs flow and are complete; notice any parts where the plot doesn’t ‘work’. Etc. And those things you don’t look for, you just notice them.

What’s in it for me? After I’ve reviewed somebody else’s work I look at my own with a fresh eye. The ‘ing’ thing and ‘there was/were’ are so noticeable to me because I was guilty of them myself.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s great value in chapter by chapter crits to iron out the nitty-gritties. But the first three chapters does not a good book make. My great fear has always been to write a kick-arse first three chapters, leaping and bubbling down the hill – to end up in a meandering marshland of broken tributaries and a bog of cliché. And only a disinterested third party can tell me if I’ve got it right.

Have you ever noticed how often ‘Aliens’ (especially in the movies or the TV) are humanoid? They usually have two arms, two legs and one head, two eyes and they speak with a mouth. Or maybe four arms or legs just for variety. Check out Star Trek sometime. And what’s more, in Star Trek they can actually mate with humans and produce hybrid beings like Spock. Or so we are led to believe. Yes, okay it’s not always like that. But cast a glance at the Cantina scene in Star Wars I, or even the new arrival, the being in the new movie Avatar.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in a way, nothing. After all, we’re not talking intelligence here, we’re talking technology. Sure, you can have all sorts of aliens inhabiting other worlds. Look in a pond on mother Earth, or in the ocean trenches or in the deepest caves. Life abounds in all sorts of conditions. But not much of it uses technology. Take dolphins; acknowledged to be very, very smart with abilities (like echo location) we can only dream about. But I can’t see your average dolphin building a spaceship. To do that, it seems you need first the desire and secondly the digits to make it happen.

Enter the opposable thumb. Oh, and some brains. And suddenly all those humanoid aliens become a little more understandable. You need things like fingers to build machines. So smart lizards would fit the bill. Very common, your lizard-like alien – especially if it’s a baddy.

Okay, so there might be other ways of building technology that we quite literally cannot imagine. That’s not much use to a writer, is it? So let’s accept that our aliens will have to have some way of getting around (we call them ‘legs’ in our part of the universe) and some means of manipulating material (fingers, hands). But there are other issues. They’ve just found an ‘earth-like’ planet seventy light years away. That means lots of liquid water, a reasonable temperature range. Just one small catch, though; it’s three times the size of Earth. Can you imagine the effect of gravity on a planet that size? I reckon we’d have trouble walking. Unless we can invent some sort of anti-gravity suit.

And what about the air? What if there’s too much oxygen? Or not enough? Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t been the way it is now for most of its existence. Indeed, we need breathing apparatus if we go above a certain altitude on our own planet. So it’s pretty hard to imagine all those aliens in the cantina scene all comfortably breathing Tatooine’s air. Yes, I know some of them wore respirators or some such. But not very many.

Really, when you start looking at the difficulties the solution used by more and more SF writers makes a stack of sense. Bioengineered planets, terra-formed to suit humans. You’ll find them in Elizabeth Moon’s books and Jack McDevitt’s books among others.

I must say also that I find it difficult to imagine why the inhabitants of a planet like (say) Jupiter would ever want to come to Earth and do more than take a passing look. Always assuming, of course, the amorphous blobs living in Jovian storms subject to enormous gravity would bother to build a space ship.  So they get here and then what? Wouldn’t they be more likely to eye off Jupiter? Now this assumption puts paid to a lot of space wars. Why bother, after all?

Which is why the Ptorix (aliens in my book ‘The Iron Admiral’ evolved on a world similar to ours and live on worlds similar to ours. We are cosmic rivals trying to share a galaxy.

And the Ptorix don’t look humanoid. But they do have tentacles.

On a roll. A place in the Krystor mountains, I'd even found a picture to fire my imagination.

And then last night a little thought tapped diffidently on my shoulder. "Greet?"
Mumble wizzle. "What?"
"Why would they be in the mountains, Greet?"
"Go away. I explained all that." (Turns over)
"Yes, but where did they grow the food?"
(Sits up) "Down in the valley."
"Well then... why-"
"Oh, shut up. You've made your point."
Bloody little thought just shot down my wonderful plot device.

But all is not lost. I'd actually thought this all through with rather more sense many months ago (before 'Die a Dry Death' took up residence in my brain). And fortunately, I hadn't thrown the scene away. It was just a couple of pages but it was enough to put me back on plausible track.

The mountains are still in there, but they're not quite so important, now.

Oh, bugger. It can't be the TEMPLE at Krystor anymore... hmmm. Then again, maybe it can...

I guess we all get it. One of those times when you can't get in the groove. When your characters won't talk to you. You can see them, imagine them. But Ravindra's lying back in the chair in his office, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Morgan just throws me one of those 'looks'. And I don't know where I'm going. Or more particularly, where they're going.

Well... I do, but that's at the end. That's the thing about books. You know where they start, you know where they finish. But how do you get from one to the other?

So I thought 'bugger it. I'll work out how they get there later.' And I wrote the BIG chapter. And it all started to flow. And then I went back and started the second big chapter. From there, I came up with a title and the ideas queued up in a semi-orderly fashion to the extent I had to write some down.

On a roll now. 'The Temple of Krystor', book two of 'A Legacy of War', is well underway.

Oh, and if you're interested, I wrote the Big Sex Scene ages ago. (Grins)

At last I can stop chewing my fingernails and tell the world my first book is to be printed on paper, with hard covers at front and back and sold to the General Public.

It's awfully like having a baby, I suspect. It's a great relief to get it out there - but there's a lot of hard work still to come.

Die a Dry Death will be published in London and it will be available on Amazon but we still need to organise sales outlets in Australia. That's the next challenge, I guess.

I like taking pictures. Have done for a long time and of course, in this digital age it's even easier. Since I've been writing, photography has become more than just a way of making something pretty (or interesting) to look at. I've become a voyeur. Yes, that's a good work. I look at details; consider how to describe things, note how light plays on the object of my interest, perhaps what it sounds like. I try to find the words that go with the image. How would I express myself if I was describing this in a book, I think to myself.

Take this one. The molten metal sea reflects the clouds, a whitish glimmer on scarcely moving water. Follow the curved blue line of the sky from the deep azure of the zenith towards the paler blue of the horizon, where a boat bobs, while nearby the shadow of our vessel lends a deeper green to the languid swirl of the waves. Further away a heavier cloud mass, mottled and angry, betrays a change - but perhaps not just yet.

So it's more than just an image. You break down the elements of the image and then assign importance to those elements as you search for the words to use so that if the photo isn't there, the reader still has enough information to paint their own picture in their heads.

Of course, seascapes are an important feature of 'Die a Dry Death'. I've done my best to convey those scenes through my words. Time will tell if an editor agrees with me that the writing works.