Alice Worth Series and Writing Urban Fantasy - Part 2 of 2

Hello and welcome to MythMakers, MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, my name is Julia Golding, I'm an author but also a director of the Centre and today I am joined by a special guest from America, Nisa Edmonds, who is well best known to me for her Alice Worth's series. It's I think it's probably possibly my favourite of the series, I don't know I've enjoyed them all but when so when you were contemplating the more complicated series is there a draft of it where you did try it as a straight through and then we organised or did you plot it out and then write yeah during the plotting phase it became pretty clear that I was gonna have to do something a little bit different it just you know just as I was doing my plotting and everything I just I thought if I just tell this linearly I'm just on a couple of levels like you would already know what had happened to her really early on instead of it being sort of the mystery that gets revealed like oh that's what happened that's where she was okay um and this is and that's how she turned out that way and oh that's where you know Malcolm is and and so forth so and I just it just it just made it became pretty clear really early on that I was gonna have to do something a little different I'm imagining a great wall of post-it notes if you moving them around but maybe maybe you do it on a on computer I don't know yeah I definitely do a lot of my plotting on paper I'm old-fashioned that way I definitely I do all my writing on the computer and so forth but when it's when it's the idea generation time I have each book has a notebook a journal and I write everything out I feel like I think a little bit better for the idea generation because I'm a kinetic thinker I like to move when I think I like to write like a long hand and I also have these lovely notebooks I have this lovely shelf of notebooks where you know each book has a notebook and I can actually go back and see the earliest versions the earliest ideas um the things that didn't that I had planned but didn't it didn't happen um so I enjoyed that on a couple of levels you know just to be able to go back and see um you know things that I had originally planned in the book and then as I was writing you know as I said characters do and say things you don't expect and so you know I had a plan for this to happen but it didn't happen instead this happened so it's fun for me to go back and look at that do you have any tips for listeners who want to write an ebb and fantasy on how to do well building um for me I can only speak to what I did you know for me I started with the the characters um and then the world it's kind of developed around that because I was thinking okay I'm gonna have this person my main character is gonna have magic um I know I want to have these certain other creatures now what world do they inhabit how does that change our world um and in the Alice series it's you know her world is very similar to ours there's just a few there's a few changes it depends on how far how far you want to take it um I have um another I have a spin-off in the works um I guess I can call it a spin-off it'll it'll stand by itself but um it will be said in what I call the broken world uh which is a world that appears in the sixth book um heart of vengeance and that world is much different than ours um so to me I think a lot of people who read urban fantasy they love the world they love the worlds they love the imagination and I definitely do too but you also need really real well developed people to inhabit that world so for me I started with my characters and then I sort of built the world around them a world that could um that would challenge them um and a world that I wanted the reader to read that and say oh that's in that's creative that's imaginative that's a neat that's a neat twist on our world um the wonderful wonderful thing about fantasy and science fiction too is you're only limited by your own imagination um you can you can have a setting you can place your stories anywhere you want to um and have all of these wonderful challenges and difficulties and wonderful backdrops for your characters to play out their dramas um the only caveat to that is that your rules have to make sense um and they have to they should be consistent within that world so you know you and you don't want to change them from one book to the next you don't want to have things happen that that count that contradict the the foundation that you've established um but other than that the not even the sky is the limit which is another big reason why I love science fiction and fantasy so much um you know just you can do all you can be so so creative in how you and you know in your what you know the backdrop the environment that you're working in do you want to have um you know cities that move and change do you want to have um you know the magic that you know that they can transport you from one place to another um you know there's no limits to it I don't know if you wanted your question no no absolutely did start with the character and build around I guess that's the take-home for me um so what was your route to publishing like that's another thing that lots of people are interested in how to you know penetrate the mysteries of getting a book out there oh for sure um well I was lucky that I had I made contact with some a couple of people who had already published books and so I got some really helpful advice um one of the most important bits of advice I got was to be patient um and like you feel like when you finish the book you immediately want to send it out there you want to you know you want to get it and and query and you want to get it out there to people who might publish it and I think I'm one of my biggest pieces of advice is wait wait and revise um identify some what we call beta readers which would be people who are going to read it and give you feedback friends and family do not work well for that um you don't want people to read it and say this is the best thing I've ever written don't change a word um you need someone who's going to give you honest tough feedback because that's how it gets better um so uh and I would say you know four or five of those folks have them read it give get honest feedback you don't have to change it to to make it make them happy but if you have more than one person pointing something out I think that's a pretty good indicator that you may need to rethink that um and see I had some really great beta readers that gave me some very tough love um on that first version of part of mouse which was originally entitled magic city in in in fact um and so it went through a lot of revisions um because you when you start querying you want to send out the the best version of that book you don't want to send out the version you just finished or even the mildly revised version it needs to be its best self um and then the second bit of of advice I got that was really important was to work on your query what they call the query letter but it's actually an email usually um and revise it and revise it and revise it because that is the most the single most important thing you will ever write you can have the world's best book but you're not sending the book to the agents or the publishers you're sending your query and you've got about one to two pair short paragraphs to compel them to ask for to actually see the book um if you consider that they get hundreds of those a week a lot of them the agents and the publishers how how are you going to make yours really stand out and get them to nibble on it um so I worked on mine I must have revised it I mean dozens of times I had a people read it I actually got in on some contests and I won a couple of professional critiques of my query letter um you can get in on those on Twitter is a good place um to get in on those that other authors will run them as well a lot of times you'll see contests where someone will be giving away a professional critique and I can't I can't stress enough how important that was so once you have your book in its best form you have your query letter your base query letter in its best form um you start querying publishers and agents um and you want to change the letter and adapt it to each agent or publisher and if show them you you've read their website it's not definitely you don't want them to know like they know but they don't want them to really notice that it's a form letter like so you tweak it and you know I see that you publish so and so and my book is very similar to that or something like that um and make sure to follow their instructions exactly uh because every one of them will ask for something different um some of them just want the query some of them want the query a one page summary and the first thousand words um you know just do exactly what they say um and then I I really credit that my attention to detail on all of that to getting several bites on my hook um if you will um and you know and then getting a publishing contract was you know just making sure that I was I had the best query I could possibly and that that first chapter sparkled like a vampire in the sun so that's my that's my advice so did you get the bite fast from the publisher rather than an agent was that your um I had a couple I had a couple of bites from a couple of agents and a couple of bites from publishers um and I ended up deciding um at this stage in my career to go directly to a publisher um without an agent and I have not regretted that um I'm very happy with my publisher my publisher city all press um there are woman owned press um they specialize in urban fantasy paranormal romance uh contemporary romance fantasy um and science fiction so I've been very happy with this press um I'm very I'm pretty comfortable advocating for myself um as an author I do think that down the road as if my career continues to develop I I will want to get an agent but at the moment I'm pretty pretty content you probably have absolutely no difficulty getting an agent whatsoever because my own experience was I got interest from a publisher first and then that made it so much easier easier to walk in through the door of a big under agency whereas the other way around might have been tricky yeah it's a big gamble on any publisher or any agents part you know to to sign a debut author um and so you know I just um I evaluated you know what the offers I had in front of me which I feel so so lucky every day to have had that um about ability but when I looked at it all on and I did a ton of reading online um of various authors blogs and so forth trying to also get advice from people who've been to who've been in this spot like what should I do and at that moment in this point I felt like just going straight to the publisher I didn't need an agent um at this moment but um I probably will end up getting one yeah well you've now added to that um that good advice that's out there so I'm hoping people are taking notes even now attention to detail do what they ask don't sort of send in a whole manuscript if they're only one a thousand words that's just not gonna help the general wisdom seems to be like if you don't follow their instructions they'll they'll just delete it yeah um you know you want to show to me like think about what is your dream as an author like is your dream to be bestseller is it dream is it you know whatever it is you following those instructions is how you make that happen if you don't if you just send the same form letter with no tweaks if you if it's if it's got typos if it's got if it's not perfect if or at least it's not as good as it can be you're not going to get that door open you know um and I think those who who do make that happen um I mean it's a million to one you can increase your odds the the more you the more work you do on the front end you know get that writing sample whatever it happens to be the first chapter or the first three chapters your query letter I can't stress enough get that critiqued professionally um and then every time everything you do like that it just increases your chances even more and persist yes beepers I mean I definitely you know I I have a contract I also got a lot of rejections um I have a spreadsheet because I am I'm that sort of person I have a massive spreadsheet you know of all the places I queried um a lot of them you won't hear back from you know they get hundreds of queries a week and they don't have time to email you back um I also got a lot of um uh this isn't for us uh but best of luck um sort a sort of emails and there were a lot of those there were a lot but only you know you only lose at it if you stop and you just have to you just have to keep going because your stories have an audience um continue to work on your query letter continue to work on you know your synopsis your samples you know your stories will find their audience but you just have to keep at it Lisa this has been a wonderful conversation I suppose we need to know what's next you've trialled the fact that there's a spin-off series but what can we look forward to in for the rest this year or early next um well I like I um I have eight books so far I'm currently writing what I call 8.5 which is a novella um that takes a couple of the characters a couple of the supporting characters and they have their own story um I have four more Alice books uh to go um that the one I'm working on now mortal heart is gonna be out in november um and then I have four more Alice books and alternating with those are gonna be three books featuring a character from the series named Trent Lake um who is gonna have a trilogy of his own and then those two timelines will come together for the final Alice book um once those are done my plan is to then move on to the broken world and start that series with a character named Lucy um that uh you may have met in vengeance yes absolutely she's got a lot of attitude as well I enjoyed Lucy a lot um I actually started writing on the first Lucy book I'm gonna wait um until Alice is done to really go full full out on that but I enjoy Lucy a lot I think she's gonna be a lot of fun her world is definitely much more different from ours um and a lot of really cool fun ways so wait has dragons yeah yes it has dry it has all kinds of wonderful things I'm looking forward to it um you know I think it's gonna be a big contrast with Alice's world um and it's a little bit wild west um yeah not literally but it's a very wild environment um you have all kinds of creatures you have all kinds of issues and you've got sort of this uh uh the what they're called they're called the League of Guardians and that's their job to try to maintain some kind of order in this very crazy world um you also have the fun thing you also have the fun fun thing that you introduce like the alter ego's of some of the characters who appear in one world there's this sort of version of the many different contexts in the other which is huge fun right and I want to do too much on that because I feel like you can you can kind of slip into a little bit of cliches and um I remember when we first talking about the book my editor's like you're not gonna make Alice fight herself right no we're not gonna do that um but definitely you get to play around with it lee we we know at least a couple of you know like mirror mirror world to borrow from Star Trek uh you know the mirror episodes are sparkly weird right um mirror so that one's gonna be a lot of fun um and very distinctly different from Alice so to complete the podcast we always end with where in all the fantasy world is best for something we've done you know sort of things like the best mountains the best in the best food that kind of thing uh and because there is a strong theme of well I called them a kind of magical gang as a cabal which is in Alice's um well one of the big grits in Alice Alice's sort of oyster um I thought we'd ask where are the best gangs in science fiction or fantasy doesn't matter which magic that is a really good question um really I think I you know to put to you know for being on this spot here I think I'm gonna point to the Kate Daniel series by Alona Andrews and specifically um the way that she has the um the way that her world is set up she has what she calls masters of the dead or they have I'm sorry Lona Andrews is a husband and wife writing team um they have what they call masters of the dead they have uh people who pilot vampires it's the most creative presentation of vampires I think I've ever read in any series um so they have they have the vampires they have the the shifters have a very definite sort of hierarchy where you have um the top is called the beast lord um and you know this is sort of each of the different types of creatures has a very definite sort of um I would say coalition I guess or you could call it like a gang or you could call it like a power structure and so a lot of that a lot of that conflict that happens in the environment in that series is based on the conflicts between um the different types of creatures and their um their structures and their hierarchies um sort of pushing and shoving trying to get more power in this crazy world that they inhabit yeah I love those books as well they're fantastic you're right the idea of the vampires which is that you can kind of sell your like selling your body to science at the end you can sort of help your family out by becoming this piloted vampire it's just wonderful it gets away from many of the romanticism of the kind of gentleman vampire yeah and definitely you know the Lord Byron style you know swabs sophisticated pansexual vampire is the you know is sort of the the trope that I certainly lean on um as well but I love these stories where someone can take something that's maybe a little bit overdone and then take it and do something completely new with it um and I just love the way that you know and there's also the mercenary guild um and there's another in that series as well like the night's yeah um who are incredibly just the ends justify the means and extremely brutal and you know then you've got sort of the mercenary guild that that Kate belonged to um for a while and it's like you've got all these different gangs all these different groups like sort of jockeying for power and trying to undercut at each other and it makes for just a wonderful you know you just know that you can't count on really can't count on anybody um in that world except for a few people um because everyone is very much looking out for themselves which makes of course it which creates a great environment for storytelling which um elona andruz you know elona and gordon you will never you will never not be on your toes reading anything by them because they're the worlds that they create are really outstanding must be fascinating breakfast time conversations between the two of them I'm not amazing I know that right what an amazing partnership um I've never co-written a book with anyone I've had discussions about it um but I just it just seems like they have something incredibly magical happening in that partnership um on multiple levels to create these incredible stories these amazing characters it's just fantastic so I think it's it is quite a difficult place to pick my favorite of all because I think there are often sort of gangs of people and I suppose I'm thinking of people who work a little bit outside the law when I'm thinking of that so the thing that did come to mind was in the worlds of ta white so actually I talked to it very recently um but in her dragon ridden series she has a very good depiction of a world where there's sort of circles of power but one of them is the sort of night market people who exist have their own very strong power structures and there's also a sort of um acknowledgement that they are needed in society they're sort of almost there are sometimes raids but the the gangs look after a certain level of society and police it so I find that one quite a well thought through gang culture um yeah so that's I think that's my pick for this well Lisa thank you so much we're talking to us and do come back if you've got any new book news to share with us because of enough to talk to you broken world series when it starts definitely um thank you for having me my website is leesa edmonds.com um it has information on all the books it has a couple of fun quizzes um there's a gift shop um there's also my writing blog which is on the website so if you're curious to know more about my process um and advice for publishing it's uh leesa edmonds.com slash blog and we'll include a link in the show notes so people just need to scroll down and they'll be able to find you fantastic okay well thank you very much well thank you it was a great honor to be on your show thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit oxfordcenterforfattery.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide