Thorn Circle print copies, and The Mess that is AQATWW

[inverarity]

OMG. I want one.

Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle print copies

Remember I said I was going to stick with my Word layout? Well, I thought my layout was pretty slick, an almost professional-looking imitation of the Harry Potter books, and then I went further down the rabbit-hole of book design and layout, and found out about things like optical alignment and leading and lining vs. oldstyle and bleed and everything else I was doing wrong.

There are lots of book designers out there with free advice (usually ending with "You should hire me to do this for you") but I am a DIY kind of guy, and I persevered with Affinity Publisher. I am now a first-level Publisher ninja, and I ended up spending most of two days importing my Word layout and massaging it into a print-ready PDF.

There are a few things that aren't quite perfect (actual professionals do manual spot adjustments on kerning and justification spacing and line grouping and stuff, and I simply don't have the expertise for that), but I think it's pretty damn close.

However. Publisher is still in "active development" (they don't want to say "beta," but in my opinion, it's still beta software), and I've found it does... unexpected things sometimes. Like, after I update the Table of Contents, I would keep finding that pages in some later chapter had inexplicably been flowed on top of each other, and I'd have to manually redo the text flow. So every time I change the structure, I have to look at the entire manuscript again to see if there is a new gotcha.

Now, people have asked if I would share the print-ready file. And I have decided... yes. Kind of.

Here's the deal. Right now, it's print-ready minus a cover. Anyone can submit this file to a POD service and get a print copy.

Those of you who helped me by proofreading the first layout, and a select few others who know who they are, are going to get actual print copies, once I get my cover and order my own print run.

For everyone else... I am going to crowd-source the final proofreading. The link below is the semi-final print-ready PDF. Submit it to the POD service of your choice and you can have your own print copy. However, you will have to supply your own cover file.

AQATTC print-ready PDF

Now, here's a preview of the exclusive reward for anyone who finds an error or helps me make other corrections in the above file:



That's a black and white sketch of the cover I am commissioning. When I get the (full-color) final, anyone who contributed a correction will get an exclusive link to the final final file, including the cover.

Note that the above file is formatted for a 6" x 9" trade paperback. The Scholastic U.S. paperback editions of the Harry Potter books are actually closer to 5.5" x 7.625". Most POD services don't handle non-standard sizes, and at 6" x 9", AQATTC is already 568 pages. I am still experimenting with layouts and might try to produce something closer to the "official" HP book form, but I suspect that I won't even be able to fit a longer book like AQATSA into one volume with a standard POD printing.

So what kind of gotchas do I need help catching? Consider these two pages:





Notice the difference? The first paragraph following a section break should not have a first-line indent. I think I got them all, but it's the sort of thing that's easy to miss when importing hundreds of pages and then manually adjusting the style formatting page by page. Also any obvious things, like a blank page or a missing header or footer, or a block of text or illustration that somehow wandered off the center line, or one of those damn reflowed pages with text flowed on top of itself. I can look and look again and triple-check every page one more time, and I know there is still going to be something I miss.

AQATWW: The Mess

I am now sort of out of The Grind and into The Mess. Which means, I am writing more pages, but I have this grinding feeling that I'm writing entire chapters that will have to be cut, because I now have all the scenes and more or less their sequential order laid out, but there are so many plot holes and "how do I get there from here?" and other questions that are not resolving themselves. It would sure be nice if I could just say "Poof, suddenly Alexandra is in the next chapter, never mind that highway battle with manticores, we'll figure out how that ended later." Actually, sometimes I do leave plot holes behind, knowing I will have to go back and fix them. This is actually somewhat more productive than spending days gnawing on a problem and not writing until I figure out a way around it, but then I know I have a bigger mess to clean up later.

Besides plot holes and loose threads, there are issues of characterization and tone. Like, how far AU is AQ going to go in book six? Because the Wizard War is definitely attracting the attention of Muggles. Now, the Harry Potter tone would be what we saw in Rowling's books, and to a lesser extent in mine up until the last book: the U.S. government is kind of aware of the wizarding world, but doesn't really do much about it because they live in parallel worlds that try to avoid each other.

In a realistic setting, of course, this would not be at all plausible. Fucking wizards with magic powers, and elves and goblins and monsters, hundreds of thousands of them around the world? The U.S. government (all governments, really) would be all over that, trying to recruit Muggle-born wizards and infiltrate the wizarding world, while the Confederation would have plans for casting Imperius on the President and Congress, and the DoD and intelligence agencies would have top secret plans anticipating that, and... you get the idea. We wind up with a "gritty" realistic urban fantasy series that might be interesting, but would no longer feel like it was at all the same world. I know some fanfic authors have taken that idea and run with it, but it's not exactly the direction I intended to go.

On the other hand, I hate handwaving away all pretense at verisimilitude because "It doesn't fit the setting." So we're probably going a little bit in that direction, but I don't want this to be Alexandra Quick and the Men In Black.

(If you do like that kind of gritty, rational take on what it would look like if a magical world got dumped into the mundane real world, I recommend Bill Willingham's Fables. And no, please do not recommend fucking HPMOR to me.)

So, I am still muddling my way through, and there will be a hella mess to clean up and probably a lot of harsh comments from my betas, and I worry it's all going to fall apart and this will be the book where I reach the end of my rope and everyone realizes I don't know wtf I'm doing. (I feel like that with every book, at some point.)

Right now, I have 43 chapters of AQATWW outlined, with 21 chapters and 115K words actually written. I have 15 chapters of book seven roughly outlined.

Comments

[anke baeck (from livejournal.com)]

This might just be me not having English for a first language, but on page 2 the sentence: "none of which made for particularly good camouflage in the brown
rushes surrounding the pond"; shouldn't that be brushes instead of rushes? (also, I'm not looking for a final final copy, just decided to try my hand at some proofreading)

Rushes

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Rushes are the name for a particular species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juncus_interior) of plant.

Re: Rushes

[anke baeck (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, I see! Thank you very much for the clarification!

[tealterror0.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I don't think the Rowling "tone" is that unrealistic. I'm sure most governments would love to have control over the Wizarding World, but practically speaking, it's a world they have no control over that's also no real threat to them (or so it seems) as long as they leave it alone. Why risk an escalating war with a foe you don't really understand when there are so many other pressing problems that directly impact your political viability?

The difference in your series, now, is that the Wizarding World's shenanigans **are** starting to have a Muggle-world impact. If dozens of people are dying in mysterious circumstances, and people are claiming to see dragons or whatever, you're going to have to do something about it. That doesn't mean going full-on Men in Black--for one thing, it's impossible to keep something like that a secret--but I would expect the federal government to start seriously considering intervening on one side or the other, while ordinary Muggles might take matters into their own hands...

[graeme sutton (from livejournal.com)]

If magic were possible and muggles had actual evidence of it, I'm sure pure scientific curiosity would be more than enough reason for them to investigate it. This is the 20th century, technology is pretty much the main determinant of a nations power in most areas. The US would have to figure out how magic worked so that they could be sure the Russians wouldn't just teleport a nuclear first strike into their country and vice versa.

Also, large numbers of muggles were killed in canon HP too, even pre-voldemort (e.g. Hermione mentions muggle hikers getting murdered by giants, lots of other stuff shown or implied).

[muisjelief.livejournal.com]

Muggles realistically would have no chance, because wizards can just imperius, blackmail or threaten a few hundred generals, politicians and media personalities, while also promising to get all “fringe” behavior under control. You can’t lie to wizards, soany covert program would be easily sabotaged. and it’s pretty hard to inform the public about wizards given their abilities to cover their tracks, obliviate witnesses, create unplottable locations and so on.

Muggles vs. Wizards

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Depending on how you wargame that out, it depends on a lot of things that have never been made explicit in the canon verse.

How long have Muggles (specifically, the U.S. government) known about wizards? How long have they been making plans? How much information do they have about the wizarding world?
Do they have any wizards on their side?
How effective is Imperius, long-term and against many people?
Are Muggles actually completely incapable of devising any means to resist, detect, or counter magic? Even if they have had centuries to study the problem, possibly even with magical allies?

If it came down to all-out genocidal warfare, the sheer number of Muggles with modern weapons would be hard to counter. At the very least, there would be a high body count on both sides.

Re: Muggles vs. Wizards

[muisjelief.livejournal.com]

Here's my attempt at gaming it out.

I forgot if you ever mentioned how many wizards live in the USA in the AQ-verse. I guess if there are about 30k wizards in Britain, for roughly 60 million people, then there could be easily between hundred and two hundred thousand wizards in the US. But this is dependent on a lot of factors. For instance, the Ozarkers have lots of kids, but I personally didn't get the impression there were more than a few thousand Ozarkers. I guess another way of looking at it is that there are at least four "big schools" and maybe another dozen or so smaller schools? And then there are cultures that may have a lot of homeschooling and such.

And I suppose you can't expect every wizards to be enlisted into some Confederacy army, because there is a lot of hostility towards the Confederacy, and for instance the Ozarkers probably wouldn't like joining in a war against muggles. So this heavily cuts down into their numbers.

And some cultures are downright more sympathetic towards muggles than the Confederacy, and there are many muggleborns and halfbloods and squibs and so on, who would probably also be able to meaningfully resist any Confederacy recruitment drive. Perhaps they can join the opposition and advice the muggle government and so on.

However, I don't think that really counts as a war of muggles against wizards, it's not a "pure" contest of ability. It would be rather like the American civil war, a sort of new civil war between a wizard supremacist faction that seeks to enslave and/or exterminate muggles and another faction that would include muggles, which would be ideally about harmony and living together peacefully, whatever form that might take. Since if there's a war the statute of secrecy isn't worth much anyway. The aftermath of the US civil war also wasn't exactly kind to former slaves, with wage slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, segregation, red lining etc.

Also, imagine the US government starts to hire wizards as advisers and so on. Or let's say that they invite wizards into public society, as long as they side with them in the war effort against the Confederacy. In some sense that's a sort of Faustian bargain, since these wizards still have the potential to take over the muggle world from the inside. And governments and so on would find their services very useful, so they'd be drawn to power. I think that would create a lot of divisions in society to the point that you would get protocols of the elders of zion type conspiracies about wizards. I somehow don't think it'll be a happy ending. Wizards live longer too, they're healthier, they're pretty dangerous to befriend and you can't really control them, I think.

But maybe there can be other types of wars. A genocidal war of wizards against muggles, which pits a united Confederacy against the US military and intelligence. But here there are also a lot of variations. It all depends on the informational advantages. If the US government has long known about, and studied, wizards, maybe they have some realistic ways to strike down all major wizarding hubs and schools. That depends on whether magical energy can usefully be measured or picked up by various instruments, which it probably can given that it interferes with electricity. But would muggles be able to exploit that? Or for instance, what about muggle repelling charms, could these be ignored by muggles with enough training? Or is there a way to somehow find unplottable locations with a satellite or is that too tricky? There are other magical tricks that can maybe be countered. Invisible enemies can perhaps be spotted with night cameras, but maybe not. Maybe imperius can be dispelled with a subtle electrical shock or maybe not. Maybe it's easy to kill wizards with guns, or maybe they have some subtle magic resistance against such use of force.


--- I had to split my comment up into two parts, sorry

Re: Muggles vs. Wizards

[muisjelief.livejournal.com]

--second part
-----

For me personally, if I had to bet, I would favor wizards.

First of all, I'm not sure if magic can be sufficiently analyzed to be revealed as being based on some pure magic force that can be manipulated, measured and countered. All the time in the books, wizards use "intent" and somehow the magic takes care of everything. I wonder, if the intent behind the magic is to be invisible, is it really as easy to just use infra-red goggles? We have the assumption from the real world that, oh, everything can be subjected to scientific analysis. But would you really be able to, you know, capture a wizard and do human experimentation on them to get insight into their magic?

So I think it would be difficult to use their magic against them. On the other hand, I think it would be fairly trivial for wizards to steal nuclear bombs and use them against the population. I think wizards would also be able to easily assassinate key political and military figures. In general wizards make for very good terrorists and can probably trivially terrorize a population. For instance, you cast imperius on people and tell them to commit mass shhootings. Just a handful of wizards going around the country can spread total panic and force everyone behind a curfew. It would be way worse than stuff like Corona. It would also destroy the economy and almost immediately force some sort of government controlled wartime economy, which then depends on central authority, which I suspect would be possible to sabotage using mind magics such as obliviate, confundus, imperius.

And let's say that a wizard steals a nuclear bomb and puts it into a track. A security officer stops him and demands registration, but is confunded and lets the wizard go through. Let's say you come across a gate and it won't open, well just use an unlocking spell. But you're caught and there's a shootout, well you can just apparate away.

There are a lot of bottlenecks in the economy, for instance shipping containers or oil pipelines, which could be easy to sabotage by wizards. If you end shipping from China, then the US economy instantly collapses. Then there's the question of crop failure. Maybe there are magical diseases or other ways to ruin crops. Maybe you can burn down warehouses with magical green fire that is resistant to standard fire extinguishing methods and so on.

I guess the whole thing depends a little bit on if wizards are clever enough to fight in this way. And they're very outnumbered. But still, I think they'd at least be able to completely terrorize the muggle population. And you'd never see them, they'd be like ghosts. They can pretty easily disappear into the muggle population, and any overt attack can take place via imperius'd puppets. If you somehow destroy New Amsterdam and such, how are you going to catch all wizards?

indents

[rcow.livejournal.com]

I randomly scrolled to pages 68 and 69 and noticed the indentations were different. Are the left pages supposed to have more space than the right indents. It seems consistent so I guess the answer is yes, but why?

Also when the section break happens on a page break, it looks weird having no indent. I've also never noticed this before and now it bothers me. :/

Re: indents

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

The indents should be the same. Can you be more specific? Right now the margins are the same for left and right (though I may need to increase the "gutter," or inner margin), and indents are definitely the same.

As for section breaks that start on a new page, I'll have to look at those (and see what the HP books do). Generally it's bad to have widowed lines, and I'm following the HP convention of not using decorative section breaks, just a blank line, so that means sometimes there probably will just be a new, unindented section starting on a new page.

Re: indents

[rcow.livejournal.com]

Ah, looking at it again: The left (even) page outer margin is larger than right (odd) page inner margin (both are left margins). Once I compare from the edge of the text (not from the page), the indents are the same. Sorry about that.

I'd be in favor of decorative section breaks, as I love books full of design flourishes. I also agree widowed lines look...weird.