Sliding timetable

 Posted by at 16:07  No Responses »
Feb 272013
 

February draws to a close and the New Book’s first draft remains incomplete. In fact, two of the three chapters for it that I managed to write are probably destined for the trash bin. I’ve decided to push my timeline by a month and a half, using that half-month to address the issue that caused the delay in the first place.

At the end of the year, I had finished primary worldbuilding for the New Book. I was (and am) delighted with the setting and look forward to telling its stories and sharing them with you. I set to the task of writing an outline for the first story, which is when things started to go off course. There is a central question that drives the stories of this setting, a central question that instilled the desire to develop the setting in the first place. The outline I created lost sight of this central question, with only superficial and tangential connection back to it.

Furthermore, one of the central conflicts in the story — between a POV character and another main character — had mutated to the point that it painted the POV character in a deplorable light. What had once made sense instead rendered the POV character foolish at best and demographically insulting at worst. The conflict itself also carried unfortunate implications.

So, I need to go back to the drawing board. The setting is still solid and I now have a cast of partial characters1 about whom I want to learn more. In order to do the concept, the characters, and the setting justice, though, the whole plot needs a ground-up rethinking. I need to write a story I can believe in, not just pump out a story that I’ll reflect on with distaste, so that you–the reader–have an enjoyable tale at the end of the process.

  1. Note that phrasing: a cast of partial characters, not a partial cast of characters. [↩]

Ashes goes live on Amazon

 Posted by at 16:16  No Responses »
Nov 262012
 

I just got the notification that Ashes is now available for download on Amazon!

The physical CreateSpace copies are still being processed, but I expect they’ll be available within the next few days.

In related news, I also posted announcements about the book’s release to the two CG forums I visit, Foundation 3D and SciFi-Meshes, as well as tweeted Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, Nathan Fillion, and The Morning Stream in the hopes that it might catch their eyes and prompt further spreading of the message. Odds are pretty slim, but doesn’t hurt to try!

205 days and 80,700 words later

 Posted by at 00:38  No Responses »
Sep 182012
 

At 18:00 Eastern Time on the 17th of September, 2012, I tweeted that I had finished the third draft of the book.

I started this, the penultimate draft, on February 26, 2012. That makes 205 days elapsed. The draft weighs in at a healthy 80,769 words (according to OpenOffice, anyway), which represents a removal of nearly 15,000 words from the second draft. That represents a total average progress of just under 400 words per day, about five times less than my goal of writing 2,000 words per day. Alternately, it represents the removal of about 75 words per day from the second draft.

Formatted as it is, in manuscript submission style, it’s 463 pages long (not including the title page). Using the same word density, for the second draft, that represents the removal of about 85 pages. Don’t worry; the story is better for it! You can see the entire tracked progress of this draft here.

I have sent the manuscript to my next round of beta readers, who I’ve requested devote their efforts toward identifying plot holes that may have crept in as a result of such a major revision, as well as smaller syntax, grammar, and general wording issues that inevitably result in a work this long. This book will be dormant for me for a time, while they work through it. My goal is to finish the fourth and final draft by the end of October, with an eye to publishing by Thanksgiving. I will start on that draft as soon as I started getting feedback from my readers.

In the meantime, it’s on to the next story!

Cutting the fat in multiple ways

 Posted by at 13:11  No Responses »
Aug 152012
 

Down six pounds so far.

Ate pizza for lunch at work today, and felt over-full after one slice, and stuffed after two. I used to comfortably eat three to four slices without a problem.

As (should be) usual, I spent the train ride this morning working on the book. However, I made no forward progress in word count. That’s not to say I didn’t make major progress, though. Let me ‘splain.

Right now, I have the book broken into three separate documents. One is the manuscript proper, and it’s from there that I’m taking my word counts that I’m posting on the novel progress page. Another is my “story treatment,” which I wrote to kick off this draft of the story and sort out the plot holes and pacing issues in the second draft.1 The third one is where I’ve been working for the last couple of days: the editing room.

The editing room, or the cut doc, contains everything I sliced out of draft two that didn’t (yet) get re-integrated or re-written for draft three. The bulk of it comprises the middle and end thirds of the book. As I progress through this draft, I’m pulling things out of the cut doc and putting them back into the manuscript, modifying or re-writing as-needed. Anything that doesn’t fit–be it through changed plot, story flow, tone, or pacing–gets highlighted in red with a note about why it was cut. Anything that does fit, but hasn’t been reincorporated yet gets highlighted in blue with a note about where it should go, or why it’s important or worth keeping.

It wasn’t until Monday that I decided to take a proactive approach to the cut doc, rather than the reactive one I was taking. Before, I was going through the story, picking pieces out of it chronologically, and putting them in the new draft. But because of the major retooling in the second half of the book, chronology has gone right out the window and certain major events that happened in draft two never occur in draft three. That means a lot of stuff goes away, and a lot of other stuff that’s still good and worth using needs to be retooled so that it can come back.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I’ve been applying pretty colors to a document instead of making forward word-count progress. But it’s all for a purpose: organizing the content I mean to preserve, and identifying the content I need to generate anew. I’ve still got a fair amount of material to go through, but once I’ve finished, I should be able to make very rapid forward progress on completing this last major draft of the book. From there, it’ll need a verbiage pass and cover art, and then it’s live.

  1. Based on how incredibly useful this has been, and how many authors swear by them, I plan to outline far more on the future than I did with this one, which was not at all. [↩]
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