Experimenting with the process

I started rewriting the first book I ever submitted for publication this week. Its actually the third book I tried to write, the first two being abortive failures in every sense but what they taught me about the process. So by my count, by the time this is done it will be the sixth time I've attempted to write a book.

And what I'm noticing since I finished drafting Nomads (the fifth book I've written but the third book I'll publish) is that my drafting process has slowed down. I'm a lot more careful with my word choice and sentence structure, and I've actaully used the backspace key on the first run through a scene. As a consequence, my words per hour have fallen from 600ish to about 200ish.

My hope is that taking more time on the initial pass will cut down the extent ant number of edits needed for polish, and will end up saving time over the course of the process. And eventually maybe I can get good enough to take this same level of care but still draft at haphazard speed.

I'll give it a shot for science.

When to say goodbye

My original plan had me spending a few months this year getting my old short stories edited and polished so I could get more content up for sale. But a couple weeks of frustration taught me that I'd need to completely rewrite them in order to get them up to my current standards.

In a couple of cases, that's fine. The Experiment is a decent way to start one of my novels coming out this year, as I wrote it specifically to help me conceive that world. F&D is another. But most of these stories would take more work to fix than it would take to put out something entirely new.

Its not easy to bury a story, even years after writing it. I have to look at it like an especially deep edit. Those character may come back somewhere, sometime, but its time to thank them for what they taught me and move on. I'll leave the old posts up on this site, of only to remind myself how far I've come, but my future publications will leave them behind.

Onward...

Starting over

Once again I've been neglecting my dark little corner of the internet, but I'm going to try to change that. Updates should be more frequent for the immediate future thanks to science.

Recently I've been spending my time editing some of my old short stories. These were some of the first posts here, and if you've read them you'll agree that they needed it. I'll re-up A Father and a Daughter "soon", because it'll be a few months before I get around to doing the formatting for Kindle, and I'd rather be read than paid anyway.

The other shorts haven't been as kind to me. They were good five years ago, but like F&D, they need complete rewrites to match my standards now. So rather than beat my head against a format I'm not all that great with anyway, I've spent the last week outlining a rewrite of one of my training novels. This particular one got rejected by some 65 agents and publishers when I originally wrote it, but back then I thought editing was a luxury.

So hopefully I'll be pushing a new novel out by early summer. I'll talk about some of the rewrite process on Monday. We're looking at a weekend at Starved Rock ahead, so I'll check in again next week.

Onward...

I have returned

November was a thing. People I don't know slept in my house, I ran a race, I got sick, I went to concerts, I got sick again, I ate more Thanksgiving dinners than a family of four, I drank a few bottles of whiskey which made me get sick a third time, and saw some friends I haven't seen since college. Along the way, I came up with a plan that will see me with six published titles by this time next year.

Here's the deal. I'm THIS many chapters from finishing the draft of The Nomad Wilds. If I continue kicking my word counts in the face, it'll be done by the end of the month. The first novel I wrote needs a new title, new plot, and a good once-over, but I can make edits on that in a couple of months once Nomads is done. That comes out in March. Six short stories need the same treatment and will take a week each and another week to organize them into a couple of collections. That puts me at the beginning of April. Start the edits on Nomads then, and I'll be working on the new non-fiction book I have in mind throughout. Assuming I am not delayed, both of those get out next fall. Six titles in time for the next Christmas spender bender.

As far as the present is concerned, I'm a little more confused. Battlesongs of Hope is still selling, even though I've been acting like it doesn't exist for more than a month. No forums, no promotion of any kind, and it's still plugging along. Hell, I haven't so much as updated Facebook more than twice in the last five weeks, and in November I had twice as many pageviews as I did in my previous best month. I don't know who you people are or where you come from, but I hope you stick around. Welcome.

But on to the important things. I mentioned a non-fiction book. Well. I has an idea. And since I think in words I'm going to be working through it here before it goes into book form. It goes back to conversations with Girlfriend and working through her myriad bits of individuality.

My current embryonic belief is that that the tendency towards positive or negative decisions is primarily a function of a person's relations to input and their perceptions of output. In turn, a person's inputs and outputs are affected by a number of paired relationships. I currently call the sum of these paired relationships the dimensions of discipline because they create a matrix in which a person can be highly disciplined in some areas and highly undisciplined in others. And the real kicker, the thing that got me to start this exploration, is that in a single given person, two IDENTICAL inputs in IDENTICAL circumstances can produce two entirely DIFFERENT yet equally logical outputs. Yet there is a pattern and predictability to those outputs, and I intend to discover it.

The factors at play are these:
• Long term vs short term
• Self love vs self destruction
• Peace vs progress
• Resting vs working

There may be more, but those are the ones that I'm working with now. I'll have more in subsequent posts; for now I have to do my squats because I have not lifted in several weeks and am visibly withering.

Onward...

Guest post over on PJ Jones Writes

Jubeebee's very first guest blog post is live over on PJ Jones's blog. She writes some brutally funny satire, as well as original comedy novels. Head on over.

Checking in on a catchup Sunday

It's been a while since I've logged any of my progress drafting The Nomad Wilds, partially because I've been rolling so hard I haven't felt the need. This week was the first in three that I've averaged less than a thousand words a day, and that was because circumstances conspired to prevent me from drafting at all on Monday and Tuesday.

And the reason things have been flying along so well is because I finally, after getting about 30,000 words in, have identified the central plot. I have heard that some writers insist on having a plot before they start writing a book, but I refuse to be bound by such notions. Previously, I had thought that Nomads would be a 'smaller' book than BSOH; the central conflict had a more limited scope, and everything just seemed a little less severe. No longer. We've got some serious world-shaking shit going on now, and Brandon and the rest of the crew are in WAY over their heads. The primary antagonists have changed, and their motives are deliciously gray, rather than the stark good vs evil that I was working with before.

So while I had worried earlier in the year that I wasn't going to get Nomads drafted by the end of the year, now I'm thinking that I may get this finished by early December. Which would mark the first time ever that I've met one of my personal deadlines.

In other aspects of the Master Plan, I deloaded about 25lb on squats this week to adjust to my new lifting belt. First workout I hit every rep high, but Thursday I buried dem sumbitches nice and deep, so I'm going to hop on the linear progression train for the next few weeks and see if I can get to a 3 plate squat by Thanksgiving. Can't push lifting too hard because I have a pair of 5k races coming up in the next six weeks, but as long as I drink my milk and don't deadlift the day before the race (yes, I've done it; do not recommend), I should be fine.

And I might as well admit it, my football predictions for this year were juuuust a bit off. Between injuries and bad coaching, the Bears O-line looks worse than it did last year. Cutler and Forte have been playing their balls off, but when the best receiver is an undrafted slot guy, and your best lineman is an injured rookie, you've got problems. And the thing is, all of that would be fine if the defense didn't completely implode over the offseason. Peppers hasn't shown up since week 1, the safety turnstile is spinning so fast it could power a city block, and for all Briggs has complained about wanting a new contract, he sure isn't making a very good case for one. Urlacher can't carry this team anymore, although he's doing his damndest to try.

The good news is the Blackhawks look solid and I've got a date with the Arboretum and a pumpkin patch next weekend. So pop a beer and hunker down; it's time to blitz all the way to the end of the year.

Onward...

The blurb process

Whether you call it a blurb, a product description, or a pitch, writing it sucks. The goal is to convince someone in 200 words or less why they should read your 200+ page book. If you have a short book and a long blurb, you get one word per page. This is something you've spent, at minimum, several months writing, and you have about 30 seconds and one or two paragraphs to convince someone that it's worth reading.

It SUCKS.

When I first sent off Battlesongs of Hope to agents, writing the queries was a nightmare. My thought process while writing the pitch part of the query went something like, "JUST PLEASE READ THE FIRST PAGE YOU'LL LOVE IT PLEASE JUST SKIM THE ACTUAL BOOK IT'S SO GOOD!"

What it actually said was this:

Civilization fell apart, and no one knew why. After years of anarchy, broken spirits languish in the ruins waiting to die.

Jacob Vogel scrapes together a living and a sense of purpose by working as a mechanic in a sprawling, ruined city once ruled by an oligarchy of Wizards. But the violent murder of his only surviving friend drives him out of the city on the verge of suicide.

Jacob wanders the hinterlands battling disease, dehydration, and wild animals for weeks. His travels bring him to clues about civilization's fall, a woman who teaches him to love life, and to the discovery of an impending crisis that dwarfs what came before.

Jacob's story is told in honest, direct language that shows the reader a man who doesn't consider himself or his experiences extraordinary. Four chapter-length flashbacks broaden the scope of the story beyond Jacob's immediate perspective.

This is a decent summary of what happens in Battlesongs, even three years and some extensive edits later. But it kind of... skips. There's no coherent story, because it's missing about 350 pages that turn that summary into a story. You can see my intent in this blurb; the descriptions might be interesting enough to get someone to say, "Huh. I like wizards, maybe I'll take a look." But this approach depends on two assumptions I have no right to make.
1: The summary of the setting of BSOH is interesting to someone who is unfamiliar with it.
2: People are willing to take a chance with their time reading an unfamiliar fantasy by an unknown author. There are THOUSANDS of books that fit this description, and there's nothing in the blurb above to set me apart.

Both of the above assumptions violate one of my key tenants as an author: NO ONE CARES!

People do not owe me their time. Fact is, no one cares about my story unless I give them a good reason to, and because the above blurb does nothing to set me apart from anyone else, I haven't given the reader a good reason to give me their time.

That blurb racked up about 20 some rejections, for good reason. Two years later, Girlfriend came along and made me revise it. My thought process went something like, "Hey, movie trailers get people interested in movies; why not make my blurb read like a movie trailer?"

This is how it turned out:

Five years ago something killed the Wizards and plunged all of civilization into anarchy. No one knew how, or why.

The Chaos that followed forced Jacob Vogel to become as hard and as cruel as the gangs that claimed his friends and family. Years of violence and futilely trying to forge an honest, dignified life drive Jacob to the verge of suicide and into the untamed hinterlands.

The hinterlands offer Jacob a new life. A wife and family, peace, work that makes people’s lives better; unimaginable blessings after a lifetime of suffering. But the city’s mysteries and malice have a long reach. In an abandoned farmhouse, Jacob learns the true nature of the Anarchist Murmur, the Wizards' bane, as well as the terrifying reason for the Wizards' extermination. A monstrous army led by the last magic-users in the world survived the Anarchist Murmur’s crusade, and have returned to scourge humanity from the Wizards’ realm.

Fighting means launching an impossible crusade, returning to violence to defend the only peace he’s ever known. But the truth behind the Anarchist Murmur turned Jacob’s life upside down, and he swears he'll never be a slave again.

If you squint, you can see how a particularly active imagination could tag along with this blurb and become interested enough to give the first page of the book a try. It's certainly more exciting than the first, but it still jumps around for someone who's unfamiliar with the book. In 192 words I introduce the main character, Jacob, Wizards capital W, some major events in Jacob's life, something called the Anarchist Murmur that somehow relates to Wizards capital W, and then an army that somehow Jacob has to fight because of the Anarchist and oh dear I've gone crosseyed.

No one owes me the time it takes to decipher this. It works as a moderately interesting account of events in the book, but there's too much proprietary information in too small of a package for anyone to really get their brain around it in the time it takes them to throw the query away or click off the Amazon page.

This second blurb racked up another half dozen rejection letters from agencies, but did get one small publisher interested enough to extend an offer which I ultimately walked away from. It was better, but it wasn't good.

When I started working with Lucky Bat, I now had to write something that ACTUAL READERS would see when the "Buy Now" button was staring them down. This is for actual dollars, not a contract, and I came up with this:

When the Wizards died, Jacob Vogel thought humanity could finally throw off the shackles of slavery. The years of chaos that followed left Jacob's family dead, his personality warped, and the Wizards' city in ruins. Wracked by guilt after failing to prevent his only remaining friend's murder, Jacob wanders to the edge of suicide and there discovers the truth. The mysterious force that killed the Wizards has been driving the violence plaguing humanity, ensuring no one would be prepared for the unthinkable. The Wizards have transformed into a monstrous, genocidal army, and they're returning for revenge.

First, it's cleaner. Not nearly as much information, about half as long, and a much more direct focus. At this point, the real underlying problem starts to emerge: this paragraph says what HAPPENS in Battlesongs. What it does not do is describe what the book is ABOUT. Girlfriend, being the editor she is, had some stern words for me when I showed her this.

Something wasn't clicking for me. And because I need to kick ass wholesale at this blurb if anyone is going to buy the book, I strip mined my bookshelf and spent a couple of hours studying the back covers and trying to figure out why I bought the books I bought.

I thought I bought books because of all of the cool shit that happens in them. I expected to see blurbs talking about how bitchin the stories were, because that's what I remember from reading them.

What I actually found was that was true for exactly ONE of the books I own. The VAST majority of the other back cover blurbs made me interested in the main character, in one way or another. A slightly smaller majority doubled up on that and made me interested in the main character's personal conflict. This is NOT the main conflict of the story (news to me). When I revealed my discovery to Girlfriend, she had more stern words for me, but in the "How the hell didn't you know that?" sort of way.

She explained that the appeal of books for most people is NOT:
"Isn't it cool that [plot happens / setting exists]."
Instead, the appeal is:
"Wouldn't it be cool if I [were the MC / did these things]."

A couple of days later I sent the blurb that is going to accompany BSOH when it goes off into the wild.

Jacob Vogel considers himself one of the few decent men left in the world. During the riots following the ruling Wizards' downfall, he tried to provide for those close to him through his work as a mechanic. But the chaos kept spreading, and his skills with machines couldn't keep the violence at bay; he watched his sister's murder and killed his best friend with his own hand. The years of brutality finally broke him and drove him from the ruined Wizards' city. The hinterlands are a new world and offer a chance to build a new life. He finds peace, compassion, even love. But the city's corruption has spread farther than he could have imagined.

When the Wizards' legacy returns to enslave humanity, Jacob has a choice. He can run, abandon his family to their fate, and acquiesce to the world's depravity like he has so many times before. Or he can face his past, discover the power of redemption, and wield the human spirit as the only hope against tyranny.

In this final version, Jacob as a character takes precedence over Jacob's experiences. His internal struggles take precedence over the external conflict that drives the plot. This gives the reader a foothold in an unfamiliar world, because Jacob's character and conflict are familiar: someone who stands up for what's right, even when the whole world is against him. It's short, it's focused, and it's interesting.

Each of the first three blurbs took one or two solid writing days to craft. The final one took a week. I have no idea how much it will help or hurt BSOH when real people read it, but I do know that I have a much better chance to get someone to sample the first page of the book now than I did when I was begging them to.

Onward, in 150 words or less.

Drafting on slow days

Put up a new story today, clearly. Or rather, not new; it's actually rather old. I wrote it the summer before my last semester of college, which was a rather dark time in my life. Many nights I found myself walking around at night, and the things I saw and/or imagined on those walks had me a little worried for a while.

In fact, I knew I had this somewhere. A few days before I wrote "Of course it's not real.", I saved a file called "hrm.txt" It's pasted unedited below.

For the past couple of days I've been seeing imaginary bugs darting accross the floor, the walls, etc. It's always in my periphreal vision and they always disappear when I look for them. This could do with the earwig I had crawling on me a couple nights ago right when I was about to fall asleep. I've been around bugs my whole life and there's no other reason I have to really fear them. But it is somewhat unnerving. 6-23-06

To me, the interesting part of the story is that I found it creepy enough to include every distinct image in it when I wrote Battlesongs of Hope a year later. The horns-for-eyes monster gives Jacob a scare early on. And the smiling guy in the hat is actually the main antagonist in the book I'm working on now, The Nomad's Wilds.

Speaking of, I'm 15,000 words into drafting Nomad's and have been hitting a pretty good clip these last couple of weeks. Not today though. I'm at one of those spots where I know what has to happen to move the plot, but I just can't get things going.

Part of it is I know that whatever I write for this part probably won't last past the initial edits. It's a narrative in the middle of a book, which is almost always bad practice, but I need to get the ideas down so I can move onto cooler parts. And right now, knowing that has me tripped up.

The good news is I kicked 858, 528, and 600 words on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, which means I almost hit my goal of 2000 words per week already. Won't be getting anything done tomorrow because of a road trip followed by a party followed by chores on Sunday. So I guess that's how things will stand until next week.

I may try to add something about drafting every week on here, on the off chance my books actually find an audience someday. Girlfriend says some strange people enjoy 'relating' to other people, and I suspect that if any of my books do sell copies, some of those readers may want to write their own books. So, future friends, this is the first drafting entry.

Battlesongs of Hope World Almanac: Part 1 - The World

Battlesongs of Hope takes place in a world that most readers will recognize as Earth, even though it isn’t. Most readers would also recognize the time period as mid-20th century, but those years mean nothing there.

Battlesongs takes place on a large continent that is demarcated primarily into those lands which have been recently under Wizard influence, and those that have not. The boundary between these lands is fuzzy, primarily because the Wizards' lands were so vast and their power so great that there were no other powers on the continent to whom a boundary would be useful, and also because the Wizards are now dead, and so their influence has been waning of late.

The Wizard continent is presumably surrounded by an ocean, although because its role in the book is solely to help regulate the weather, it warrants little more mention.

The Wizard lands span mountains and coastlines, swamps and forests, but the greatest area of land is occupied by vast rolling fields that experience a temperate four seasons. Few cities dot the plains, due to the Wizards’ tendency to consolidate people and resources. Expansive farms turn the fields into a checkerboard of crops from horizon to horizon. The characters of BSOH are not particularly educated regarding life outside of the city, and therefore unfortunately do not know the proper names for many of the landmarks and features in the hinterlands.

The largest Wizard city, which the characters usually refer to as “the sprawl” when discussing it in aggregate, forms a centerpiece in BSOH. This city is so massive that it is much more useful to refer to the districts within the city, which take the names given by the Wizard clan that presides (or rather, presided) over them. The size and population of each district is variable, as Wizards control territory in the city according to their clan’s relative strength and favorability in the eyes of the Two Houses.

Resources and technology in the Wizard lands generally tend to obey the laws of physics. If there is oil in the Wizard lands, it has not yet been found. Liquid fuel is instead produced from algae or plant material, and is generally far more valuable than gasoline. Oddly, electronic computing does not work at all in the BSOH world, despite all theories and calculations indicating that it is possible. The Wizards and most other scholars have concluded that this one discrepancy in natural law must be due to magic.