Author of THE UNITY SEQUENCE. Doing the right thing for Alderaan reasons since 2012.
Limited bloggery over the past few days – sorry about that. We’ve been away on a little trip over the long weekend here in Brazil. I have no idea which saint’s day it was which gave me the day off last Thursday, but I’m grateful – taking the extra vacation day on Friday made it a four day weekend, and they’re always good.
Anyway. Read more…
Lovely fiancée Amisha powered through the first half of ASCENSION POINT today, and has loads of great feedback, including some things I’d simply never have thought of:
“If she’s a really powerful politician who works all the time, why does she care so much about her beauty regimen? I mean, look at Dilma.”
It’s marvellous having a voracious reader and very smart cookie to give the story a good kicking before it goes off to the professional editor. I really want to make this first novel the absolute best it can be.
And on that note, I’m very excited that Stephanie Mooney will be starting work on my cover next week – can’t wait to see what she puts together. Exciting times!
Ah, starting the first draft of a new book. Second only in writing satisfaction to finishing one.
I knocked out the first scene of ROGUE today, the first part of the prologue introducing the antagonists. I can already tell this is going to be really fun to write.
Meanwhile the edit of ASCENSION POINT rumbles on slowly – I love my beta readers dearly, but feedback is a tough thing to wait for. Hurry up, please! My impatience knows no bounds. I want to get the edit done, and get the book out into the world!
Patience, Dan. Patience.
Here is another marvellous post from Nicola Morgan’s ‘Help! I Need a Publisher’ blog, this time on how to respond to criticism.
“[The writer] continued by explaining that the person giving her feedback had said lots of positive things but had suggested that x and y should be changed, but that she’d actually got a publishing deal and x and y were retained. Therefore, the person giving the feedback was wrong.
Oh goshy goshy gosh. And feckity gosh all over again.”
It’s talking about writers, of course, but the advice actually applies to anyone who ever gets feedback about anything – everyone in other words! You should read the whole thing, because as always Nicola whacks the nail firmly on the head.
It’s quite pertinent to me at the moment. Read more…
I just printed off a copy of my MS so my fiancée can get her red pen out and give me some notes. It’s… bigger than expected:
328 pages – or 164 A4 sheets of double-sided, 1.5 line-spaced size 12. Emptied my brand new printer cartridge!
Satisfying, though.
What to do when you can’t write, or edit, your WIP? Like now, when I’m waiting for feedback from my beta readers. (Or rather I will be when a new printer cartridge arrives in the mail, so I can print a copy, so my fiancée can read it. I bet Stephen King never has this problem. Anyway.)
You write the next thing, of course! I’ve had the high-level premise for the next book knocking around for a while now, and today I started putting some bones on it. I’ve now got a chapter-summary outline for the first half, and biographies for the four protagonists, which I think is a pretty good day’s work.
The second book is set in the same universe as the first, a few months later, with a slight overlap in characters – I’m not sure if this will be confusing when I start switching between projects. I hope not.
Another pitfall I’ll need to avoid is due to the setting – the story is primarily based on a harsh, desert world, with an advanced but still fiercely tribal culture. I’ve already had to throw a few possible plot points away because I realised I’d unconsciously ripped them wholesale from Dune.
Damn you, Frank Herbert. Using up all the good desert-based material. Oh well. I’ll manage!
Just finished the first pass edit of ASCENSION POINT. I was quite pleased, overall. I managed to tighten the prose and trim just over 6,000 words from the draft – about seven percent – and the plot seemed to flow quite well.
I’m now four chapters into the first-pass edit of my novel, the goal of which is cutting out any obviously unnecessary text and just getting an initial feel for if the plot and character arcs hang together and make sense. I’ve been a bit surprised by how familiar these first few chapters are, and how little I’ve actually managed to cut – I can only guess that I reworked them quite a lot last year, before I moved to my later approach of just hammering out the scenes and not even reading them afterwards.
I’m expecting that’ll change soon: I’ve got my eye on chapter seven, which I think is about 3,000 words of nothing relevant to the plot happening, just some slow-burn character development. Pretty sure I’ll be able to tighten that up to about 1,500 and merge it with chapter six.
Editing’s fun!
So my resolution to wait two months before editing lasted . . . 43 hours. Oh well.
First up was running through my scene synopses from start to finish, checking for flaws or holes in the main plot arc.
(A note on synopses: as I’ve been drafting, I’ve written a one-sentence summary of every scene as I finish it. The index cards on the Scrivener corkboard – see here for previous on this – make this an absolute doddle. But I digress.)
Boom. And the first draft is complete.
A mere eleven months, 90,401 words and 383 pages of double-spaced size 12 Courier New later, I can now say:
“Why yes, I have written a novel. Thanks for asking. I’ll have a glass of the Malbec.”
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 
