Author of THE UNITY SEQUENCE. Doing the right thing for Alderaan reasons since 2012.
With my completed WIP currently with my beta readers for feedback, I’ve started on my second book – tentatively titled ROGUE. I’ve spent my writing time in the last week or so working on the outline, and now have chapter summaries for the whole book, which is very satisfying.
It’s one of the most exciting parts of writing, starting a new project. Read more…
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.
My new inclination toward self-publishing has brought with it an unhealthy obsession with book covers. I must have spent over an hour today just flicking through designer’s websites listed on the Writers Café Yellow Pages. There’s also a great cover art category on A Dribble of Ink, which has inspired me.
My novel is (at the moment, at least) called ASCENSION POINT. It’s far-future space opera, fitting neatly alongside Iain M. Banks, Neil Asher, Alastair Reynolds, and the like. As such, when it comes time to publish I’m going to want a proper, space opera cover that fits the genre. Something like these…
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.”
Nice post on io9 here.
I’m drawn to the Anachronista category – the others don’t do a lot for me. I’m no good at history so hardly qualified to suggest alternates. Cheese is . . . well, cheesy. And I think there are enough people writing steampunk – the best example of it, China Mieville’s work, doesn’t even get called it because it’s so much more as well.
But anachronista, that I could do. The next book I’ve got planned is somewhat tinged with this – it’s a Chandler-style detective noir, but set in the same technologically advanced far-future universe of my current WIP.
It wouldn’t quite fit the anachronista mould the io9 article talks about, as it’ll be stylistically redolent of 1930s/40s/50s pulp crime lit, rather than actually containing any technology that you might have found back then. But still – that’s one of the things I love about SF, the scope to combine it with another genre entirely and come up with an interesting hybrid. I’m looking forward to writing it.
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 