Playing In Other Authors' Sandboxes...

This morning I ordered a copy of the new short-story collection The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth set in S.M. Stirling's Emberverse. This is not the first time Stirling has let other authors play in his sandbox. Back when I was in high school, when that wonderful place called Media Play still existed, I flipped through a copy of Drakas!, a collection of short stories other authors wrote in his Drakaverse.

I haven't started reading The Change yet beyond the first few pages and I don't remember Drakas! all that well beyond a few particularly interesting (or particularly silly) stories, but I do love the concept. Many authors have played in other authors' sandboxes before--I read Robert Jordan's Conan stories in high school and Brian Herbert has been filling in the blank spaces his father Frank Herbert left in the world of Dune--but short stories are different from letting another author write a novel-length work set in the same world.

A full-blown book is a pretty momentous--Brian Herbert's novels describe the Butlerian Jihad and much of Paul Atreides' reign as Padishah Emperor, stuff that was left out of his father's books completely or only alluded to. However, short stories allow for much smaller brushstrokes that wouldn't have large effects on the wider worlds.

For example, my BattleTech short story "Skirmish at the Vale's Edge," which I sold to BattleCorps and so it's now canon, depicts the relatively small Battle of the Jallington Vale described in a single paragraph in the Clan Wolf sourcebook. The good people from Catalyst Game Labs advised me to stay away from the major events and people, lest my story get nuked for contradicting established canon. Given how enormous the BattleTech world--like the Emberverse and the Drakaverse--is, there's plenty of blank spaces to fill without impacting people like Victor Steiner-Davion, Phelan Kell, etc. The same principle applies to the Emberverse and the Drakaverse as well. It's even been applied to Charlaine Harris's world of Sookie Stackhouse--see this collection Dead But Not Forgotten.

Perhaps someday my own work will be popular enough to justify similar projects. The world of Battle for the Wastelands I've plotted out thus far covers three generations and spans a whole continent, plenty of time and space for other writers to play in my sandbox without causing undue problems for the main plot. The world of The Thing in the Woods, although what I've plotted so far only covers a relatively short time period, could also host works written by other writers. The world depicted in my unfinished space opera The Cybele Incident and a current project I'm keeping under wraps for now also have plenty of space, especially the latter one.

All I need to do is make those projects successful enough. Time to get cracking. :)

January 2015 Writing Contest Results

January 2015 was another iteration of my writing contest. I ended up writing 3,230 words on various fictional projects. Now that I'm starting the last phase of graduate school (the last classes and various exams), I doubt I'll be doing any more writing bets with friends until possibly this summer. So this'll be your last monthly update as to what I'm working on for awhile.

*Most of the words went into bringing The Thing in the Woods up to 56,000 words. That's at the low end of the right length for a young-adult novel. I've begun querying agents again, since it turns out there won't be an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest this year. Mostly just dribs and drabs of content, since the really big stuff went into the text in December.

*I also added a few hundred words to The Atlanta Incursion, the more UFO-centric sequel to The Thing in the Woods. I basically went through the entire text as written and added a little bit here and there. In the near future I'll need to do some research and go to the Videodrome in Virginia Highlands--the last in-town video rental store. A pity I don't live near it. :(

*I added a few hundred words to my near-future hard(ish) SF space-war tale The Cybele Incident. It's still around a third finished approximately.

*Also added a few hundred words to my two additional short stories featuring supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel (who has appeared in two earlier stories, Übermensch and Needs Must).The plan at present is to release an omnibus on Amazon containing all four stories--Alex Claw has already done a cover--that will be the only place one will be able to get the two remaining tales.

*Finally added a little bit to Battle for the Wastelands based on my reading of the history book River of Dark Dreams about the settlement of the antebellum Mississippi Valley. The Flesh-Eater regime just got a little bit more dystopian, although we won't actually see the details under the second book.

Writing Advice: How To Cut Words

Over the last few days, I went through Battle for the Wastelands, cutting words in anticipation of #PitchMas. The manuscript began at 104,000 words (well, 103,946 or something like that, but I'm fairly certain one rounds when one pitches) and I've gotten it down to 100,375 words, which as far as publishers are concerned I can call it 100,000 words. Given how intricately I've plotted this out, I would much rather cut a few words per page and hope they add up rather than make macro cuts of scenes and characters.

So based on my work on Battle, here're some tips on how to do just that:

*Avoid the word "that." Oftentimes it's not needed. In particular "that" and a verb. Instead make it a gerund. Frex, instead of "a box that contained bones," say "a box containing bones."

*Cut the phrase "of them." Instead of saying "the two of them did this" or "the three of them did that," just say "the two did this" or "the three did that." Sometimes "of them" is necessary, but I cut a lot of words purging it.

*In tight third person, saying the POV character "knew" something is redundant. The portion of the story is being told from their perspective, so everything the reader reads they know. There were some situations where it was stylistically appropriate to leave that in, but I still cut some words there.

*Don't present the same information twice, even if realistically this would happen. The reader has already seen it once and that's what really matters. The second time, have something like, "So-and-so told her about such-and-such." The reader will know what you're talking about. This was a much bigger problem in The Cybele Incident, but it did crop up in a much earlier draft of Battle for the Wastelands and I found a bit of it at the end of the current draft of Battle.

*Cut speech tags. If you're describing somebody doing something and then have speech, it means that person is talking. Something like this:

Erin glared at him. "Don't condescend to me!"

Instead of

"Don't condescend to me!" Erin said angrily OR "Don't condescend to me!" Erin spat.

This example doesn't result in a net word loss, but when I applied this policy to Battle, I was able to cut words. This isn't to say speech tags aren't necessary, especially if there are more than two people present, but a lot of times they can be cut if what's going on in the scene gives context clues as to who is speaking.

I hope these suggestions prove useful to you.

May Writing Contest: The Results

Yesterday was the last day of May and thus the last day of the first month of the writing contest involving my friends Nick, Lauren, Sean, and I. The goal is to write the most fictional words, with the loser buying the winner lunch.

My word count, which I tracked per project per day on an Excel spreadsheet, was 19,154 words spread out across multiple projects. So here goes:

The Thing In The Woods-The word count went from 6,349 to 19,361. The first two chapters are completed, albeit rather short, and some great big hunks of other chapters are written. My plan now is to finish the entire first draft before I start graduate school in late August. It's young adult, so it'll probably be shorter anyway. I'm guessing it's around a third done, 40 percent on the outside. One of the biggest additions is that I've now got a romantic subplot involving the male lead, a rather snobby Buckhead transplant to a small town south of Atlanta that's rapidly turning into a bedroom community, and a local girl who's into theater. Given how my friend James R. Tuck said the big difference between young adult and adult fiction featuring teen protagonists is whether or not they're facing "grown man problems," high-school dating shenanigans will make it "younger."

(Yes, Battle for The Wastelands has a teen romance tidbit too, but it's not nearly as important. What to do about the flirtatious cowgirl Alyssa Carson takes up much less screentime so to speak than the Flesh-Eater threat to the protagonist's hometown, the starvation threat to the Merrill refugee camps, etc.)

The Cybele Incident-I went from 15,817 words to 20,215 words. This is net word count, since I ran the completed chapters through my Kennesaw writing group and they had ideas on what to cut as well as what to add. I wrote a new beginning to make the male lead Lt. Commander Thomas Briggs more sympathetic and more competent and added a new wrinkle to female lead Captain Adhirai Lakhani's battle plan to make her more sneaky-subtle as opposed to simply brutal and "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." She's genetically-engineered to be the next stage in human evolution, so having her act like an unsubtle moron kind of makes the people behind it look inept and stupid. I'm shooting for a shorter word count than Battle for The Wastelands, so I'm probably around a third finished.

The Wastelands Universe-I started writing the manuscript for the third novel in the series just so I could write down a 1,000-odd word sequence in the harem-intrigue subplot that came to me in a burst of inspiration. The second and third novels in the series give the female characters a lot more screentime, in particular the women of the villain Grendel's harem. I also started writing a sequel novella centered around Grendel's daughter Astrid, which would take place chronologically after the fourth, fifth, or possibly the sixth books. Finally, yesterday at the gym I had another burst of inspiration and wrote a 700-odd word scene that elaborates on Alyssa's character a fair bit.

I haven't gotten specific word counts from the others yet, although I'm certain I've beaten at least one of them. This coming month will be a lot tougher, since one will have more free time and the other will be more organized in tracking their word counts. Best not slack off. There are whole stretches of May where I didn't get any fiction writing done at all (15 out of 31 days, nearly half of the month). It'd be easy to blame my paying writing gigs, which have to take priority over my personal writing, but I could have still gotten some stuff done. At the very least, I could have broken 20,000 or even 25,000 words.

Writing Contest Update Halfway Through

A couple weeks ago, I announced that I'd begun the writing contest that began with just my friend Nick and I and expanded to include Sean Korsgaard and Lauren Patrick. I even included a selection from the first Mortal Kombat movie for your entertainment.

Well, here's my progress:

1. The Thing In The Woods, which is turning into a full-blown young-adult Lovecraftian horror novel, is now at 18,063 words from a beginning-of-the-month figure of 6,349. Right now, I'm concerned that it's actually going to be too short, although I've seen minimum YA word-counts as low as 45,000. I've added a small unrequited romantic plot involving our rather snobby Buckhead transplant hero and a small-town community theater enthusiast that should add to the word count some, include more female characters (before she showed up, the only ones were the protagonist's mom and little sister and they didn't really do much), and show some character growth on the protagonist's part.

Now an aside about the young adult genre: My friend James R. Tuck said what made my first complete (original) novel Battle for the Wastelands NOT a YA book even though the protagonist Andrew Sutter was in his teens was that his difficulties were "grown man problems" (hunger, genocide, war), with some teen-romantic drama being a tertiary issue. Contrast that with Thing protagonist James Daly's problems(before the tentacled swamp god and his redneck cult get involved), which are basically having to contribute to paying his parents' mortgage in the aftermath of the housing crisis, not being able to afford the college he wants, and his little sister trying to hook him up with this artsy girl who has a crush on him. That explanation makes a great deal of sense.

2. The Cybele Incident, my hard SF novel and hopefully beginning of a trilogy (with a fourth novel set a generation later), began the month at 15,817 and is now at 18,380. I wrote a new beginning for the first chapter to make protagonist Commander Thomas Briggs more sympathetic (the original beginning depicted him trying and failing to pick up women at a bar) and various odds and ends throughout the story. I did expand an attack sequence to depict the female lead/villain/anti-heroine doing something rather sneaky, as opposed to straight-up throwing nukes around.

Just over 14,000 words written and two more weeks left. At this rate, I might hit 30,000 words, which is 60 percent of the National Novel-Writing Month figure. If I had to guess, I'm probably going to finish Thing first, since it's going to be shorter to start with and it's a one-shot.

The Great Summer Writing Challenge...

Today I was chatting with my friend Nick and we were discussing the progress of our various writing projects. I referenced author William Meikle, whom I have corresponded with via Facebook and Twitter. Meikle seems to have a book out every few months and I asked him what his secret was. His response was basically writing 2,000 words per day. Nick has a novel he's working on, but as a teacher, it's easier for him to write during the summer when he has lots of time off.

Nick suggested we have a competition to write 2,000 words per day during the summer. I'm preparing to go to graduate school this fall and I've got various freelance writing clients I need to attend do, so I figured instead of 2,000 words per day, it would be better to set the word count by month. The way I currently do freelancing, work tends to pile up at the end of the month, so 2,000 words per day isn't very practical for several days.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to have a writing competition covering the months of May, June, July, and August. The loser (by word count) has to take the winner (by word count) out to lunch. The minimum amount of words to be written is 10,000 words, which comes out to roughly two or three chapters per month. And that's the minimum.

Luckily I have three possible projects to spread this out:

*The Cybele Incident, my NaNoWriMo project from last November. As of today it's 15,000+ words written, roughly 20-25 percent done. I've been using my Lawrenceville writing group to give myself deadlines to have each chapter done, which has served me well in getting the first five chapters written. I've also gotten most of the next-to-last chapter done. Five of the 21 slated chapters complete, with one almost done--two chapters a month means it's done in seven months. Three chapters a month equals five months.

*The Thing In The Woods, my one-shot Lovecraftian horror novel that draws on some of my experiences living in and reporting on a small town on the southern fringe of Metro Atlanta. 1,517 words long as of today. I was thinking that this was something that, if I really applied myself to, I could finish fairly quickly, since it doesn't require the same degree of expert knowledge that TCI (hard science and Naval protocol) does and it'd be shorter and require less military knowledge than the Wastelands novels (more here later). Eleven chapters total, so at two per month that's five months and three per month that's three and a half to four mouths. Given the lack of need for research, all I'd really need to do is apply myself.

*Escape from the Wastelands, the sequel to Battle for The Wastelands. As of today it's roughly 25,000 words written, around 20-25 percent done. Given how this is a sequel and I haven't sold the first one, this isn't going to be a priority. After all, if I can't sell the first one, what good is a sequel? Unless I e-publish it of course, which I'd really rather not do. At present this is 42 slated chapters, but many of them could be consolidated and worst case scenario, it could get split in half. After all, I've done it before.

I posted on Facebook and called on all of the mutual friends of Nick and me to witness the challenge and nag us into meeting our targets and now Sean CW Korsgaard wants to join in. The fact he lives in another state could be problematic re: actually getting lunch, but he will be coming to visit Georgia sometime during the summer.

As I said on Facebook, let the games begin...in a month. :)

What I've Been Writing Lately...

I think it's been awhile since I've updated my loyal readers with how my writing is going, so here you go...

*I just queried another agent for Battle for the Wastelands. This makes the fifth agent I've queried for it. So far I've been rejected by two. I have created a list of agents and publishers based on trips through the Alpharetta and Dunwoody Barnes and Noble stores and I'm running out of those. Next it's time to go through 2011 Novel And Short Story Writer's Market and 2013 Writer's Market and see what agents I can find there.

*Completed chapter five of The Cybele Incident, which the title I settled on for my 2012 NaNoWriMo project. I went over it with my Lawrenceville writing group on Sunday. It came through surprisingly unscathed (a fellow group member is a retired Navy petty officer), although it looks like I'll be revising the whole universe to depict artificial gravity as a viable technology. Luckily I recently got new laptop and was able to look up during the meeting a method of artificial gravity that was surprisingly near-term technology-wise. Including it in the story wouldn't require too many painful alterations.

(Having a laptop is really cool for writing-group meetings. Rather than write everything down in a notebook and then have to keep track of physical pages, I can take notes in a Word document.)

*This afternoon I submitted my short story "Ubermensch" to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's a villain-protagonist superhero story featuring a half-Indian biomedical engineer who follows the creed of Nietzsche (as he understands it, which might not be all that well) and has turned himself into a cyborg. If FSF doesn't want it (I mostly use them as a secondary sort of critique--depending on whether a story didn't grab the editor's interest or hold the editor's interest, I can tell whether the problem is the beginning or the middle), I'll send it off to Daily Science Fiction, which explicitly accepts superhero fiction. At worst, I'll package it with a second story that dovetails a whole lot with "Ubermensch" and self-publish it for e-readers as "Two Tales of Andrew Patel."

*In the middle of revising my short story "Lord Giovanni's Daughter," a sword/sorcery story featuring a barbarian adventurer who is essentially a Norman--a Viking who got civilization but still has the energy and warlike attitude of his uncivilized forebears. My Kennesaw writing group came up with a lot of good suggestions last Saturday. A friend of mine is putting together an anthology of sword and sorcery fiction and failing that, there are still a few more markets out there. The story was purchased (and paid for) by a print magazine in 2008 that went under before it could be printed, so it's among my better works.

*Today I downloaded Celtx, a sort of screenwriting software that I first learned about at a job networking meeting. One local screenwriting group won't even accept screenplays written in Microsoft Word, so this could prove very important. I could probably finish my "Coil Gun" screenplay fairly quickly and writing a "Melon Heads" script shouldn't take that long, so this could prove very important.

*I'll soon start working with the editors of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly on my story "Nicor," which is slated to be posted on their website in April. Given how much they seem to like "Nicor," I'll be sure to send them more of my sword and sorcery work in the future.

My NaNoWriMo Autopsy

Just as I suspected earlier, I did not succeed at National Novel Writing Month this month. Based on the numbers in my Excel spreadsheet, I wrote approximately 7,660 words, around 15 percent of the 50,000 words those who set out to climb the NaNoWriMo mountain must write.

Now it's time to conduct an autopsy, to see why I did not succeed and what lessons can be learned:

*Work was one of the biggest causes. Although I've made some money with my personal writing, that which makes most of my money should take the top priority.

*For my NaNoWriMo project, I picked a hard SF novel I had already begun writing. That genre is more difficult to write and requires more pre-existing knowledge than, say, a sword-and-sorcery or "New Pulp" novel. My friend Jamie, who "made" NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row, said my not succeeding at NaNoWriMo was understandable if I chose hard SF. I'd written most of the first chapter of a pulp adventure novel in an hour or so at DragonCon this year and that would have been a better NaNoWriMo project.

*If you look at my November blog-posting list, I found a lot of stuff to comment on. Although some of that was very time-sensitive and necessary (like the Starcraft novel review), others perhaps could have been held off on. Part of the issue is that if I run into a block, I often find something easier to do, like post on the blog or message-board. Good for bringing in blog traffic (November was one of the most-trafficked months this year), but not good for finishing a novel.

*I brought the first four chapters to my writing group and spent time revising them rather than simply writing new content. I have reason for this--one of my writing group's more active members is a former petty officer on a submarine who knows significantly more about the Navy than I do and his comments lead to large re-writes. It's better to get problems in earlier chapters fixed to minimize the amount of rewriting later. However good that might be more for the novel as a whole, that contributed to my not making the 50,000.

Oh well. Better luck next year.

First NaNoWriMo Update

Now begins Day Five of National Novel-Writing Month and I will update you with my progress, or lack thereof.

In the first four days, I wrote a grand total of 1,956 words. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing--except in order to meet the "50,000 words in a month" challenge of NaNoWriMo, I would need to write just under 1,700 words per day. This means I should have written 6,700 words so far. In order to be on-track for five days in, I would need to write in the neighborhood of 8,400 words today.

(I have some legitimate justifications here, but excuses buy no yams. I'm still very behind. Meanwhile, I have a friend who is not only meeting his goals, he is actually exceeding them.)

At this rate, I do not think I will be able to make the 50,000 word count. I am not giving up five days into the project--I will still try to write a lot more on what will hopefully be my second completed original novel (and an easier sale, since it will probably be shorter than my first). However, I am being realistic.

On the bright side, those 1,956 words have been rather useful. The first chapter is now complete and I've made significant progress on the second and third. I have committed to bring something to my Lawrenceville writing group for the 11/18 meeting. Since the deadline to submit something is 11/11, I might be able to bring the first three "real" chapters (as opposed to the prologue, which consists of a bunch of future news articles for world-building purposes) before the writing group.

Do novel titles count toward the word count goal? Several thousand words in, and I still don't have a title.

To NaNoWriMo or Not NaNoWriMo?

The other day on Facebook, my friend Lauren Patrick posted a general call-out to several of her writer friends (me included) about whether we would be participating in National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The gist of it is to write 50,000 words in a month. That's a complete novel by some people's metrics, albeit a bit on the short side.

I am seriously considering participating. While I wait to hear back from the first publisher I sent Battle for the Wastelands, my friend James R.Tuck from my Kennesaw writing group recommended that I work on an entirely new project. He said once he wrote the first Deacon Chalk novel Blood and Bullets, he sent it out to agents and publishers and worked on other stuff in the meantime. It wouldn't do to spend all that time writing a sequel and not be able to sell the first novel.

So I started pondering a new project, born out of thoughts I had on how the Star Trek canon could have gone differently. And so a new space opera came to be, a world born of electric cars and fusion power freeing the U.S. from dependence on Middle Eastern oil, of European unification and the fall of Pakistan, and the genetic engineering of humans came. Now the human realm is divided between five Great Powers, all of whom have nuclear and antimatter weapons, spacecraft using inertial confinement fusion, and offworld colonies. It is in that world that a prototype antimatter-propelled spacecraft is lost and an American warship races an Indian one to retrieve it.

(It's much, MUCH more "hard sci fi" than Star Trek will ever be, and it's not nearly as utopian.)

Battle for the Wastelands is 104,000 words long and took me one to two years to write most of it. 104,000 words is a little long for a first novel. Blood and Bullets is around 80,000 words long, as was Wicked as They Come,the debut novel of Delilah S. Dawson. Meanwhile, The Shifter, the debut novel of Janice Hardy, was 70,000 words. My new project, which doesn't yet have a title, would probably be this length if not somewhat shorter.

I told James the other day that if I made Escape from the Wastelands my NaNoWriMo project, I could write 50,000 words and still have a lot more to do. However, if I did my new project instead, I could, if not actually finish it, be pretty darn close. And a shorter novel would be an easier sell than a longer one.

And now that I've described the project in extensive detail on a well-traveled blog, that means I need to get started pronto, lest someone else steal the idea.

To NaNoWriMo! Let's hope I have time!