I’ve polished up The Broken God Machine and begun querying agents about representing that manuscript. I’m pursuing traditional publication for this one because I’m still curious about that world, and about whether I can the same success working within the industry that I have outside of it. We’ll see how that goes. If I don’t get any bites after a while, I’ll make some tweaks and see if they help. In the end, I can always publish it the same way I have my vampire books. Advance reader feedback has been really good, and I think you guys will enjoy it!

With TBGM out of the way for now, I’m moving back to The Children of the Sun. It’s time to start draft 2, and in this case that means cutting. Lots of cutting. My goal is to slash 25,000 words out of the book (which would bring it to right around the same length as Blood Hunt). I think that will make it leaner and meaner, more fun to read, and also address some of the issues that my trusted readers brought up with the first draft, one of which is that this book about Two just spends too much time not featuring Two!

TCotS is flabby right now, as evidenced by the fact that I managed to trim more than 9,000 words off of it this weekend by hacking out some sections that just aren’t integral to the story. I liked them. I’ll miss them. But they had to go.

This is a necessary part of revision — there are bits of The Blood That Bonds and Blood Hunt that never saw the light of day, either. I’ve never had a book this long, so I’ve never had to cut this many words before, but I think it’ll be good for me and for the novel! The whole point of a first draft is to just get the damn thing out and written down. That’s done. Now it’s time to make it good!

Oh, on one other TCotS-related note: the thumbnail ideas for the cover are starting to come in. You can see one of them in this very post! More on that soon.

Well, I decided to give video blogging a shot. The result seems to be ok — I think fans of the II AM Trilogy will find it interesting. If you’ve read both The Blood That Bonds and Blood Hunt, you should check it out. If you haven’t read those books, I would suggest avoiding this blog, as I do casually mention some fairly big spoilers here and there (note: the are ZERO spoilers for The Children of the Sun). I filmed it under the assumption that the people who would be interested are up to date with the books I’ve put out.

It was an amusing project. The camera angle’s not perfect (I’m too low on the screen), I don’t look at the camera enough, and I do things like scratching my head too often … I guess I could have re-filmed a few more times, but I kind of like leaving it a little rough. If I do more of these, it will be interesting to see if the professionalism level evolves and improves.

Hope you find it interesting and enjoyable! Let me know what you think in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter.

As some of you might remember, a while back I was interviewed by Darrell Pitt for his blog, Writing and Life. Well, after compiling many an interview, Darrell decided that it would be a good idea to compile an eBook of what he considered his best interviews. The good news is: I made the cut, and am included in the eBook. The even better news? The eBook is free!

The book contains talk with a whole batch of really interesting folks talking about both the business and the craft of writing, from people like me who are just starting to be recognized to people who are pretty famous in their respective areas. It’s a great collection of information if you’re an aspiring author or just interested in the world of writing.

Check it out: Secrets of Succesful Authors by Darrel Pitt on Smashwords

Well, it took quite a lot of hard work and many long nights, but the first draft of The Children of the Sun, the final book in the II AM Trilogy, is now complete. The whole story is laid out, and everything came together pretty well. I’ve been waiting to write the closing epilogue for several years, and it feels good to finally have the words out on the screen. Now to begin the long and arduous process of taking the first draft and turning it into something worth publishing!

The Children of the Sun is the longest single work I’ve ever written, by a fairly wide margin, weighing in at 177,425 words. Blood Hunt was 154,148. Since most people think more in terms of pages than words, I’ll give my best estimate: The print edition of Blood Hunt is 516 pages long including all the extra pages like the dedication, author’s note, the TCotS sneak peek, etc. I expect that the print edition of TCotS will be close to 600 pages long.

So, let’s discuss next steps. The first thing I’m doing is taking a short break from writing. One week, to be exact, to let my brain recuperate and distance itself from the work a bit. I’m going to play some video games and relax, and then I’m going to go back to the manuscript and tweak a few things that I already know I don’t like. After that, I will send it out to several trusted readers, who will in turn read it and give me their feedback. This is hugely helpful in identifying inconsistencies, plot holes, and parts of the story that just don’t “work” for people.

Once feedback is gathered, I will begin the second draft. This involves a complete rewrite of the book in a new word processing document, with the first one open on the other side of my monitor. It usually goes much faster than the first draft, and I will be setting myself a much higher nightly word count for that reason.

After the second draft is done, I take another short break, and let my wife read it and give final comments. Then I go back to work, and produce a third draft. This one isn’t rewritten from scratch. Rather, I duplicate the second draft and then go through it making edits and tweaks as I need to. Once that draft is finished, it goes off to my editor, Lauren. She’ll read through the manuscript several times, making multiple passes for tone, consistency, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and so forth. Then she’ll hand me a “marked up” document with all of her changes, thoughts and suggestions, and I’ll go back through the manuscript one more time, incorporating her edits. At that point my work as a writer ends, and my work as production designer begins — that’s how it goes when you format your own print and eBooks, design your own cover, and build your own promotional website.

But we’ll cover that process in more detail when we get to it! For now, the important part is: the first draft’s done. The story’s written. We’re still on schedule for November, 2012. I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride!

As you might recall from my earlier post, I spent the month of January (and the latter part of December) trying to write 1,747 words or more per night on The Children of the Sun. I picked this number because it would get me to 150,000 at the end of the month. Well, 150,028 if you want to be specific. So how did it go? Fantastic, thanks for asking!

January included a trip to Long Island over a weekend, and a couple of other nights were I couldn’t be at the PC such as Jan 31st where I was at a Tool concert, but all told there were only five nights where I wrote less than a thousand words, and only three nights were I wrote zero. I more than made up the difference on the other nights, and actually surpassed 150,028 a day ahead of time, on the 30th. The final tally for the challenge: 150,419, for a total of 63,283 words written in thirty-six days — an average of 1758 per night. Here’s the spreadsheet I used to keep track:

That’s the good news. The bad news is: the book’s still not done! There are a lot of complex story threads to wrap up in The Children of the Sun, and they’re taking more words than I expected. Don’t worry, though, we’re very near the end. I’m guessing it will come in slightly longer than Blood Hunt (which was around 155,000 words). Probably 160 or 170k — and that’s likely to get whittled down a bit in the second draft.

In the meantime, though the challenge is officially over, I am holding myself to a new, slightly less-difficult challenge: 1500+ words per night, every night, until this thing is done. Can I do it?! Well … yeah, probably. We’ll see!

Writing a novel, for me, is a lot like driving a car through an area I’m only semi-familiar with.

There are times when I know where I’m going and can comfortably haul along at 65 mph (105 kph, for all my fans outside of the US), churning out 2000-plus words a day and feeling great. This usually happens when I hit a section of the book that I’ve thought about quite a lot already. Because I don’t have to think too much about where I’m going — I “know the area” so to speak — I can concentrate on just getting the words out in a way that hopefully doesn’t sound like the ravings of a deranged chimpanzee, banging on a Speak-n-Spell.

Related to these times, but not quite the same, are the straightaways — periods where I may not even know the road, but it’s so straight and wide and open that I can still just crank out the words. Everything is just clicking, and the story’s flying out behind me. These don’t happen often, but when they do, it might be my favorite part about writing.

More often than anything else, there are times where I have to slow it down to maybe 30 mph (48 kph) because, while I know the general direction I’m headed in, I just don’t really know the roads all that well. I haven’t driven them that often — that is, I haven’t thought about this particular section over and over — and I need to be careful not to miss my turn, and lead the story off into some crazy direction it wasn’t supposed to go. These are the days where I hit 1500 words (or 1,747, right now) and feel more relieved than anything else. “Whew … got through that without crashing into anything.”

Last but not least are the times when things go wrong; you take a bad turn, hit traffic, or find yourself detoured by construction. You have no idea where you’re going and only a vague sense of what the right direction is. More often than not, you end up having to turn around and backtrack. In the writing world, this means you’ve lost the thread of your plot, and usually it means deleting words, sometimes whole paragraphs, to get back to where you need to be. Man, nothing hurts like highlighting an entire paragraph and whaling on the delete key, but sometimes it has to be done!

I try not to “plot” my novels. That is to say: I try not to lay out all of the important elements ahead of time. I like the organic feel of coming up with stuff as I go. At the same time, it’s a bad idea to have no direction whatsoever, so I do like to give myself lots of map markers — points in the plot that I know I want to hit — and then finding my way to them. This lets me have certain scenes that I can think about over and over, and then really tear through. For example, in The Blood That Bonds, I knew what was happening to Abraham well ahead of time. As far as what happens to Theroen? Didn’t know until a few days before it happened. As a consequence, the Abraham scene was much easier and faster to write, but both scenes are equally important to the reader (hopefully!).

I’m nearing the end of The Children of the Sun, now. I’ve just begun the fifth and final section of the book, and it’s an interesting place to be. I’m hoping for lots of straightaways, and I have a few more map markers guiding my way, but I’m not kidding myself: there’s going to be some twists and turns, and maybe even some backtracking, before I reach that final destination.

The last time I sat down in front of a microphone to be interviewed, the term “podcast” hadn’t been invented yet, I was still working in the video game industry, and I was covering the nightmarish hellscape that some people know as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka: E3.

I don’t do a whole lot of video game journalism or development these days, so opportunities to get in front of the mic at major trade shows are less frequent (particularly since I try to avoid major trade shows). The good folks over at The Online Guys, though, gave me an opportunity to stand up and speak out. Or rather, to hang out on my cell phone and chat with them for about twenty minutes on what it’s like to be an author making his way through the brave new world of electronic self-publishing. We talk about my work, the way I’ve used social media to connect with my fans, and dive for a bit into how the process of producing an eBook actually works.

You can check the interview out over at their website. Many thanks to Nils, Rob and Samantha (not the one from TBTB!) for having me as a guest. It was a good time!

Darrell Pitt maintains a blog where he chronicles the ups and downs of writing in the modern era, including lots of advice, news and info. He also does the occasional author interview, and recently got in touch to find out if I’d mind answering a few questions. I, of course, never mind answering a few questions, so I went ahead and did so. He’s posted the interview over at 1001 Secrets of Successful Writers and you should go check it out. Here’s a sample:

You’ve just published your first novel “The Blood that Bonds” on Amazon and via Createspace. As a first timer, how would you describe this experience of uploading your book and preparing it for publication?

Well, there were two separate publications – the eBook first came out in late 2009, and then I released the print edition in early 2011. Both processes were fairly complex, and I think it helped a lot that I’ve spent most of my professional life developing web-pages. The type-setting, graphic design, and scripting skills necessary to create print and eBooks are quite similar to the things I was already doing on the web.

Of the two, I found the print publication more difficult, just because it required exacting attention to margins and bleed areas, page size, type-formatting (I spent hours just making sure none of the fleurons in the book were left hanging at the top of a new page) and so forth. Also, the feedback process on a print book is much slower – you have to upload your stuff to Createspace, order a proof, wait a week for it to show up, and then comb it for errors. With the eBook, you upload a file and can view it instantly.

…

Check out the full interview! Many thanks to Darrell for giving me the opportunity. I thought his questions were pretty solid — hopefully my responses hold up.

This was posted a few days ago, but I didn’t get a notification that it had gone up, so I just realized it. A while back I did an interview with Susan over at MyVampFiction. She really enjoyed The Blood That Bonds and asked me a bunch of questions about it, and about writing in general. So if you’re interested, head on over and give it a read.

A couple of notes: I actually answered the interview questions before the new year, so some of the answers are a bit out of date. For example, I’m not “just about” to launch the print edition of TBTB … I’ve actually done it!

I am nearly done with the polish draft of the sequel to TBTB, Blood Hunt. I expect to send out my first agent query this weekend. Very exciting times ahead.

I spent this past weekend working on The Blood That Bonds, a book that I swore to God, Vishnu, and Ray Kurzweil that I was done with more than a year ago. Such is life when you’re prepping for print.

Incorporating another person’s edits into your work can be a surprisingly slow and difficult process. On the surface, it seems simple enough — correcting a typo here, fixing an improper piece of punctuation there — and as long as you stick to basic copy-editing, it is indeed no big deal. What’s more difficult, though,  is dealing with edits that include changes, suggestions, and questions about the story itself. Take for example, this excerpt from the first chapter of The Blood That Bonds:

Not twenty yards away was a piece of art in chrome and fiberglass, black like his clothes, black like hers. A sports car unlike any she was familiar with. Certainly not the loud, rowdy, American Dodge Viper, nor any of the trim, mechanical Japanese imports. The lines of the car were — must have been — Italian. Two’s father was an auto mechanic, but this was a vehicle beyond anything she’d ever seen.

This is what it looked like when it came back from my editor:

And this is the final revision:

Not twenty yards away was a piece of art in chrome and fiberglass, black like his clothes, black like hers. Two’s father was an auto mechanic, and she knew her cars, but this was not a vehicle with which she was familiar. The lines of the car seemed Italian.

Them’s some good edits! The revised paragraph is not only smoother and easier for the reader to process, but we also cut out a lot of extraneous words and pare it down to just what really needs to be said. This leaves us with with more words available to spend on the important things, like characterization, “showing instead of telling,” and dialog. All good things, but it should also be noted that amidst all of these substantial changes to the wording lies the potential for the introduction of new typos, misspellings, omissions, and other errors. I hate errors!

This is my editor, Elise. Hi, Elise!

Obviously, no book is perfect. You can probably pull any given book at your local bookstore off the shelf and find at least one typo somewhere in its text, especially if it’s a first printing. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to eliminate them, and this is why any time I’m working on edits to a manuscript, I live in mortal terror of introducing new problems while trying to fix old ones!

There’s no real solution to this other than taking your time and editing with care, which is why this stage in a book’s life can be pretty drawn out. You’ll need to check and re-check, type carefully, and probably avoid doing your editing at 3 AM after a night spent slamming down daiquiries (we can’t all be Hemingway). You want to be awake, alert, and aware, and you’ll want to go slowly. It’s all part of the process, and it’s why people who write for a living laugh when others suggest that their job is easy.

The fear of introducing new errors into your work while incorporating edits is both tangible and legitimate. Fortunately, the benefits that those edits provide make it worth the time and patience required to make sure they’re properly integrated.