Wow, how has it been two months since I last posted here? Time flies, my friends, especially when you’re working on a bunch of different stuff. Let’s cover all that work, shall we?

The II AM Trilogy

With the exception of an upcoming contest, I’ve put the II AM Trilogy to bed by creating a compilation eBook that contains all three titles in one file, and by redesigning the website. Note: if you’ve already read TBTB, Blood Hunt, and TCotS, there is nothing new in the collection and you should not feel any need to buy it (unless you want it all in one file for some reason). This is just a way for interested new readers to get the whole thing at once instead of having to download/buy three different ebooks. It’s not intended as a cash-grab from people who already paid for my work.

You can get more info at the new II AM Trilogy website. There’s also a FAQ, the full historical timeline (starting at 5000 BCE and going all the way to present day), and some other fun stuff.

The Broken God Machine

I’ve completed the final draft of The Broken God Machine, making substantial changes to the narrative that I think really help the book. It will shortly be going out to my advance readers for one last, quick round of feedback, following which it will head for my editor Lauren. We’re looking good for an early fall 2013 release! I’ve also engaged a very talented illustrator to do the cover. You should check out his website!

More on TBGM in the coming weeks.

Monster Hunters

The original draft of Monster Hunters is a fun book and I like it a lot, but it’s severely flawed from a structure standpoint: basically the climax happens in the middle and the whole last third of the book is stuff that really should take place before said climax. This is what happens when you write a novel in 30 days with very little thought put into it beforehand beyond “this girl kills a werewolf and gets recruited by a school that trains monster hunters” …

So I’m restructuring it, basically by cutting and pasting the chapters and then reading through and changing stuff that no longer makes sense (like the climax happening in February when, in the new order of things, it should happen in June). After that, it’ll go out to my advance readers for their first round of feedback. I have no idea if I will ever release this book, let alone when, but I’d like to at least advance it along the stages.

Also I’m renaming it from “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters” to “The Monster Hunters – Book 1: The Werewolf at the Window” … but since the name’s never been official anyway, it really doesn’t matter much!

Non-Fiction

HUGE gin roundup coming to Primer soon. I submitted it at the end of March so it’ll probably be up in late April or early May. Sixteen gins with full tasting notes, plus I did a martini test for each one. It’s a fun, informative read (I think).

The Future

With The Broken God Machine about to leave my hands for a couple of months, my thoughts are turning to starting a new book. I’ve spoken before about a revenge thriller set in a partially flooded, future Brooklyn, and that’s what I’ll likely be working on next. It should b a standalone book, like TBGM, and I’m expecting it to come in at about 95,000 words, also like TBGM (that’s a bit longer than The Blood That Bonds). Sometimes these projects have a tendency to grow, though, so we’ll see. At 1,500 words a day, I should be able to crank this thing out in about two months. Which is just about the amount of time Lauren needs for editing TBGM. Serendipitous!

That’s it for now.

Whoah, it’s been way too long since I updated this here blog. The good news is: that’s because I’ve been hammering away at The Children of the Sun! Between that and my full-time job, I just haven’t had a ton of time for the peripheral stuff. I have been posting to my facebook page, though, so if you’re into that sort of thing you should go “like” me so you can get those updates! In the meantime, here are some updates on various projects:

The Children of the Sun

Man, this book is a beast! There’s just so much stuff that happens. I think you guys will like it and come out feeling satisfied at the end, but it’s hard to tell when I’m in the midst of the drafting process. On that note, I have trimmed an amazing amount from the first draft, almost 25,000 words, with more to go. I basically went in and did massive surgery, first, before I started the second draft. This left a lot of gaping holes that need to be sewn up (I literally deleted two entire chapters and also nuked a character from the book), but trust me: the resulting book will be leaner, meaner, and a better read. It’ll also focus more on Two, which is good since she’s the star!

I’m more than 65,000 words into the second draft now, and humming along. Every time I finish a chapter, I spend the next day going through it and then send it off to my editor, Lauren. This will let her get started on the easy stuff (punctuation, grammar, typos), and then when she has the full manuscript in hand she can help with things like flow, consistency, and outright story errors. She’s good at that stuff, which is an immense relief when you’re working on a massive novel and are no longer sure that what you’re writing even makes sense!

I’ve set some very aggressive word goals for myself for July. I don’t know if it’ll QUITE be done by the time I head for France in August, but that’s OK … long plane rides are a great excuse for writing. I’ll be posting progress updates here more frequently moving forward. Also, Karla‘s cover is coming along beautifully and I’ll be posting more images soon! She’s way past the sketch seen above.

The Broken God Machine

Well, the good news is: The Broken God Machine is out there in the big, scary world of agent submissions. The even better news is: it’s already had a bite. An agent for a prominent New York firm requested the full manuscript and is reading it over. Additionally, an editor at St. Martin’s Press (a division of Macmillan) is taking a look as well.

Now, the most likely result is that both of them pass on it — that’s just the way it works. But still, it’s pretty great to be getting some interest. Should be hearing back from one or both of them pretty soon. Wish me luck!

Non-Fiction Work

I’ll be doing some more cocktail articles this summer. I’ve got one already submitted to Primer that chronicles the history of the Daiquiri. After that will be a Tiki Drink roundup, and then a history of the Margarita. I’ll be posting here as the articles go live. I also am doing some spirits reviewing over on my Tumblr.

More coming soon. Stay tuned!

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’m at it again! I can’t seem to help but set up challenges for myself, when it comes to my writing, and the second draft of The Broken God Machine is no exception. I’ve set myself a very aggressive number for this one, for two reasons: first, TBGM is arguably the most complete first draft I’ve ever written; it came out of my brain in a state I’m really happy with, and even features solid foreshadowing and a little bit of symbolism right from the get-go. Second, the simple fact is that second drafts are much faster and easier than first drafts. You’re not trying to figure out what happens anymore, you’re just trying to figure out the best way to present it.

Sure, there’s more than just sentence cleanup involved — there’s a middle chapter of the book that I plan on excising in its entirety and replacing with something else, and there are chunks of description and dialog that need rethinking, not just rewording. That’s fine, though, because for much of the book I can crank through the words like crazy, cleaning and prettying and clarifying without having to engage in structural work.

Therefor, I’ve set my goal at 2,500 words a day. That would be an aggressive number even for many writers for whom their work is their full-time job. Considering that I’m rarely able to even start in on it until 9 PM or so, it’s even more difficult. Still, my first night of the challenge, last night, showed that it’s very doable; I wrote more than 3,800 words!

I’ll be posting regular status updates here, and of course tweeting and facebooking about it. Swing by and cheer me on!

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!

Good gentlemen, gentlewomen, and gentlecreatures who read this blog, I am pleased to alert you to the fact that in late December I decided it was time to make a concentrated push to get the first draft of The Children of the Sun finished up and out to my early-draft readers. Thus, I began the 1,747 words per day challenge on December 27th.

“What’s the 1,747 word challenge?” you ask? Why, it’s a challenge to myself to write at least 1,747 words every day from now until the end of January.

“Why 1,747 words?” you ask? Well, because when I started the challenge, I was at 87,136 words, and I figure the book is going to be about 150,000 words long (about the same size as Blood Hunt), and so I determined that 1,747 words a day would get me to 150,000 on January 31. If the book isn’t finished at that point, it will be very close! Also, “seventeen-forty-seven” just sounds nice when you say it out loud.

“How’s it going?” you ask? Swimmingly! So far I’ve written 16,750 words since the challenge started, which is an average of 1,861 words per day! I’ve only come in below 1,747 once, and that was on New Year’s Eve (where I still managed a thousand words before my wife and I began gorging ourselves on oysters and champagne). If you discount that day, I’m averaging more like 1,965!

“Why should I care?” you ask? Because the faster I finish the first draft, the faster I can get it out to my early readers — people who I trust to go through the book and tell me which parts of it are crap. The faster I get it to them, the faster they can get their feedback to me, and the faster I can start on the second draft, and … well, you get the idea. This whole process leads up to me releasing The Children of the Sun, and I would hope that we can all agree that the earlier I do that, the better!

So, stay tuned. There will be further updates on the 1,747 challenge. ALSO, I will be releasing more than 15,000 spoiler-free words from The Children of the Sun in early February. The story is a flashback called “Amun Sa and the Girl from the Desert” and tells Ashayt’s backstory. It’s integral to the plot of The Children of the Sun, but it also stands alone. I’m even having Karla Ortiz do an illustration for it! The cost to you, the reader, to download this story? ZERO DOLLARS! Who loves ya?

More soon!

Why look, there are buds on the trees. Spring is here, and with it I’ve brought some very exciting (I think) updates on my projects!

Blood Hunt

I’ve decided to go ahead and move forward with getting Blood Hunt ready for eBook and print formats. I’ve hired an editor, Lauren, who did the first editing pass on The Blood That Bonds way back in the day, and am working with Adrian again on a cover, which should be more complex than the cover for TBTB. I’m about to send the draft off to Lauren so she can start on her end of things, which should take 8-10 weeks. Meanwhile I’ll be incorporating her edits into BH as she sends them in. The result of all of this is that, while I don’t have anything close to an exact date for Blood Hunt yet, I’m pretty comfy saying it will be available as an eBook at LEAST on Amazon, B&N, the iBookStore and Smashwords sometime this summer! There’s a very good chance that I’ll actually be able to do a simultaneous print and ebook launch.

The eBook version of Blood Hunt will be priced at $2.99. The print book price isn’t determined yet. The Blood That Bonds eBook will remain free, but the print edition may come down a bit in price. I’m looking into ways I can shave off the cost.

The Children of the Sun

The Children of the Sun, or TCS for short, is the final chapter of Two’s adventures. Will it be a happy ending? I’m not exactly sure, yet. Two’s world, like the real world, has its share of sadness, misery and despair. Two’s pretty fiesty, though. I wouldn’t bet against her!

I’ve started on the first draft of TCS. Not much written yet, but it’s a start. I’m also working on its entries in the master time-line I keep for the II AM saga, which extends all the way back to about 5000 BC! When all of the books are out, I’ll probably publish it on this here website for people who are interested in it.

The Broken God Machine

I had meant to go from BH to the second draft of The Broken God Machine, but the truth of the matter is that the demand for Two and her adventures is so great right now that I don’t feel comfortable putting them off to work on another novel. So it’s in a holding pattern for the moment. When I finish the first draft of TCS and send it off to my trusted readers for their thoughts and comments, I will try to squeeze the second draft of TBGM into that time.

Short Stories

My Sci-Fi short story “Watchers”  — which Lauren also edited — has made it through three rounds of critique from the readers for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and is now short-listed, which means there’s a good chance they’ll publish it. Should hear about that in the next couple of months. I’m also working on a short-story about a serial killer set in the early months of 1918. More on that as it develops!

That’s about it for now. Stay tuned.

"Great job finishing your novel! Did you mean to spell your protagonist's name wrong in half of it?"

Behold: A Novel

You’ve finished it. Finally. After countless long nights fretting over your words, manipulating each sentence for maximum effect, and imbuing every paragraph with depth and symbolism, your journey is at last complete. Your novel is done. You set it aside (virtually, if you’ve been working on a word processor) and walk away, content with the knowledge that you’ve brought forth this thing into the world. Where once there was nothing, now there is something, and it’s there because you created it.

In the heady days that follow, you tell everyone you know that you finished your novel. You’re a proud parent, and you don’t even have to get up in the middle of the night or change messy diapers! It’s an amazing thing, really, and one about which many people dream. You want the world to know exactly how great it feels.

Time passes. The days come and go, and you begin to get the itch to take a second look, to bask in the glory of your novel and remember all the good times you had writing it. You yearn to once again be devastated by your dialog, pleased by your pacing, captivated by your characters … awed by your alliteration. Eventually you can’t wait any longer, and you settle in one evening and give it a read.

To your horror, you discover that the unthinkable has happened: while you weren’t looking, someone went and switched your perfect, beautiful baby with some kind of ugly, wart-riddled troglodyte. This isn’t yours! Can’t be. There’s no way you would have ended that sentence with a preposition. No chance you would have missed that obvious fragment. It is utterly inconceivable that you would have completely forgotten one of your characters mid-way through the book.

Yet that’s what you’re seeing now, and the grim realization begins to dawn on you: you’re not finished. You’re not even close. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty again. It’s time to redraft.

Reasons to Redraft

For many authors, redrafting holds neither the mystique nor the excitement that they found in the initial act of creation; it’s just simply not as fun. For others, it’s quite painful to admit to themselves and to others that their perfect baby was never really so perfect to begin with. Some writers go into a permanent state of denial and never touch their first drafts again. If that sounds like you, keep this in mind: few of these writers ever get published.

If you want to be a professional author, you should prepare to write multiple drafts on every project. It’s a necessary step in the process, and once you’ve done it a few times, you may come to enjoy it for its own sake. There are many very good reasons to do it, and here are my top three:

1. To clean up obvious structural errors, typos, misspellings, and the like.
2. To improve the clarity, readability, and flow of the text.
3. To excise things that don’t work, improve things that only kind-of work, and occasionally to add or remove entire sections in the service of making a better book, story, article, or other piece.

Microsoft Word and other text-editors have helped a lot with item number one. Oh, don’t get me wrong — any editor worth his or her salt will tell you that there are still plenty of typos and misspellings left to fix no matter have many drafts an author has done. But spelling and grammar syntax-highlighting, auto-correct features and the like have made it much easier for the author to catch a lot of mistakes as they’re made. Still, every redraft should be done with an eye toward fixing these kind of errors.

Numbers two and three are where it starts to get complicated. Text tweaking and improvement can involve everything from simply switching the order of a couple of words, to making minor tweaks in a sentence, to striking and rewriting entire paragraphs. The goal? Making a better book — not for you, but for the reader. Let’s face it, if you’re writing for you and you alone, then it doesn’t matter so much how ugly your baby is.

Text Revisions

Text revisions are often relatively mild. Sometimes a few sentences just need tightening up. Let’s take a look at some text from the first draft of my novel The Broken God Machine, with some anticipated edits marked in red:

There was no time to celebrate this victory. Pehr turned ready to help Josep, only to see the hunter take a slashing hit to his midsection from the Lagos’s metal blade. Josep screamed and stumbled, going to one knee, and Pehr began to run toward the combatants already knowing he was too late. The Lagos, roaring in triumph, raised the blade over his head to swing down, just as Pehr had done to its companion. The blow would surely kill Josep, and Pehr found himself screaming in rage. Not now. Not yet. Not before they saved Nani.

Note: The red text in this instance is used for illustrative purposes. I don’t usually go through and do this with my drafts. I prefer to just keep a copy of the first draft open on one side of my monitor, and re-type the second draft from scratch on the other.

As you can see, a huge chunk of the text is going to get some amount of adjustment. This doesn’t mean it’s all going away or even changing substantially. Here’s how the edit looks:

There was no time to celebrate this victory. Pehr turned to help Josep, only to see the Lagos warrior’s metal blade slash across the hunter’s midsection. Josep screamed and stumbled, falling to one knee. The creature roared in triumph, raising the blade over its head for the killing blow. Pehr found himself running forward, shouting, knowing he was too late. Not now! he thought. Not yet. Not before we save Nani!

These aren’t earth-shattering changes, here. I’ve just gone in and altered the text so it’s a bit shorter, and flows a bit better. This, along with the basic spelling/typo checking mentioned above, is what agents and editors mean when they say they want a manuscript to be “polished” before they receive it. Polish can mean the difference between an accepted manuscript and one that gets rejected, so it’s certainly worth spending your time on!

The Big Changes

When it comes to excising or altering big chunks of text, it’s a lot harder to provide an example within the scope of this blog! I can tell you that in the first draft of Blood Hunt, I was unhappy with the way the relationship between two key characters played out over the course of things. One of my primary goals for the second draft was “get these two people to behave the way I want them to” (it’s funny, sometimes, how little control we have over our characters, especially in early drafts).

I ended up cutting out almost a dozen scenes — more than five thousand words — and creating two entire chapters that never existed in the first draft, in order to achieve what I wanted. It was a time-consuming and at times difficult process, but the end result is definitely superior. Of course, all of that new text now needs its own second draft! Fortunately, most of the rest of the novel has already been through one round of polishing.

If your first draft is a road map, then big changes are like cutting holes out of it. Before you start in on them, you should spend some time considering what it is you’re hoping to accomplish with the redraft, and have a solid idea for your new route in your head. It’s not enough to just start writing and hope for the best (sometimes that’s not even enough for the first draft). Identify your problem areas, and then identify solutions to those problems. Figure out how you’re going to get where you’re going.

Embrace the Process

Redrafting has to happen. No professional author out there, not matter how talented, can consistently produce pieces of any length that don’t need to go through multiple drafts. This very article was redrafted several times, piece by piece, in the hopes of making it clearer and more concise.

The key to preventing the process from becoming a boring slog is to focus on appreciating what you’re doing. After all, part of the joy of writing is finding just the right way to say what you’re trying to say. There is as much craft involved in honing a sentence as there is in coming up with the sentence in the first place.

Think of it as your chance to build the six million-dollar baby. It’s still your creation, still your beautiful child, still the thing to which you gave birth. It’s just bigger, faster, smoother, stronger and better than what was there before.

We redraft because we must, but there’s no reason not to enjoy the process, and there’s no reason to be afraid of it either. Get in there, get your hands dirty, and polish your work. You’ll be glad you did.