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!

I think I’m going to try an experiment with this blog — I’m going to ask if you fine folks, my readers, have any particular questions for me. They can be about my writing process, or about the II AM Trilogy, or pretty much anything else you can think of. Ever have a question about one of the characters or events in Blood Hunt or TBTB? Ever wanted to know where I do my writing, or when I work, or how I come up with these zany ideas anyway? Now’s your chance!

Just visit my contact form, and ask. I’ll put together the MailBlog entry in a week or two, depending on how many questions come in! Hopefully I’ll get some interesting queries!

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.

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.

It's been there for a long time.

I’ve posted a new item in the Short Stories section. I don’t differentiate between fiction and non-fiction on that page, which mostly isn’t a problem because I’ve never written a non-fiction short story until now. 200 Willoughby Avenue, however, is entirely true, and it poured out of me the other night as I was thinking about the passage of time, and the way we view ourselves.

I don’t know if it’s any good, this one — I’m better at werewolves and far-future dystopia than I am at introspection — but I’m going to go ahead and post it anyway. I’m curious what people will think of it, especially those who’ve never stood there, and looked around, and thought that they knew who it was they were.

Hat tip to Brooklyn Before Now for the image.

Admit it: the one on the right looks way more interesting!

Something which you may have heard about, and which most authors fall victim to at some point in their writing, is the “Mary Sue” effect. This is a term used to describe when an author inserts a character into their work that they wish they could be. Usually it’s an idealized, impossibly attractive person who also happens to be brilliant and talented. This character typically lacks significant flaws, and while they may appeal to the author (for whom they are often acting as a surrogate), they’re rarely very compelling to readers.

I have by no means moved beyond this problem, though I’ve gotten better at identifying when I’m moving in that direction and working my way out of it. More and more I find myself putting together notes on my characters before I ever begin writing, in the hopes of avoiding the situation in the first place. One of the things I try to do with characters, especially major ones, is identify a trait or two that they possess that might not be considered desirable by most people.

As an example of what not to do, let’s take John Storm in my novella Voices. This is one of my oldest characters, originally created before my teens, and even in his present incarnation he suffers rather heavily from Mary Sue syndrome. He’s tall, fit and handsome, confident and caring, and frankly he seems to have his shit together far more than many twenty-five year-olds living in New York. Not super realistic to begin with … and this is a guy who supposedly spent the last decade or so thinking he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and convinced he was crazy!

John does have a few flaws — overconfidence and a tendency to act without thinking among them — but he’s a bit too perfect for his own good. I don’t think this kills his character (reaction to Voices has overall been quite favorable), but of the four main characters in the book, it makes him by far the least compelling. Brian, Kevin, and particularly Jen are all far more interesting, in part because they have more flaws which they need to work to overcome.

In the real world, we’re all flawed, and readers will relate even on a subconscious level to a character who has to deal with this fact. In Voices, Jen is really struggling. At the start of the story, she’s on the far opposite spectrum of John: so flawed that she may initially seem abrasive to the reader. She’s a homeless alcoholic with a bad attitude who pushes hard against John’s attempts to help her. Even as her character evolves, the rough edges remain; Jen will always be stubborn, judgmental and quick to anger. It will always be an effort for her to let people in and let them get close. These traits, and the reasons for them, make her a more compelling character than John. As a side benefit, they also allow for some fun dialog, and some interesting plot points. Win-win!

Next time you’re coming up with characters for a story, try this exercise: write down their name on a sheet of paper (or a text editor), and then start listing words you think people would use to describe that person. If the descriptive list is coming up more than 80% positive, consider specifically adding some character flaws, physical flaws, or both. It may hurt a little to do it, but your characters and your writing will be better for it.

Seek out smart, thoughtful readers who will take notes on your work.

Believe it or not, one of the most difficult aspects of writing a book is getting honest feedback on your early drafts. Finding readers can be a difficult task in the first place, and even if you’re lucky enough to have achieved a level of popularity which simplifies that aspect, you’re still faced with the daunting task of weeding out the ones who can give you the criticism and critique that is so vital to redrafting (a process which I covered in my last blog entry). When you find someone who can give that kind of feedback — what I call a trusted reader — it’s like striking gold.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to cultivate a small but incredibly valuable group of trusted readers who I know will deliver honest, specific, unbiased feedback on early drafts of my work. This group includes a few old friends, a professional editor whose services I periodically employ, a select few internet friends, and my brilliant wife (who pulls no punches!). I am highly appreciative of all of these folks, and I place an extraordinary amount of value on my relationships with them. Quite simply: without their input, my work would suck.

When trusted readers give feedback, it’s the type of response that delves well beyond “I loved it” or “I hated it” (or even worse: dead silence). The Blood That Bonds has earned enough fans at this point that I could quickly put together a group of readers for subsequent projects, but not all of them would be able to provide the feedback I need. Make no mistake: I’m very glad that they’re out there! I love hearing from people who enjoy my work, and the rush of receiving an “I loved your book!” email has yet to wear off. I’m not sure it’s ever going to.

I’m just not always looking for that rush. In particular, when I’ve finished a first or even second draft, what I’m looking for is criticism. Hard, heavy criticism. Criticism that hurts, that makes me want to get defensive and start justifying my choices. Criticism that leaves me thinking, “Jesus … I guess I shouldn’t quit my day job just yet.” Not every reader is able to give that kind of criticism. A lot of readers don’t want to give that kind of criticism; they just want to enjoy the story!

The thing is: nothing gets better without criticism. This is why identifying and appreciating trusted readers is so vital to any author’s work. I’m not going to pretend that The Blood That Bonds is a work of high literary art, but it’s a hell of a lot better in its finished version than it was as a first draft. My friends Caryn and Josh pointed out glaring issues with that draft which required major rewrites in the second draft. My editor Lauren went over draft two with a critical eye, pointing out not only myriad typos and grammar errors, but also giving her input on plot, pacing, and characterization. These opinions were all invaluable.

I’m currently in the middle of a feedback round on two different books: The Broken God Machine (first draft) and Blood Hunt (second draft). In the case of the former, I’ve sent it out only to the specific few people mentioned above. In the case of the latter, I’m trying something new: in addition to sending it to my trusted readers, I held a contest and picked ten readers who said they wanted to read it and fill out a brief questionnaire once done. I’ve already received five responses, and all five have provided useful information! I may well consider using some or all of them as trusted readers on future  projects. If you have existing fans, and aren’t terrified that they’ll leak your manuscript, I recommend giving something like this a shot.

Of course I can’t (and won’t) change every aspect of a book to suit the whims of everyone who comments on it. In the end, it’s my story, and certain plot details and character actions are set in stone. What I will do though is seriously consider everything they have to say, especially if more than one or two of the readers identify the same specific problem. Yes, it’s my book, but if some aspect of it’s not working for people, then that part probably needs to be either rethought, or rewritten to better accomplish whatever the goal was. This is the kind of invaluable information that can help you transform a rough first draft into a solid second draft, or take that second draft and build a polished manuscript that’s ready to be submitted to agents, editors, or publishers.

If you’re a writer, you need trusted readers. Without them, you’re going to have a very difficult time getting any kind of objective opinion on your drafts, and without those opinions, your work will never be as good as it could be. If you’re a reader, don’t be afraid to engage an author on a level beyond “I really enjoyed your book” … sending a thoughtful email with real critique in it might just land you the chance for an early look at new work. You’d be surprised how many talented authors, even ones who’ve been published before, are still actively looking for quality readers.