Ripples in Speculative Fiction

Well, I missed April’s blog post. The first Saturday since I dropped to once a month updates, and I missed it—oh, well. I’m going to blame it on playing Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4. I actually got it for Christmas but delayed playing it until I was between writing projects. I thought it would be 10-15 hours of distraction—ha! I should’ve read the reviews more closely. Awesome game though, I’d highly recommend to any gamer that likes sci-fi.

I finished the alternate history steampunk novel, query letter, and synopsis back in March; and I’ve sorted through agents and have started querying—so that’s one 2018 goal done. And with the now regular addition of listening to audio books while working out (I know I previously said they weren’t for me, but they’re just so dang efficient), I’m up to 3 fiction books read and 6 nonfiction books. I’ll have to pick up the pace on the fiction books. I’m currently listening to one I don’t particularly care for, but I’m a little more than halfway and the next book up is one I’m really looking forward to so I’m eager to get through the less than good book.

I’ve begun research on a new novel series. I’m excited about the setting and the central idea, but I need to spend some time to get the setting right. Once the setting has gelled in my head, then I’ll start populating it with conflict and characters and then start drafting. I miss drafting, the thrill of discovering a story. I haven’t the slightest idea when I’ll start drafting again, but I hope it’s soon. I’d like to have most of the novel done before the end of the year. I hope to have a better estimate to when I can start drafting next time, until then!

Prepping the alternate-history steampunk novel for novel submission is done. Like many of my projects, it wrapped up unexpectedly and with much relief. I’m heartened by the fact that every time I read it, that I still like it and think it’s good. A lot of times after the fifth plus read through, I get so sick of a novel it starts to make my head hurt. This novel wasn’t like that. I got tired of it at times for sure, but I still always really liked it. So, I have some hopes.

Now I need to comb through the agent listings to find an agent that will be a good fit for both the book and myself. This does not look to be an enjoyable task, mainly since it’s tedious, boring, mind-numbing work that takes away from actual writing. There are a lot of factors to consider before approaching an agent, and good-ole-fashioned excel seems to be about the only way to get it all down to a manageable amount of data to sort through and rank-order. A quick five-minute search on one website that lists agents listed about 200 agents that might possibly fit the broad parameters I put in to match my book. That’s a lot to get through and only one website.

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I also decided at the start of the year, that I’d drop my already sparse blogging schedule from first and third Saturday a month to just the first Saturday. I don’t have as much time as I’d like to dedicate to writing (such that I don’t think I’ve hit the 10 hour a week target once this year so far) and writing a blog post sucks down time much better spent elsewhere. Once a month is as low as I’ll go, since I do like posting at least that much for myself for posterity and goal tracking reasons.

Now all I need to do is decide what the next project is ….

I think I’m done with the editing phase of the alternate history steampunk novel. Now it’s time to let it sit while I wrap up the submission package materials. I have the agent query done, and now I’m wrestling with the synopsis.

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I had two versions of the synopsis laying around from several years ago for a writers swap (I ultimately did not enter) and ooh boy are they both terrible. The first was six pages long, the second was four. Guidelines say no more than two pages double spaced. Two pages! Madness!

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So now my mornings are spent ruthlessly cutting the synopsis while trying to make it all coherent and engaging. I hope to have that wrapped in the next week, then I’ll focus outlining book 2. Then one more read through for a coherency check and polish and off to agents! Not really looking forward to that part–never much fun to receive rejection after rejection after rejection, but it’s the game all writers have to play. I’m hoping to start submitting by mid-March.

After that … I’m not sure. Either I’m going to start a whole new series, or finish up Sunken City Capers with Book 5. I’m leaning toward wrapping Sunken City Capers up, the marketing push in January has helped the series and there are encouraging signs (and I still have much more marketing mojo to unleash). I also think the time away from the Sunken City Capers series has done me well, and now I kinda want to check in with them to see what they’ve been up to.

I think I’m nearing that point on a project where you start to get sick of it; where another editing pass fills you with dread. I’ve dusted off my alternate-history steampunk novel and started editing some of the character arcs of the two main protagonists. Of course, I only intended to edit one of them, but, naturally, in the course of doing that I had a revelation about the other main character and here I am. I can’t seem to stop making work for myself.

I’m hoping to be done with those edits by the end of the month. I’ve written a draft of an agent query letter and sent it out to get some feedback from fellow writers. It’s annoying how one page can fill you with such angst. Is this novel middle grade, young adult, too long, too short?

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You’d think this would be clear cut, and I hope to God it is to some agent out there, but it’s not to me. I can’t seem to write cleanly in one genre. Which makes for great reading (in my opinion) but makes for terrible marketing and selling. Anyhoo, I need to settle on the query letter and then write the synopsis (oh, joy). I think I’ve settled on trying to take this novel the traditional route and see what comes of it.

I also think I’m going to follow the advice and not write book 2 in that series until it sells to a publisher. I really hate losing work, or being inefficient. Fortunately, I’m a writer, new ideas for novels are easy. Picking which one to write is hard. And so is staying in genre. In fact, the one I think I want to write is yet another one that doesn’t fit neatly into a genre that I know of—so good job brain. It’s like you aren’t listening to me at all.

Happy New Year!

The main thing I learned from 2017 was that marketing is pretty dang important. If you build it, they will not come. How could they, unless they knew it was there? Pretty obvious in retrospect. But alas, one of the goals of rapid releasing novels is getting Amazon algorithms to work in your favor (which is a kind of marketing). It didn’t work in my favor. In short, I’m losing money on this series. I hoped releasing book 4 would juice sales. It didn’t.

My analysis of what went wrong are three areas: book 1 characterizations weren’t as strong as they needed to be, I didn’t pay enough attention to also-boughts,  and I misbranded the cover. 1) Isa’s character in book 1 is a little too cocky/strong; I didn’t include enough pet-the-dog moments to make her more sympathetic. She’s a well rounded character, which emerges in later books, but no so much in book 1. I got a lot of comments that people liked the book but not Isa. 2)  When I released the books I paid a lot of attention to gaining early reviews, but not to the also-boughts. The also-boughts are how Amazon knows how to sell your books. So if your also-boughts are all over the place (cookbooks, comics, literary fiction) Amazon doesn’t know what to do with that to push your books. This is opposed to if your book appears in all science fiction heist books, then you stand a better chance to sell books to that audience, right? Whoops. I thought that would sort itself out; I was wrong again. 3) I love the covers, but they’re too reminiscent of Paranormal Romance genre, which was by design (Sunken City Capers has a lot in common with the core tropes of Paranormal Romance so I intentionally went after that). I thought I could get crossover appeal; I think I got neither. Those that like science fiction saw the cover and said that’s paranormal romance, and those that like paranormal romance saw the cover and said that’s science fiction and I missed the bulk of both crowds. This is impossible to really assess without getting new covers, but I’m already losing money and purchasing four new covers is a painful choice.

There are two direct actions that came out of this. First, marketing is going to be the central theme of 2018. Second, Sunken City Capers Book 5 will be the last book in that series. Book 4 ended on a huge cliffhanger, so I’m going to wrap that up (my OCD nature doesn’t let me leave threads hanging unresolved). I had always hoped to keep writing adventures for this band of mischievous ne’er-do-wells for the foreseeable future, but alas, the market doesn’t seem to support that at this time. This leads to another 2018 target: start writing in a new series.

The more sticks you have in a fire, the more likely one is to catch. So I’m switching gears in 2018 to an alternate history steampunk novel series I’ve had on the backburner while I worked on Sunken City Capers. My plan is to get a submission package together and start querying agents and publishers. I’m not sure I want to go that route yet, but I figure it’s a good exercise at any rate.

Another target I have for 2018 is to be more disciplined than I was in 2017. 2017 was intentionally a slower year for me to help me recover from 2016. It’s time to speed things up again (using both lessons learned from 2016 and 2017; not too fast, but not too slow either). My target is to spend at least 10 hours on writing a week. Now I just need to find a good way to track that.

2018 Targets:
1) Learn and apply marketing
2) Spend at least 10 hours a week on writing (including drafting, editing, and marketing)
3) Polish, write supporting material, Book 1 in alternate history steampunk series and start submitting it
4) Outline Book 2 in alternate history steampunk series
5) Write 50% of Book 2 in alternate history steampunk series**
6) Read 10 fiction books
7) Read 10 non-fiction books

**I may or may not do this. Conventional wisdom says not to write book 2 while submitting book 1 in case of changes.

It’s December already (made clear when my wife and I panicked shopped this past week on Amazon for Christmas–came out of nowhere!) and so that means looking back at the 2017 writing goals and assessing how well I met those targets. The goals for 2017 were:

1. Finish and publish Sunken City Capers Book 4
2. Read 10 fiction books
3. Read 10 nonfiction books.

All targets hit! Which is good, since 2017 was deliberately supposed to be a nice and easy year after the horror of 2016. I finished and published The Brummie Con: Sunken City Capers Book 4 in October (whew). That book was a lot harder to write than I thought it would be, so I’m quite pleased it’s done. I have some theories as to why it was such a pain, but I’ll let those thoughts stew some more before sharing.

To date, I’ve read 17 fiction books! I’m ridiculously excited about this. I love reading! Love. It. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to finish an 18th before the new year. This year also included my first audio book listened to–not really my thing. It was good for when I was painting my office (boring, tedious work) but after that I had to listen to it in the car and I learned I really prefer music and to let my thoughts drift on my drives. What would’ve really made it better was if the ebook came free with the audio so I could read it at night (audio books are expensive!). I read a whole lot faster than a narrator can, and the slow pace drove me a little nuts (I did train my brain to listen to it at 1.5x speed, but that was the fastest I could go and still process it). My personal favorites for the year were Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and The Green Mile by Stephen King, both were awesome (for different reasons), but I recommend either to anybody that will listen.

I read 11 nonfiction books that ranged a whole gamut from writing, to parenting, to finance, to Christian theology. My favorites for the year were Creating Character Arcs by K. M. Weiland, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, and Heaven by Randy Alcorn (a bit repetitive, but a really, really worthwhile read for Christians).

So 2017 targets hit! It was a good, peaceful year compared to 2016, for which I’m grateful. Next time I’ll post a joint entry of 2017 lessons learned and 2018 targets.

Onward!

The Brummie Con: Sunken City Capers Book 4 is released!

Bosses are dead. Her father kidnapped. And no one has a clue why.

Isa, Puo, and Winn rush back to her father’s estate for answers, but only finds guns, assassins, and relentless pursuit. Forced into a desperate escape, Isa must retreat further into her past to stay alive.

Dejected and back in the miserable gutters she started from, Isa starts to piece together the disparate events of the past several months. Unfortunately, the trail leads back to England, the site of the most daring underwater heist in history and a buzzing hive of pissed of Brits clamoring for the thieves throats.

Confused and on the run for their lives, Isa must unravel the unthinkable: Cleaners declaring open war. More than just their own lives depend on it.

The Brummie Con: Sunken City Capers Book 4 will be released Tuesday October 24, 2017. The cover and blurb are below!

Bosses are dead. Her father kidnapped. And no one has a clue why.

Isa, Puo, and Winn rush back to her father’s estate for answers, but only finds guns, assassins, and relentless pursuit. Forced into a desperate escape, Isa must retreat further into her past to stay alive.

Dejected and back in the miserable gutters she started from, Isa starts to piece together the disparate events of the past several months. Unfortunately, the trail leads back to England, the site of the most daring underwater heist in history and a buzzing hive of pissed of Brits clamoring for the thieves throats.

Confused and on the run for their lives, Isa must unravel the unthinkable: Cleaners declaring open war. More than just their own lives depend on it.

The editing is over. Thank goodness! Now comes all that other stuff, like laying out the paperback, creating the ebook, writing the adcopy (!), etc. I don’t particularly enjoy writing adcopy–actually it makes me downright grumpy. Grumpy enough that my wife notices. I think it’s the fact that it’s generally less than 200 words but can take a week to get right. It just feels like progress is sooo slow.

But I have picked a release date: October 24th, 2017! I picked this date based on my time estimates for getting everything done, but when I looked October 24, 2016 is the day I began writing The Brummie Con, so releasing it exactly one year later has a nice sense of balance to it (despite my hope that I would put it out in four months [ha!]). Ah, well. I can’t wait to be done with this one. Even though it took longer to write than I hoped and had a number of setbacks, I think it’s pretty awesome.

Next time I’ll release the cover and blurb! October 24 can’t come fast enough!

The end is in sight. The real end. The finally done end.

I finished reading Sunken City Capers 1-3, and I’m about 2/3rds through the final read through of book 4. Once I finish the read through, I’ll have to go back through and wrap up any notes and then … done. Well, at least with the whole writing phase. Then I have to shift into the publishing phase. But that, at least, is more easy to schedule rather than the nebulous writing/editing phase.

I’ve circled a date on my calendar for publication, and I’ve started to plan around that date, but I’m not ready to publicly commit to it yet. Assuming there’s no hiccups in the final read through and edits, then I plan etching that date in and starting up the publishing gears. Hopefully, I’ll have more concrete news next time!