It’s been more than eight months since I gave up my status  as wage-slave – i.e., I retired. Now Spring is nearly here and with the change of season it seems a good time to talk about what I’ve been doing – aside from cooking, trying to get better at golf, and bits of travel, that is. The constant thing that has been part of virtually every day since last July, is writing. Herewith some of my activities, experiences, and thoughts on all that.

This way? Or that?

Before retirement I did my writing weekends and some evenings, rarely more than 1-2 hours at a time. For all that I think I got a lot done. From 2010 to 2020 I published four books: The Temple of Beauty (short stories collection,  2016);  Fractured Symmetry (Blair and Terendurr novellas, 2017); Treyavir (fantasy, 2018); and The Lady of Dungeness (near-future SF, 2020.) Already there  was a lot more to this than just letting thoughts flow from brain to keyboard, like copyediting, e-book production, and getting covers. After all that, there’s marketing, something that has never excited me all that much. (I’ll build marketing software, but I am not the person you want doing actual marketing.) Anyway I’d say pre-retirement, of all my “writing” time 75% was spent on writing and 25% on everything else.

And now? Before I throw out details, let me share my goal: To reach more people. I think I have entertaining, and sometimes helpful, things to say and I want more people to read them. In a way this isn’t totally different from my working life – after all the goal of a software company is to make things that more and more people need and want to use. It is a bit different in that writing isn’t – or shouldn’t be – merely a product, it has to be a personal creation. Otherwise, we should just let AI write all our books.

How to pursue that goal? There’s lots of indie writers who reach tens if not hundreds of thousands of readers, by publishing and marketing their own stuff. That is absolutely great and there’s many cool authors in this category.  But, my own experiences here have shown, that’s not me. I don’t have the interest in all the promotion activities you have to do. Also, authors here who are successful often have a 1-2 book a year pace; many have catalogs of 20 or more books, which drives their credibility and helps their marketing. Not that I write particularly slow, but just having a big catalog for the sake of marketing doesn’t appeal to me.

And while indie writers often have help and support – beta readers, writing groups, maybe editors – I feel I want a stronger collaboration. So the route I’m pursuing is so-called traditional publishing. Here, your publisher is your partner, they help with edits, marketing, even concept. You still have to do a lot, but this is a formal commitment. Ideally, you’re supported in this by an agent, who offers guidance and feedback on all the early stuff and ultimately pitches your book to publishers.

So, my plan is to get an agent and/or work direct with a publisher. So, I’m sure its a matter of just sending some e-mails and et voila! Agent! Right? Right … ?

One of the Querying Crowd

Turns out there’s a pretty big number of people trying to do the same thing. Example: The app many agents use for accepting queries from authors shows the number of submissions the agent receives. Most are receiving 150 queries a month. That’s a 150 different authors trying to get representation for their how-to book on barrel-making, or their family saga, or their cozy mystery, or their urban-fantasy-romance … or their SF epic. Multiply that by the close to 1,000 agents in the USA and that’s a lot of authors looking for agents – even when you factor in that most of us send the same query to multiple agents at once.

I tried reaching out to 6-7 agents last year with no luck. Briefly, this involves three things:

• A sample of your book, typically up to the first three chapters.
• A synopsis of the book, a 1,000 word or so summary of the characters and the plot.
• A query letter, usually 800 words or less, that makes the case why the agent should take on your book.

The query letter is far and away the most important part – you need it to hook the agent so they read the rest of your materials and then, hopefully, ask to see more of the work. There’s tons of guidance on the web on how to make an effective query, though much of it is contradictory. For example, there’s no set consensus on the acceptable length of such a letter. One camp holds that longer than 400 words is automatic reject; another says longer is fine, so long as the content is high quality. Click here if you’re interested in an example of a successful, real-world query letter.

The longer I thought about this the clearer it became I needed professional help. (Yes, yes, I know you can’t want to be a writer and not need professional help, ha, ha.) There’s actually quite a large market for this, ranging from people who will critique your query letter for $50, to online get-an-agent training for $500 and up, to a whole host of other, pricier things.

My choice was to engage a coach. I won’t identify them, yet – hopefully when I do close an agent, I can share with everyone a testimonial on that. I’m super-happy with this choice. My coach is a former agent, with many active industry contacts. They don’t use those directly on my behalf, but the perspective that comes from that is invaluable. I have learned from them an immense amount about what makes great books different from ok books, what agents and the industry want, and how to go about addressing my goals in a methodical way. My coach read my book – Bandal The Only – and helped me with important improvements. They wrote my query letter and reviewed my synopsis. And – incredibly valuable – they provided me a list of those nearly 1,000 agents, all categorized and with background and contact info. Compiling that bit alone would have taken me a year, assuming I could even ferret-out all that stuff on my own.

Armed with all this, I’ve been querying since November. I hope it goes without saying, this is not an automatic thing – there are those 100’s of other authors competing with me for each agent; on top of that, there’s the subjective aspect of needing to find someone who likes my story.

Stone by Stone

While the master plan to get representation for the current book is grinding away, how do I spend my time? By writing a new book. If you’re a writer, you have to write. Back in January I briefly toyed with updating and/or revising the current book, but it didn’t take a lot of thinking to conclude I had been staring at that book too long. Better to go on to something new – I can always come back to Bandal in the future. The new work is currently titled Stone By Stone.

Not only did I want to start a new story, I wanted to try new ways of writing. You can’t be doing the writing thing for very long before you hear about the plotters vs. pantsers thing – the theme of this post’s title image. Plotters plan out their whole story in outline form before doing any writing. “Pantsers” fly by the seat of their authorial pants – while they have ideas about the story, mostly they just start writing. All my work till this year has been pantser-esque. My new book idea was for an SF-Thriller, set in the Civspace universe of Blair and Terendurr. Thrillers, even more than mysteries, require tight plotting – the goal is to “thrill” the reader with a build of action and suspense that in the end resolves in an unexpected but still satisfying way. The Andromeda Strain is a venerable SF-Thriller; a more recent example is Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. I decided to go the plotter route with this effort. It was about 20 January when I first began.

I am really liking how this has worked, so far. I started with background text on the world. Like most SF & Fantasy readers, I expect world building, so as an author I have to give that some priority. I don’t need every detail spelled out but what there is has to make sense, and can’t be simply arbitrary. (“On planet X, the aliens there always set fire to something before breakfast.” “Why is that?” “They just do!”) For me, starting this way allowed me to ask, then answer, the “what if” questions that SF works always have. In the case of my story that root question is:

What if a race of commerce- and utilitarian-minded aliens started a new colony planet and explicitly kept themselves isolated for 500 years?

That question prompts a great many second-order questions: How does their economy work? Who provides labor? What do they work on? What do they value? And so on.

Then it was on to characters. This was a lot less reasoning and more just imagining. Aside from the obvious need for backstory and personality, an important thing I worked on here is what are the abilities and weaknesses of the main characters? Fictional characters almost always have a “super power” – like Sherlock Holmes’ deductive reasoning – but also a weakness that leads to conflict and challenge in the story – to cite Holmes again, this would be his misanthropy, his ego, and his short attention span.

I really only started the plot – the incidents and the action – after a good three weeks on background. Something I had decided early on was the structure of the book. There’s 3 stories, all showing the main character Gerald Francis Finn (“Finn”):

1. Finn as a child and his life with father Charlie – a master mason – and mother Mary, an accountant. It is Charlie’s craft that led to the title, Stone by Stone.
2. Finn from age 11 to 17, at an elite private school, supported by the income of his step-father.
3. Finn as a “new adult”, age 17 to 20, working as a martial arts instructor for Akeshia House – a kind of combination business consultancy/mafia protection racket. Akeshia and other houses are accepted players in the unfettered economy of the planet Caron.

The chapters of the book go back and forth between these three arcs, and through them we progressively learn about the world and about Finn’s early life, as the main action of arc 3 unfolds. This is a fun challenge, devising occurrences that are not only interesting, but that reinforce the themes of the other arcs. Anyway, it took about a week, but I set down in spreadsheet form what I wanted to have happen in each of 17 chapters, spread across the 3 arcs.

Ok, nearly done here. I started creating draft text mid-February, and so far have reached the 31,000 word mark – I expect the final length to be around 85,000. And I have a few times gone back and refined the outline – haven’t really changed or dropped anything, but have filled in details on many whys and hows. So now I just have to keep repeating that till I get to the end.

I’ll leave you with a few lines of actual writing. Akeshia House, like many classic gangster organizations, affects a style of dress, in their case of green and black. Finn’s mentor, Will Machado, takes Finn to a tailor who fits Finn with garments suitable to his position. The tailor, a Phair named Fuscule (bonus props to anyone who recognizes that name!) has these parting words for Finn:

Out of Finn’s earshot, Machado and the Phair seemed to haggle, then come to terms. The two Terrans departed with four everyday ensembles for Finn, and the promise of two formal suits.

Fuscule saw them to the door, saying, “A pleasure fitting you, young Finn – I daresay you look reborn. A word of caution though.”

“And that is?” Finn asked.

“Why, it is that you bear in mind that while my fabrics are proof against ordinary stains, notably blood, they offer nothing against stabs and slashes. I do so hate it when one of my works comes back for mending of such – even more so when it never comes back at all. And so, fare you well!”

Till next time …