Back in March I wrote about my approach and progress on writing a new novel, Stone By Stone. On the last Saturday In June, I finished the first draft. Accompanied by glasses of wine, I read the concluding chapter to Kim and, for about 24 hours, I felt a sense of mild elation, a sort of I kicked ass on that! feeling. But it didn’t take long for the long list of everything ahead to start weighing, and you wonder, whose ass exactly got kicked?

An actual milestone

Ok, it’s not that bad. First of all, while estimates vary, it’s clear that no more than 1-3% of people who start a novel actually finish it. Getting to the end of a book is an accomplishment. Here’s some stats on the 1st draft effort, starting with the length of the in-progress draft over time:

Having generated this graph just now I’m fairly surprised how straight the line is; in my mind progress was way more bursty. The total is 95,000 words. My expectation at the start was 85,000, but I’m not going to worry about 10K extra, at least not now. A logistical thing I’m pleased at is how few adverbs and awkward repeats there are in the text, much lower than the average for published works. Since I didn’t do any copy editing yet in the draft, I guess I must be getting better at not introducing those things in the first place.

Something that bears reflection is pantster vs. plotter. For this project I took the plotter approach – working out character sheets, worldbuilding master-book and action outline first, actual writing second. Looking back, while the main plot elements all were kept, there was a ton of change and refinement along the way; for example the main action at the end has not just one, but two types of peril! I recorded all these changes in my outline document and it looks like about every 3 weeks I had enough of a change to warrant a notation. A big general change from the starting conception was having fewer bad guys. Initially I had a *lot* of evil people but, as I tried to convey that it quickly became unworkable – a world where virtually *everyone* is a Draco Malfoy is just not credible. I turned most of those folks into red herrings – they do suspicious seeming stuff, but in the end it’s mostly explainable or just petty – kind of like life.

What Now?

I’m still sending my previous Civspace book, Bandal The Only, to agents, and I don’t want to query another book until I’ve exhausted possibilities on that. That means I have time to refine and improve Stone By Stone. The new book is set in my Civspace universe, introduced in Fractured Symmetry. One possible path is, if Bandal doesn’t get an agent, is to query Stone By Stone and if it hits, follow-up with Bandal.

So I have time to make Stone By Stone as good as possible. My first step is sending out the call for beta-readers. In fact, here’s the blurb:

Five hundred years ago, the planet CARON was colonized by the KERET, a utility-minded species, who sought to escape what they felt were burdensome laws and regulations. To realize their vision, the Keret first brought a population of PHAIR to Caron as a labor force; three hundred years later they were joined by Humans. All advanced weapons are banned, save for those wielded by the robotic SENTRIES, AI robots programmed to defend the Keret and to control the population.

After five centuries Caron has become a competitive and ruthless society. Key players in the economy are the HOUSES – business consultancies with expertise in cybernetics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, manufacturing and more. But these houses complement their skills with teams of enforcers who defend house interests or intimidate rivals.

It is at this time GERALD FRANCIS FINN (“Finn) is born, the son of a master mason. STONE BY STONE is Finn’s story: His childhood watching the work of his father, adolescence where he mixes with the elite of Caron; and finally, as a fighting instructor for AKESHIA HOUSE, where he will face mystery and deceit, loyalty and tragedy, and in the end a plot to seize ultimate power over the world of Caron.

The book is SF, but with lots of thriller elements, and a good deal of fight scenes. If you are interested in beta-reading, send email to author@wild-puma.com.

Another thing I am going to research is partnering with a developmental editor. Where line-editing focuses on syntax, punctuation and so on, and copy-editing on smooth flowing prose, paragraph to paragraph, a developmental editor looks at the book’s themes, characters, setting and plot, providing feedback on what works and what doesn’t, on what should be intensified or what should be dropped, and generally on how to make your story as engaging and affecting as possible. It’s obvious how valuable this can be – if  nothing else, having spent 6 months knee-deep in this book, I have lost a lot of objectivity about it.

Finding the right editor will be a ton of work. I already have a list of 40+ freelancers to look at, they all have varying levels of experience, different processes, and different perspective on working with authors. And of course, this isn’t a free service; cost will be a consideration.

There it is. I’ll leave you with a quote from Stone By Stone, where master mason Charlie Finn and his partner Al Cassini are deciding whether or not to take on a big project:

Al wasn’t sold on the idea, but in the end his desire for the job won him over. Before long they had their land, a square kilometer about fifty klicks from Caron City center. The Keret offered a contract; it provided minimal upfront money and pushed most of the risk on the two Terrans.

Looking at the list of conditions and deliverables, Al remarked, “This is it, then. Seeing it all, I don’t know …”

“What?” Charlie said. “I heard somewhere, ‘With bravery, all things are possible.’ I’m going to sign this, sure as eggs.” He pressed his thumb against the contract tablet.

“You in?” he asked.

“Damn you, Charlie Finn – at least I won’t go broke alone.”

Al stamped his thumb, and that was that.

Till next time …

It’s a goal of mine to learn about the work and business of writing. So far this year I’ve taken a few steps in that direction. One was attending BOSKONE 2024, where I  was able to hear a bit about the state of SF and Fantasy today, as well as attend a number of writing-oriented panel sessions. Another step was taking the Fiction Forge: Write a Novel in 45 days course from Autocrit. While I didn’t finish a book in 45 days, I did create a good outline and some starting chapters. (BTW I am now at the 70,000 word mark in that book.)

Today I want to talk about my latest step on this path, attending the Pittsburgh Writing Workshop and giving my first pitch session.

First off, this was a great workshop. The sessions were very different from BOSKONE, in that they were all hosted by agents or editors, and were all aimed at specific writing topics. A convention like BOSKONE of course has to have content for fans primarily, and writers secondarily. I attended six sessions and I got some value from every last one. Some highlights:

Sinfully Simple Synopsis, by Marlo Berliner. In this context a synopsis is a *short* summary (1,000 words or less) of the characters and events in your book. This is becoming the most important thing in attracting an agent. Query letters are even shorter and there’s so much internet info about how to make a good one their average quality is going up. But with your synopsis there’s no hiding – it has to tell a story that is intriguing to the agent. Lots of great advice here, the standout one was this: A good synopsis does not just recount the things that happen in sequence, it states that B happens because of A, and C because of B and so on. This lets the agent assess the credibility of the story and whether readers will engage with it.

The Pro Ten: Techniques to Take Your Novel from OK to “Oh Wow!”, by Lorin Oberweger. The presenter here, Lorin, was fantastic – her decades of experience were evident in everything she said. Just one of the ten techniques was “Go Deep on POV”. What’s that mean? Writers, myself included, have a tendency to adopt a “reportorial” style in our writing – what we write is like describing what is seen at a play. Sometimes that’s a good choice – noir in particular can really work using a “just the facts”, gritty style of describing action. But the trap here is this detached style risks losing the reader, the descriptions are too distant. “Go Deep on POV” means put yourself in the literal shoes of your protagonist and ask: What are they feeling? Wanting? Even, smelling? For example, if your character encounters a formidable looking dog, don’t write something like:

The dog’s shaggy coat couldn’t hide the powerful muscles in its neck and jaws.

Instead try:

Tom couldn’t help but imagine the dog’s jaws clamping onto his forearm and the powerful neck trying to tear Tom’s arm from his body.

Yes, it’s florid and melodramatic – but sometimes that’s what you need.

Crafting Satisfying Endings with the Story Endings Matrix, by Jes Trudel. I guess I never thought about it, but there are really only five possible endings to any story. The point of this talk was, understand those five types, then tips on how to make sure you use them properly. What drives the types are the story goals – in a heist book, the goal is to steal the boodle – and the story outcome – how did things turn out? In many heist books, the goal is not achieved – even though there was a plan with split-second timing, a fluke event happens and the boodle falls overboard, or whatever – but that turns out to be a good thing – like maybe we find the boodle wasn’t what we thought and getting it would have been disastrous. This kind of ending is called the Sweet Surprise. Other possibilities: The gang does steal the boodle, but then they fall out and their friendship is broken – that’s the Tragic Turnabout; The gang loses the boodle, and someone dies because of that – the Dismal Failure; lastly, the boodle is stolen (hopefully from a mustache-twirling billionaire), and the gang goes off to live on a desert island – the Happily Ever After. Lastly there’s an “open-ended” ending, where either the goal, the outcome, or both, are unclear. Literary works, or books that are parts of series often end this way.

These endings sound cliché, and they are. But they also work. No one will buy a romance that doesn’t have a happily-ever-after ending. Yes, there’s some romantic tragedies out there, but when a reader goes to the shelves marked “ROMANCE”, happily-ever-after is what they expect. That brings me to my main overall takeaway from the sessions, namely: Being a published writer means writing what readers want to read. Seems self-evident, but I believe I never really admitted that to myself. What I’ve been doing so far is write to please myself, and then hope that also pleases others.  Now I don’t intend to make radical changes or to stop writing what I like. But I need to learn more about what works in this industry and, maybe, I can do both. But I’m convinced that nowadays, with so much competition out there, its going to be rare that a writer creates a work that meets industry expectations of character, plot, and ending – you have to know the rules to effectively play the game.

A little bit about my pitch meeting. This is where you meet 1-1 with an agent and try and interest them in your book. At this workshop these meetings were ten minutes; sometimes they can be as short as five. Anyway, it’s on a Zoom call, you both say “hello”, then you start talking. I took my existing query letter and enhanced it to be more conversational. I also added a few cool-sounding details, like “the ENTERTAINERS, a band  of actor-assassins”. I started the pitch with a logline – a single-sentence summary. Probably the most famous logline of all time was created by Ridley Scott for ALIEN: “It’s Jaws, in space!” My original logline was this:

An irreverent investigator finds herself through a struggle with a galactic master-criminal.

In the hour or so before I was rehearsing, something wasn’t clicking, so I changed it to this:

An irreverent investigator finds her power and purpose through a struggle with a galactic master-criminal.

I think the change was way better – to “find oneself” is kind of a meh outcome. But “power and purpose” – cool, everyone wants those!

For whatever reason, my pitch was successful. The agent asked for my query letter and full manuscript to be sent to her direct email. Yay!

To wrap up I’ll leave you with a Pitch Meeting video. I love this guy, as he shows how lame the plots and contrivances are in successful moves. Enjoy.

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 …

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on backstory and context, not only for ONLY’s END, but for the worlds and species of Civspace. In my mind I know a lot of this. For example, the Phair species has an extreme male-female ratio, on the order of 10:1. This makes them risk-takers, makes them cynical, and makes them sexually voracious – you have to be, otherwise the other 9 Phair will beat you to the grand prize, as it were.

So, I know that, but to be truthful I haven’t worked out all the implications. That’s why writing it down is so important, so that when I spend time thinking through “what ifs?” I don’t lose any of that, but capture it so I can iterate on it. Some of this is pretty mechanical; for example I need a fixed timeline on when Raylics encountered Terrans, and in broad terms what happened in the 360 years since then. Then when a character refers to this or that war, that will be a consistent point in time for all the characters that might also mention it. Other parts are broad strokes: what’s the temperament of an alien species, or what happened in the early life of the main characters.

All in all, there’s hundreds of facts to think up and set down. No single one is all that important, but taken as a corpus, they’re super-important – thus the “fiddly-bits” reference as used by Slartibartfast.

Another thing that goes into this reference doc is vignettes or bits of backstory that I originally create as part of an actual chapter or story, but that I decide are too much of an “info dump”. Here’s one, hopefully amusing, about the Oro-Ka. All hail Fleen!

The next day the Oro-Ka were still on my mind. They have been a star-faring race for more than ten thousand years, more than three times longer than the Keret, and more than twenty-five times longer than we come-lately Terrans. Terendurr believes the Junn have an even longer history than the Oro-Ka, but they are now a wholly space-borne people and have little contact with Civspace.

As the Black Stone observed, it is pointless to guess the motivations of an Oro-Ka. They are renowned for chaotic behavior. A few years back, in our own city of Kuundo, a prestigious research conference was visited by a certain Oro-Ka. Their name escapes me, but this individual presented several times at the conference and in fact convinced a number of Terran and Raylic researchers to abandon long-held theories and pursue a different, highly unlikely idea, with no evidence, based solely on his arguments. The scientists discontinued their grants and plunged headlong into this new venture, at considerable loss of prestige. Then it was discovered some months later that this same Oro-Ka spent his nighttime hours in Kuundo as a street preacher, passionately proclaiming the imminent coming of the bird-god Fleen, who would ordain a new golden age for Raylic and Terran alike; the only price being the eradication of all feline-form house pets.

The cult of Fleen persisted, with hundreds of members, for over a year. Certain commentators pondered whether this Oro-Ka might all along had been here for a different purpose than religion or scientific collaboration, but rather to experiment on the population of Kuundo.

The thing is, with Oro-Ka, you can’t tell. He might have been hoaxing everyone, measuring our gullibility. But he may well have been totally sincere in all he said and did.

Answer: What the author thinks will move you. Many readers will consider this as part of the plot or the action – hero sees something, hero learns or does something. But that’s just a fact, and probably one you could’ve predicted; our hero is a detective, of course she finds dead bodies. What’s more important is, where is this discovery set? Isolated woods? Grounds of a country estate? The rubbish pile of a fenced-off construction site? The setting of the action, and the details of how that particular setting differs from the general type, are what create emotional responses in the reader. When the body is found in the woods we might feel the victim agonized over their fate, as it was likely just them and the killer. For the country estate we might feel the victim deserved it, the setting suggests he was a rich toff who probably had wronged dozens of people. And for the rubbish heap, we might feel the most sympathy of all these cases – no one deserves to be discarded like trash. Of course, all that is dependent on the details the author gives you. What’s on the rubbish heap? Crushed stone, cement and rebar? Furniture and personal effects from bulldozed houses? Logs and shrubs from ripped-up landscaping? Whatever the choice is, it will tell you something about the world but, I guarantee, it will also make you feel something.

BTW before I go to much further I need to call out the source of the photo above. It’s from Deadloch, a hard to describe show from Australia – black-comedic mystery with absurd dashes is best I can do. Highly recommended.

Setting is something I’m looking at in my current work on ONLY’s END, a trilogy where Blair MacAlister and Terendurr the Black Stone contend with cruel master-criminal Bandal the Only. Book 1 will be two hundred fifty paperback pages (that’s my current guess). In all of that there’s around twenty-seven distinct settings. A few of these, like Terendurr’s office, are the backdrop for several scenes. How much do we need to know about an office? Sometimes it’s just the intent of the action:

With screens and projectors brought from the lab, and guest chairs arranged in ranks, the boss’ office had become a lecture hall.

But other times, the details (I think) help:

The Black Stone was behind his desk, just as I’ve seen him a thousand times or more. As Sandrine and I drew closer I was aware of the many familiar artifacts – the Phair executioner’s sword, Oro-Ka ritual gong, the Keret selling drum were things my eyes couldn’t help but light upon – but Terendurr was the only thing I really saw.

The one-time locations are in a way easier. You can’t invest an often-used location with too strong a default emotion, because you may want to vary the impression from that location. But with a one-time, I feel the more intense the better, like with the Dontoo Gardens, a public park that Blair visits with her beau, Theo:

We both laughed. Walking on, we became happy fairgoers, chatting with Raylic merchants, tasting bits of this and that offered by hawkers, with the faint drum and cymbal sound of Raylic music in the air. All around Raylic pups scampered in small packs, their parents and older siblings coming in their own packs behind, growling out cautions or encouragements as needed.

…

We continued our amble along the pathways of Dontoo. Music still wafted all about, though the crowds grew larger as we approached the area of the stage. On any day of good weather there were acts of various sorts – dance, acrobatics, puppetry – and today was fine.

With the bigger crowds came more hawkers. Now, the “hard sell” isn’t part of the Raylic character; where a Terran peddler would badger you to buy, a Raylic will just stand holding out their wares, if anything trying to look both pathetic and trustworthy.

Perhaps I was too interested in Theo and the charms of the gardens to see right in front of me. There was a hawker barring our way, an old Phair with tarnished-gold skin. He bounded side to side as we tried to pass by.

“Terran lady!” he exclaimed. “I have just the thing!” From a voluminous bag he withdrew an object and pressed it into my hand. Without thinking I looked at it. It was a small statuette, of a grimacing, sword-drawing warrior, made of warm brownish-white material. It fit in my palm perfectly, like a keepsake I’d had for years.

I won’t presume to tell you how you should feel, reading that, but I will tell you what I’m hoping for: A sense of safety, of family, a carnivale-like break from the real world, and finally a bit of foreboding of something different to come.

I’ll close by suggesting you reflect on settings from your own favorite books. Thinking on Lord of the Rings I think can name at least ten amazing settings without thinking, and can visualize almost all of them. Till next time …

What is it, 6 weeks since my last post? It’s not so much that time flies when you’re retired (though I am that), but rather that it flies when you are working.

That work is the work of writing. I certainly can’t claim an encyclopedic experience of my new vocation, but I do know enough to say it is not just staring out the window awaiting inspiration from Sharon Stone. For one thing, when inspiration does strike me it’s most likely to do that while I’m exercising, on a walk or on my stationary bike. For another thing, Ms. Stone and I … ah, best not to go there.

So what is this supposed work? For the past 5 years I’ve been working on a Blair and Terendurr trilogy. Thus far I’ve completed about 250,000 words – two and a half books worth. I’m quite pleased with that and as I copy-edit and re-read I’m more and more confident this work is good. But that does not mean it’s done. It means it’s time to make it better.

Whether you consciously know it or not, whenever you read a story, you are processing the rhythm of the action. Almost all stories (and almost all movies) use a three-act structure that is roughly like so:

1. Meet the hero or heroes, learn about their problem or antagonist.
2. Heroes contend with the bad guys, suffer a crushing defeat.
3. Heroes bounce back with a just-so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan – which works! Yay!

We don’t want every story to simplistically follow the three-act structure (which would be boring) but at the same time we need to see challenges and victories. The books we like the most tend to be the ones that vary the rhythm, keep us guessing, while still fulfilling the goals of the three-act structure. This is where the crunching comes in.  I’ve taken the first story of the first book and for every separate scene in it, given it a number that indicates an achievement or a setback. When Blair finds a new lead on the case, that’s an achievement, worth a “1”. When she finds someone has deceived her, that’s a setback, a “-1”. A major defeat is a “-3”. Then I’ve plotted those values on a graph:

This literally shows the ups and downs of the story. “A” is the crisis, a tragic gun-battle where civilians are killed, the bad guys make off with the object everyone is pursuing, and Blair is knocked out and apparently kidnapped. “B” is where Blair and her kidnappers – who were her allies all along – rally, strike back at the bad guys and at the last instant hit upon the one weapon that will bring them victory.

You’re probably thinking, “Didn’t he already know this, seeing as he wrote it?” Having this in number form is more than just confirmation of what I already knew. It’s a way to plan optimization: Are the lows low enough? The highs high enough? And the achievements/setbacks are just one way to look at all this. In what scenes do the characters change? What made them change? Is it clear enough to the reader? Finally, a very practical asset is knowing the length of every scene, so you can assess where to make cuts or tighten things up. For example, as a writer I might like the scene where Blair and her beau have dinner, and we learn some of the beau’s backstory. But, is it worth 5 pages?

To end let me leave you with a few paragraphs from story 2 of book 1, REMNANTS:

At that more Keret began entering the saloon. These were Alwin’s officers and senior staff, each needing an introduction. Most were formal in their greetings. One, Pinthill by name, offered a witticism, “Blair? I thought all Terrans were named Doug.” This raised shrieks of Keret laughter, together with much waving of tentacles. I chuckled myself and was grateful at this lightening of mood.

The conversation in the company was that typical of new space-travelling acquaintances: What places have you been? My roster was the shortest by far. An older lieutenant claimed twenty-one worlds and was subject to interrogation. He was a shy sort – uncommon for a Keret – and it seemed he was oppressed by his shipmates’ skepticism. Until, that is, Alwin-vir intervened, “For shame, you spratlings. You should all serve so long to see what my friend Theebus-lim has seen. I go nowhere new without consulting him – a paid service, mind you! Now let us to table. Theebus shall sit on my left. Blair, you shall be at my right. The worthy elder lieutenant may offer some good advice.”

I rather like the “Doug” joke. Will it make the final cut? Only time, aided by my spreadsheet, will tell.