I’ve posted “Departure,” a short story that I wrote in 2015, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.
“Departure” is a tale about (literally) star-crossed lovers and the sacrifices they may have to make to pursue their dreams. The story should be linked from the sidebar, but here’s a link as well.
While I’m waiting for my consulting editor to have a look at The Curse of Steel, I’ve turned back to a project that I’ve been neglecting for too long: the world-building book Architect of Worlds. Several sections of that book already exist in a rough draft, which can be found at the Architect of Worlds link in the sidebar.
The bulk of the material I’ve already written is a design sequence, permitting the user to set up fictional star systems (or to fill in details for real-world systems). The idea is to let SF writers, game designers, tabletop game referees, and so on design locations for interstellar SF settings, using whatever combination of random chance and deliberate choice they prefer. The emphasis is on “hard SF” realism, as far as the state of exoplanetary astronomy will permit, and no dependencies on any specific tabletop rules system.
So far, the draft system permits one to place stars, planets, and moons, and get gross physical properties (mass, density, surface gravity) and dynamic parameters (orbital radius, eccentricity, and period) for each.
The next slice of the system will involve generating the surface conditions for such bodies, at least for the small “terrestroid” worlds that are likely to provide environments for SF adventure. At this point we’re talking about things like surface temperature (average and variations), atmospheric composition and pressure, the amount and state of water (or other volatiles) on the surface, what kind of native life might be prevalent, and so on.
I’ve been mulling this section over for a few years now, since the science involved is a lot more complicated and more difficult to reduce to a set of game-able abstractions.
When I designed a system like this for GURPS Space Fourth Edition, I made a deliberate design choice to reduce all the possibilities to a specific set of archetypes. That provided some backward compatibility with earlier versions of the GURPS system, and with the older Traveller systems that were an inspiration for both. For this book, though, I want to give the readers as much detail as I can, and let them decide what to use and what to set aside. That complicates the design.
So, a very rough overall outline of what’s going to be involved for a given “world” (that is, a terrestrial planet or moon with some likelihood of a solid surface):
All that’s the minimum for what the next section of the book needs to cover. There are a lot of dependencies back and forth here, which is one reason why I’ve struggled for so long to build this piece. I’m beginning to think I see how to design something workable, though. At least enough to get started. More over the next few weeks.
My plans regarding The Curse of Steel have evolved with remarkable speed over the past few days.
My novel-writing process seems to boil down to the following:
About eight years ago, my first mature original novel reached that second-draft stage. That was The Master’s Oath, a tale of time travel, alternate histories, and Hermetic magic that will absolutely never be seen again outside my dead files. It wasn’t until I was finished with that one that I had a “What in God’s name was I thinking” moment and realized the thing was utterly unpublishable. Decently written, not a bad adventure story, but bound to mortally offend big chunks of my audience. Lesson learned.
Now, as of last week, The Curse of Steel has reached the second draft stage. Lo, the creator looked upon his work, and he was pleased.
Now what?
Well, to be honest, my workflow doesn’t exist yet past this point. The Curse of Steel is the first original novel I’ve ever written that I honestly believe is publishable.
I spent a couple of weeks putting together a cover image for the book. While I worked on that, I thought about what the next steps should be. Should I just publish the second draft as is, and hope for the best?
The more I thought about that, the less comfortable I was with the idea.
I know my prose style is reasonably clean. When I was a freelance writer, more than one editor remarked on that. As an editor, I’ve seen enough prose from other people to be able to compare.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a few people reading my drafts, and they’ve been encouraging about the story.
On the other hand, a novel is a very different beast from a non-fiction book, there are necessary skills I may not have developed in full, and none of my early readers are experienced editors. I don’t have a decent writer’s circle to help me hammer my drafts into submission. What if I’m missing something?
No, scratch that, I know I’m missing something. Maybe two or three novels from now, I’ll have a better idea of what to do at this point. Right now I’m still not sure.
The obvious solution would be to hire an editor.
Of course, a skilled and reliable editor costs money. Not to mention, there are a lot of people out there ready to take advantage of would-be authors, offering cheap book-preparation services for top dollar without any guarantee of results. Ever since deciding to pursue self-publishing, I’ve been very cautious about laying out cash for such services.
On the gripping hand, I can afford to spend some money on the experiment.
So over the past week or so, I’ve done some research and developed two lines of attack.
One line is to search for software that can help a novelist pick nits in his prose style. Sure, everything has a spelling-and-grammar checker these days, but strong prose writing needs more than that. I need to be able to ferret out filler words, excess adverbs, phrases that I repeat too often, that kind of thing. I could do that by eye, but the process would be slow and painful, and I would be likely to miss the weaknesses in my own style.
Enter AutoCrit.
Autocrit is billed as a “self-editing platform,” and it certainly works as such. It’s essentially a web-based word processor, but it’s specifically designed to carry out a wide variety of specialized text searches and basic statistical analyses. It compares your text to a huge corpus from published novels, helping you find and carve out the flabby bits of your prose.
Using AutoCrit over the past three days, I’ve been able to rework The Curse of Steel with surprising speed and efficiency. Already I’ve cut a little over 2000 words of material, mostly filler words and repetitive phrases that didn’t add to the sense of each passage.
It’s been quite the eye-opener. Every writer needs something to rub his nose in the shortcomings of his prose style, or he isn’t likely to improve. Lacking an editor or a ruthless critique circle, something like this may be the next best thing.
AutoCrit isn’t ideal. It’s web-based, which I don’t care for. It chokes if you hand it more than 50,000 words of text at once, which means I have to edit my novel in chunks. It doesn’t handle special characters gracefully, so all my conlang words that have accents and umlauts in them get snarled up. Its import from Word, and its export back to Word, are both a little kludgy.
Still, I suspect I’ll have a third complete draft, with much tighter prose, by later this week.
The second line of attack is that I have, indeed, hired an editor. This involved a fair amount of searching through the Web, looking for editorial networks that are competent, reliable, and not outrageously expensive. The SFWA site was fairly helpful here – they don’t explicitly recommend editors, but they have an excellent checklist of things to consider in the process.
The editor I ended up with is being hired specifically to do a manuscript assessment, not a complete edit of the novel. This will set me back a few hundred dollars, and it may not end up being part of my usual workflow in the future. Still, the experiment should be worthwhile. I’m hoping he’ll be able to provide actionable feedback that I can use while producing a final complete draft – the last step in my development process before the book goes out the door.
At the moment, the plan looks like this:
So it looks as if The Curse of Steel will finally hit the virtual shelves by Halloween. There will be much rejoicing . . . and then I’ll get started on The Sunlit Lands, the second book in the series. One assumes that one won’t take nearly as long to reach fruition.
In other news, that four- or five-week gap in September, while I wait for my editor to finish his task? I think I may sit down and work on Architect of Worlds for a while. No promises . . . but I think my research, and the subconscious work in the back of my head, have reached the point where I may be able to develop a rough draft of the third chunk of the world design sequence. We’ll see how things go.
With the cover art ready to go, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focusing on day-job work (writing and editing course material that’s going to go online) and working on the second-draft edits for The Curse of Steel.
That latter task has paid off. As of this afternoon, the novel is complete in the second draft.
What this means for the project is that I’m about to do one last editing pass, and then prepare the manuscript for release as a self-published novel. If all goes well, the novel will be released sometime in September. The one wild card is that I’m considering submitting the current draft for a manuscript assessment from a reputable freelance editor, to help me organize and direct that last editing pass. If I decide to go with that plan, that might delay the release a bit, depending on how long the assessment takes and how deep an edit it suggests I make.
In the meantime, though, the last chunk of the second-draft manuscript will be released to my patrons within a few days as the charged reward for August. All of my patrons, from the $1 level up, will get a copy of the last eight chapters of the draft (about 24,800 words). When the novel itself is released, all of my patrons from the $2 level up will get a free copy.
I’ll probably also release another piece of short fiction later this month, for my patrons and in the free-fiction section of this blog. More about that as we get closer to the end of the month.
Whew. After over a week of work, a pile of tinkering and experimentation, at least a dozen new digital-art techniques mastered, and a lot of frustrated beard-tugging . . . I’ve finally put together cover art for The Curse of Steel.
My self-imposed deadline was the end of the month, and it’s now about two hours away from local midnight on 31 July, so I’m barely under the wire. Even so, I’m very happy with the results.
Now to finish revising the draft and get the book ready for release. It’s starting to look like a mid-September release is going to work.