I’ve posted a new version of “Safe Haven,” one of my oldest short stories, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.
“Safe Haven” is a tale set soon after the Trojan War, in a world that isn’t quite the same as the one familiar to us from the poems of Homer. Aside from the links on the Free Articles and Fiction page and in the sidebar, here’s a direct link as well.
“Safe Haven” will also be released to my patrons, free of charge.
I think I may have finally gotten myself unblocked with respect to one of my long-term creative projects. The project in question is the Human Destiny setting.
The premise is that sometime in the middle of the 21st century, an interstellar civilization arrives in the Sol system and (without much effort) conquers humanity. It’s a strangely benign sort of conquest, though. The aliens don’t have any interest in us as slaves, nor are they motivated by a desire to take the solar system’s natural resources for their own benefit. Their goals seem mostly to involve . . . nannying us. Their laws are fairly strict, backed up by almost-universal surveillance, but enforcement seems to be non-violent, completely incorruptible, and even-handed. Meanwhile, all of us are provided a standard of living better than ever before, without anyone being required to work for any of it.
Naturally, a lot of humans resent all this mightily, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about it. The longer-term question is why all this has happened. What motivates the aliens?
I’ve written and published a couple of stories in this setting: “Pilgrimage” and “Guanahani.” I have two or three more stories in my development pile too. I’m fairly sure there’s a robust series, maybe even a few novels, in there. Yet, even after years of cogitation, I’ve never been able to get the idea to launch.
The main problem is that the setting does away with a lot of human agency just by its premise. Great, the aliens have come along and solved a lot of our problems, including many of the ones driven by human conflict and misbehavior. There are certainly stories left to be told, but a lot of the writer’s tools for plot and character development are set aside already.
It’s probably telling that almost all the stories I’ve written in this setting so far involve breakdowns of the alien surveillance apparatus. It’s kind of like Star Trek‘s transporters – they’re so useful for short-circuiting plots that a writer often has to justify taking them off-line before a story can happen.
There’s also the aliens’ motivation. They’re here because they want us to survive and evolve into the kind of species that actually can play a role on the galactic stage. That means human psychology needs to change. We need to learn to live with each other and tolerate the Other, we need to get better at understanding and preserving the big systems that keep us alive, we need to start thinking on much larger scales in both space and time.
So how do I write stories about that, in which the aliens demonstrate their motivations through conflict and plot rather than by simply telling the reader what’s up?
I was idly thinking about this the other day – a lot of my creative work happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else entirely. Then my mind made a connection with what I was doing with my hands and my forebrain at the time.
I was idly playing a game on my iPad, you see.
Terraforming Mars has been out for several years as a tabletop game, and now has a pretty good adaptation as a mobile app as well. It’s one of those wonderfully thematic board games that does such a superb job of making a complex subject playable and interesting to the layman.
Terraforming Mars assumes an era of exploration and colonization throughout the solar system, starting either late in this century or sometime in the next. The centerpiece of that era is a generations-long project to, as it says on the tin, terraform Mars – transform that planet into an at least marginally habitable world, where human beings can live freely with little or no life-support equipment.
Well. Suddenly I could see a lot of possible context for the Human Destiny setting, Suppose the aliens, aside from simply providing a decent quality of life for most humans, also opened the door for this kind of expansion into the solar system? If humans could settle on Mars, cooperate with each other in a project that might not pay off for many human lifetimes, wouldn’t that be an opportunity for some of us to demonstrate the citizen-of-the-galaxy mindset the aliens are looking for?
Right away, my brain started working on ways to get my character Aminata Ndoye – the protagonist of “Pilgrimage” and a few of the not-yet-published stories – involved in Martian terraforming and solar-system expansion. That in turn gave me a whole raft of new ideas about the Human Destiny setting as a whole.
All of which is to say that I might be turning back to that project, finally. My creative plate is rather full at the moment, between working on my Krava stories, and Architect of Worlds, and wanting to flesh out the EIDOLON game system a bit more. Still, as 2020 winds down I think I might be able to revisit the Human Destiny setting, rework the core documentation for that, and start making some of that information available. Readers of this blog, and my patrons over on Patreon, can expect to see some results from that over the next couple of months.
A quick note to assure everyone that I’m still alive. I’ve been working on a lot of things this week, with the result that none of them have been pushed through to completion. Hopefully this weekend will help change that.
Look for some results from that list over the next few days, I think.
Well, The Curse of Steel has been on the market for about a week now. Sales have not been overwhelming, but I didn’t expect them to be. In any case, the book has already earned me more in royalties than my last two ventures into self-publishing put together. This is a slow business, which doesn’t reward you for obsessively checking your KDP reports.
(Have I been obsessively checking my KDP reports? Yes, yes I have.)
So, on to next steps.
I’ve started work on the first draft of the next novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands. Progress on that can be tracked in the sidebar.
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on promotion for The Curse of Steel. One thing I’ve become aware of is that there’s a whole ecology of reviewers for new books, and especially for self-published books. New books that don’t have many professional or customer reviews don’t do as well, but as you might expect there are always more new books coming out than there are available reviewers.
After thinking about that problem for a while, I’ve decided to add a new thread to this blog: reviews of new self-published fiction.
I’m going to try to have at least one substantive review of an indie novel or series per month. Those reviews will be posted as blog entries here, and if the book(s) being reviewed are being published on Amazon I’ll cross-post the reviews there too. Look for the first of these by the end of October – I’ve already found a very promising novel series that will almost certainly get a review.
This is something of a departure for me; this blog has never done many reviews in the past. It will involve some formal work over the next few days as I set things up. I’ll have to develop and post a review policy, and I’ll also be advertising this blog on some of the review-clearinghouse sites to attract more attention to the project.
As another point, I’ve just taken some steps to (hopefully) make this site a little easier to navigate. You’ll notice the white top-bar now provides several menu options. These links will take you to some of the most important (or popular) pages on the site, notably the Architect of Worlds landing page. I’ll be expanding that menu a bit over the next few days, possibly converting a couple of the items into drop-downs to further improve navigation. There may be some tweaks and additions to some of the pages as well. Feedback is welcome as to ways to improve all of this functionality.
As of this evening, The Curse of Steel is available as an e-book for Amazon Kindle. Here’s a link to the book’s page on Amazon US, but it’s also available on all of the overseas Amazon sites.
The catalog description:
A woman who shares the blood of the gods. A cursed sword that has ruined kingdoms.
In a single fateful day, Krava the Swift learns of her divine ancestry and gains possession of a weapon of formidable power. Suddenly raised to prominence among her Iron Age tribe, at first she enjoys her new life as a god-touched hero. She quickly learns that a hero’s life may be glorious but it’s also complicated – and possibly quite short.
Krava and her friends soon find themselves caught up in a deadly game of gods and kings. If she refuses to be a pawn, she may be forced to become a queen . . . or a curse upon all her people.
Time for some celebration: this is my first original published novel, after twenty-plus years of being a freelance writer. Hopefully not my last!
My patrons at the $2 level and up will soon be getting a code for a free copy in email.
As of this evening, The Curse of Steel has been fully prepared as a KPF-format e-book and is about three steps short of being released.
I’m not going to try to publish it tonight. I want to review the whole e-book one final time to make sure there are no last-minute errors, and that may take me a little while. Especially since I have a pile of telework to get done for my office over the next couple of days.
Still. Everything has been loaded into the Kindle Create app, and it looks very nice indeed. This is starting to feel like a real event. The book will almost certainly be released by Wednesday of this week.
I’m still working on the next step in the Architect of Worlds design sequence.
This one is proving a bit thornier than usual, because I’m trying to model a very complex system. This step is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to describe the geology of a world. I need something that can handle Earth’s complex plate-tectonics geology, and the stagnant-plate geologies of Venus and Mars, and the mega-vulcanism of Io, and putative super-Earths, and can also handle long stretches of geologic time, and and and. Tall order . . . although I think I’m converging on something that will work well enough. A few more days of work on that, most likely, and then the next block of draft text will appear here.
Meanwhile, as of today the editor I hired to review the draft of The Curse of Steel has finished his work, and his assessment was both useful and very positive. The big takeaway here is that he’s confirmed my belief that the current draft does not need any more major surgery. I estimate about two more weeks of work, to finish the glossary, go through the draft one last time to pick a few more nits out of the prose, assemble the e-book files, and publish.
The Curse of Steel will almost certainly be available on Kindle Direct by the middle of October. At the point of release, anyone who’s signed up as my patron at the $2 level or above will receive a free copy of the e-book, and anyone who’s signed up at the $5 level or above will be mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the book.
After which, I plan to spend about three days in unashamed celebration, and then it will be time to get to work on the next book in the series: The Sunlit Lands.
I’ve posted “Guanahani,” a short story that I wrote in 2015, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.
“Guanahani” is a tale about a scientific mystery, but it’s also about people trying to survive amid the perils of human history. The story should be linked from the sidebar, but here’s a link as well.
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.
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.