Category: Novel Writing Journey – 1st Novel

Straight Out of the 80s!

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The big news of the week was that I finished the ‘Script Outline’ draft of my military sci-fi book. The working title is ‘Maelstrom 1: Valkyrie’, because who writes less than a trilogy nowadays? Seriously, though, there’s definitely more than one book in the idea behind it, and this first book only takes things up to a certain point.

The Script Outline (I’m using capitals there because capitals make it a ‘thing’) has taken a lot longer than it was supposed to, but I’m not yet completely distraught about that. I had hopes of publishing in November, but as long as it’s before the end of the year, I guess that’s okay. And, either way, having found a copy of my old novel, Promenade, to mercilessly edit down and put out there – well, it might be better to push that to market first and perhaps leave this until the New Year, when I might be most of the way through a second instalment. In fact, as I write, I’ve literally just talked myself into that.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’m not so worried about how long the Script Outline has taken, as the point of it was to hopefully do away with a draft while simultaneously completing a detailed (as it turns out, very detailed) outline. The idea is that my next (1st, I guess) draft will be a lot better than an ordinary first draft would be, that I will have already learned many of the things I need to learn about the story. Well, that’s what I’m sticking with.

My hope is that, after this, I’ll have an editing / proofing draft, and then a final draft via a proof reader, and BOOM… book.  This is not how I will ideally work on every book, as I’d at least like to have a proper ‘editors’ draft before proofreading, but that is simply going to be too expensive this time around.

As for Promenade, trust me when I say that book has already been mercilessly edited for many years before now, as it was originally completed in 2002. Although, like some poor, mistreated captive, it has barely seen the light of day, read by only a handful of people that weren’t its creator. No… no proof reading for Promenade, that one’s going to be the guinea pig, and the sooner I can shove it out onto the market, the better.

I’m actually quite daunted by putting my script version of the Maelstrom book into Scrivener, as I’m now starting to do. I know it’s going to reveal all those research / world building / background and character points that I’ve failed to adequately explore as I’ve gone along. The whole thing is going to look like a mess, and I’m going to have about three times as much work as I thought I would have, I know it! However, I also know that, somewhere on he other side of all that, is a book and a story world I can keep exploring. Plus, it might even be fun along the way. For one thing, as I wrote the last pages of the script, I was surprised by how many things just seemed to slot quite neatly into place, and it’s a great feeling on a book when that stuff starts to happen.

You wouldn’t think I’ve been writing books for years, would you? But when it’s your own, somehow it makes you feel more like a newbie. Not sure why, would have expected that to work the other way around, if anything. Plus… sci-fi. Somehow, military sci-fi is quite intimidating. I’ve never properly written sci-fi before, and, I don’t know… there’s definitely more fear of getting stuff wrong.

Couple of other things to finish of this slightly rambling post:

‘Constitution’ by Nick Webb. I was very critical about this in a previous post, mainly because the set-up stage of the book felt like Battlestar Galactica rehashed. I would just like to say that, although I haven’t changed my mind about that aspect of it, the book has nonetheless turned into a superb read. Am currently a little over three-quarters through, and have found myself really drawn to the characters and the situation, and the pace is just electric – not to mention some situations that are h-a-r-s-h on the characters. Always gotta love that.

And finally, Alpha Smart Neo 2. I’m writing this post on one of these wonderfully retro little beasts. They’re like eighties tech, but made in the zeros, or later. I’m currently just using it as a plug-in keyboard on my phone. I don’t know quite why I’m doing this, my laptop is just upstairs, except for the fact that I just like writing this way. It also has its own little LCD screen, and can – literally – ‘write’ it to MS Word – or anything else – when plugged into a PC later on.

Maybe I love using this rather outmoded technology because I grew up in the 80s. Speaking of which… can’t wait for season 2 of Stranger things later this month!

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Alone and Old in an Online World

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A much better week. Have been really on top of my freelance work, so that I only had about an hour’s work come Friday. Really thought I might finish my scripted outline later that day, but hit an unexpected bit of burn-out in the afternoon. A little surprised, as I didn’t really feel all that tired, but my brain just stopped cooperating for a bit.

Writing really is all about focus and concentration. There’s a sports saying about ‘having your head in the game’, and I often feel this aptly describes writing. If my head isn’t in the game, things will go very slowly.

Not dwelling on that, though, as I’m close and the week had another big achievement. The thought of book marketing thrills and terrifies me in equal parts. Although far from being computer illiterate, I am of an age where, unless you had the sort of interest in computing that would, a decade later, lead to a job making sites for that new inter-web-net-thingy – the thing that nobody but businesses with something to sell could yet see point of – you didn’t learn much about them in your most formative years. My IT teacher owned a farm and wore tweed, and the lessons mostly involved playing some skiing game based around dots and lines on the school’s BBC Micros. Oh yeah, 32KB of computing power!

With this in mind, I just need my online experience to be as straightforward as possible. Many of the concepts around marketing and SEO can be hard enough to grasp because of the unnecessarily complex language often used to describe them, so I don’t need to be struggling with the websites and software side of things.

Although the proverbial bow of my research into marketing has a few strings, by far the most useful tool has been a website and book by Joanna Penn. She, like others, stresses the do-or-die importance of the email list. So, I decided to see if I could add one to my WordPress.com site.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I know. Get a .org self-hosted site, it’s so much better, with so much more control. I must confess, tech-fear is what initially stopped me, but right now it’s fear of the other publishing costs that will need to be met. – More immediate things, like a book cover and some sort of paid editing. It’s not that expensive to get the hosting and all that, but right now it will be a cost too much.

That said, if I couldn’t effectively collect emails through the .com site, it would be a big issue. No problem, though, I found something that tells me about embedding code into a text widget (a silly word if ever I have heard one), or if not another widget with a pop-up box. Not ideal, pop-ups are annoying, but better than nowt.  Neither worked, consistently changing my code, or just displaying it all as text on the site. Some research revealed that this is a ‘safety feature’, which can be got around if you pay the $200, or whatever, for a business subscription. Not happening.

I battled with this for a while. Quite a while. Too long, one might say, but the answer did ultimately come through a live chat with a WordPress.com advisor who was very helpful. It was, however, somewhat convoluted.

First, I had to start a MailChimp account. Fair enough, I knew they were one of the bigger email marketing companies and was planning to start using them at some point. It’s free for my current purpose, at least, and their site seems fairly convinced they can help my future marketing efforts in ways I don’t yet (and maybe never will) understand.

Then I had to make a Wufoo account, so I could make the form for my site. My form only included three fields – I did toy with including just one field on my mailing list sign up…. any guesses which? Still… Wufoo account. Then I had to link the Wufoo form to an email list I had made in MailChimp. Then export it for WordPress.com, which creates some html it actually won’t go changing. Then, finally, I can drop it into that text widget.

I mean, w-o-w; for something a lot of people with a website are likely going to want to do… what a fuss! Yes, I could have just used a WordPress contact form to collect email addresses, but it wouldn’t have been a great way of doing it. Plus, yes, automatically sending it to a MailChimp list will, I’m sure, pay dividends and make things easier later on.

It’s just… I dunno… is everything going to make me feel this out of my depth and confused? Of course, there is that non-techie, old bloke sense of achievement for getting there and sorting it out, but I’d still rather things just, you know, happened without me having to be sat there until 4 in the morning. Really… 4 in the morning.

In other news, I got hold of a copy of my old novel, Promenade, which I wrote about 15 years ago. I thought all digital copies of it lost, except for the possibility of a floppy disk somewhere in the tip that is my garage. Yes, I had many, many redundancies, but take your eye off the ball for enough years, you’d be surprised how they can all get unexpectedly stripped away.

So, I’m thinking ‘publishing dry run’. Make my mistakes on something that I’m not currently spending a lot of time writing. Could be good.

Illness, Inspiration, Writing to Market and when does that go too far?

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Not the best week; my winter flu/cold thing came in early autumn instead. I lost a good day and a half to it, and that left me struggling just to get my freelance commitments done. The book, therefore, did not move forward a great deal again this week.

What I did manage to do was restructure the outline for the last bit of the book. It was somehow simultaneously vague and overly-long and convoluted. Part of that involved sitting down and writing more about what my ‘bad guys’ were actually like – what they are, where they came from, how they’ve got to the point where they are poised to wreak havoc on human civilisation.

So I’m counting the positives; which, I’m discovering, is important when obstacles to progress present themselves. Keeps me motivated.

Also, I’ve been enjoying some great sci-fi inspiration. It’s been the 15th anniversary of the Firefly TV series this last week, and they played episodes and then the Serenity film on, I think, the Sci-Fi Channel. I only watched the film and about half an episode of the series, but it reminded me of how truly awesome it was. The film, in my opinion, is pretty much perfect.

Also, we have Netflix. I usually put on an episode of something later in the evening, and recently it has been the 2nd series of The Expanse. I loved the 1st series for its noir-ish mystery and the purely Sol System setting. In the 2nd series, the story has become larger and more (in a slightly Game of Thrones-esque way) political, but it’s still a great watch.

The pre-interstellar setting really fascinates me, as most sci-fi (including my own novel) involves interstellar travel. Yet, what happens when we as a race come to explore the solar system is likely to be a more interesting and relevant question for our near future. And, I believe, might force better creative thinking if I chose to write a novel in that setting.

In The Expanse, there are three distinct groups of people. Predictably, two of these are Earth and a seceded Mars, but the third are an underclass known as ‘Belters’, who are primarily miners from the asteroid belt. They see themselves as separate to the ‘Inners’ of Mars and Earth, have some of their own language or terms, and usually a distinctly different accent.

Another thing that can’t help but inspire and inform me, particularly as what I’m writing is at least partially ‘military sci-fi’, is the rebooted Battlestar Galactica of a decade or so ago.

Now, I subscribe to Chris Fox’s YouTube channel. He talks and writes about writing, then puts these theories into practice with his own fiction, some of which has been military sci-fi. I read his book about writing to market and used those principles when thinking about the sort of book I wanted to write.

I have no problem with that. To me, putting certain things in a novel, following a few tropes about character archetypes, how the cover should look, etc. is not a big deal. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable or dirty. I’m here to make a career writing my own fiction if I can, and I’ve been ghostwriting for long enough to see how this is. I think it’s everything that comes after you make those decisions about tropes that counts.

That said…

I’ve started reading Constitution by Nick Webb, as Chris Fox spoke about it as one of the independently published top sellers in military sci-fi on Kindle when he was writing Write to Market. It seemed like a good idea to read it as a study on what works. I quickly found myself appalled, however, about some of Nick Webb’s use of tropes. It’s way too Battlestar Galactica.

It could be the aging ship’s Captain (okay, in BSG he was an Admiral) on the edge of retirement, giving the thinly-veiled speech about readiness as, unseen, the enemy prepares to strike. Or perhaps his alcoholic, hard-ass XO best friend with the frayed uniform. Perhaps the implacable enemy who inexplicably broke off the war 75 (40 in BSG) years ago. Maybe the veteran vessel of the conflict in the process of being turned into a floating museum when the old enemy comes back, and the mostly decommissioned fighters on the flight deck. I’m only just over a third of the way through, but I’m waiting to see if something happens to the new vessels’ electronics when the fleet meets them in battle.

I mean, COME ON!

There’s tropes and there’s something that borders on plagiarism. Sure, you can’t write any sort of book in isolation from what has gone before, and nor should you. It’s natural, I would even say ‘healthy’, to reference things that you love and that inspire you. I know I do:

The crew of one of the two vessels in my book have got a bit of the Serenity crew about them. The captain of that same vessel is a little reminiscent of the captain from the Ketty Jay novels. A little. And I’m sure my military ship commander trying to get out from under the shadow of her traitor father isn’t entirely original – although I can’t quite think where I got that from. Can anyone remind me?

But to borrow so much from one source is, surely, just plain wrong. Isn’t it?

Yet this novel was very successful – the sort of success I am currently only dreaming of – and it’s got me thinking about what that means. I’m sure Nick Webb did a lot of other things right to be as successful as he was with this book. And I’m enjoying Constitution so far, although it’s not exactly rocking my world, or anything. I just feel there’s a line I don’t want to cross, whatever the potential benefit might be, between hitting tropes and making vague homage, to something that would leave a bad taste in my mouth.

You can emulate without copying. I mean, what if the XO was addicted to pain meds from an old injury, for instance? Straight away there’s an extra bit of possible story there, and the character has a similar flaw without it feeling like such a direct pull from BSG.

I don’t know, am I just too concerned about this?

A Question of Balance

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If I didn’t have to earn a living, I‘d probably have published my book by now. Not that I’m complaining. I got a real break last week when a client of mine arranged for me to do regular work for them every week – just enough to keep things ticking over while I concentrate on getting this book finished.

I suck at balance and organising my time. I’m amazing at coming up with different ways to attempt to organise my time – new and inventive systems for ‘fitting it all in’ – but it never seems to work for more than a day or two before things fall apart. So, it should be no surprise that the first 2 or 3 days this week involved me trying and failing to amalgamate paid work and my own fiction efforts seamlessly into ‘a day’s work’. I might just about have managed it if my life existed in a hermetically sealed bubble, but my attempts at organisation are like those towers of pebbles that people make on the beach. Just one tiny little poke and…

Yet, it’s all okay. Because, although I had a poor week, and although I’m still on that script outline draft – which is now going on longer than I would ideally have liked, with each extra day becoming a little less justifiable – I didn’t have a terrible week. On Thursday and Friday, in particular, I got quite a bit done. I can see a ‘next week’, and a ‘week after that’, where the paid work takes up my morning and the fiction takes up my afternoon. And that’s not so bad, is it?

It’s almost like organisation.

On other news, I’m getting to that part in the draft where I’m discovering things. I’d forgotten about that, how joyous it can be, how it makes writing a story like creating a living thing. I’ve just realised that one of the crew members of my ‘privateer’-type space ship has crush on the Captain. Had no idea that was going to happen, although, looking back, it was kind of obvious. Also, I had the two main ships heading towards the planet where all the big end of book stuff happens, then realised that I only needed one ship, and that all the important characters could just be on that one ship. Have also scratched out a lot of unnecessary scenes and characters from the last part of the book before I even wrote it. Which might prove a time-saving bonus.

So perhaps this script outline stage that I’ve added into my writing process might yet prove a good idea. This draft is certainly bringing home the lack of world-building that I did before I started writing. There’ll be a lot to get down before I start the first draft proper. Many of the ideas are there though, in my head, or vaguely referred to in quickly-typed notes. Again, credit to the script outline draft – an extra stage in which to get this stuff right.

The one thing I did do before I started was a timeline. Something outlining how we got from (a little after) now to the stage we are at in my first Maelstrom book, spread across an area of space almost a hundred light years across, with upwards of fifty paraterraformed and terraformed planets under our control, plus almost countless other stations, mining operations and so on. Actually, this is making me think that I should explain something more about the book and what it’s going to be, but that’ll probably be another post, as this one has rambled on long enough.

Using Scriptwriting As An Outlining Tool

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After years as a freelance copywriter, and quite a few years as a ghostwriter, I am now on the road to self-publishing my own fiction. I have made the observances, beginning with studying the market and deciding which genre was calling to me both creatively and financially. Military science-fiction, as it turned out.

I studied those tropes – after looking up what tropes were and, as with a reassuring number of things so far on this journey, discovered it was all mostly stuff I would have done naturally anyway. I read a superb book on novel plotting. I’ve always sucked at plotting, and have got away with a lack of it on more occasions than I’ve deserved. Not this time, though. Time to start writing like an adult.

Now I am learning about marketing while, at the same time, doing something rather odd, something that I wonder if anyone else does.

Like I said, I suck at plotting. I have a good idea, I flesh it out well, then my mind goes blank until I actually start writing. The plotting book really helped to make sure that I sat down and constructed a plot scene-by-scene. But when that was finished, I still looked at most of those scenes and just kind of felt that they were low on detail.

So I had an idea.

I used to write scripts, mostly short ones. About 10 years ago, I finished a film degree, and scriptwriting was the skill I developed most during that time. I don’t love writing scripts in the way that I love writing books, but I do like the how it’s a really efficient method of getting a story down. Scripts are all about dialogue and bare-bones description.

So, most of the scripts I’ve written have been for short films, but I did write a 60-page monster one time, something a little bit like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a demon gets into people’s phones and starts possessing the teens of a small seaside town. Some time later I was looking for a story to write, so I took this script and started to write it as a book.

Revelation.

Writing this way felt so easy. Everything that was going to happen in any given scene was already there, so the writing process became about enriching it, bringing it to life and, where necessary, re-directing it. It was like something between drafting and editing. I never finished the book – can’t really remember why – but the experience of writing this way stayed with me.

So this is what I am doing with my military sci-fi novel. It’s a big investment of time, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be worth it. I’ve spent about two weeks (and generally about a third to a half of each working day) on it so far. I’m 90 pages in and hoping that another week will do it, but in all likelihood it will take another day or two beyond that.

What I’m writing isn’t a feature film script, not really. For one thing, I’m allowing it to run longer than a feature script should do considering the story I’m telling – putting in more detail, having scenes that describe characters’ internal thought processes, and so on. In other words, I’m not letting the format restrict me, that would be silly. Of course, conversely, there’s a balance to be struck, and I do occasionally have to remind myself that I’m only outlining here.

Would love to hear any thoughts about what I’m doing. Is this a waste of time? Is there a better way to overcome my outlining issues? Please comment below, I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts.