Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Author: Sean Flynn (Page 1 of 5)

The Gray God’s Countdown

August 5, 2024 /

For the ten days leading up to the release of my second novel, The Gray God, I ran a series of social media posts counting down to the launch. Each post featured an image to evoke a setting, scene, or tone from the book and a short bit of the book’s text. The idea was to tease but not spoil the reading experience. Social media being what it is, the odds of you having seen any of it are very low. So here, now, you can see the whole thing. No pesky algorithm can come between us. Rejoice and relive the countdown to The Gray God.

TL;DR

I enjoyed putting the countdown together and am pleased with images. I should have waited until only five days remained. Friends and family were on board early on, but only the most diehard followed the whole thing. If the algorithms even let them. From a marketing perspective, it was a good concept, but absent a large audience, it did not live up to its potential.

Countdown gallery

Behind the scenes

Each of the pictures was authored in Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a happy medium between MS Paint and Photoshop. It is relatively simple to use and supports layering images, quality text, and some simple but powerful effects. It’s about my speed.

At the bottom-most layer lurks the awesome cover art for The Gray God.

As the countdown progresses, more and more of the cover seeps through.

Next up is the scene image. Most of the pictures were taken by me on a field trip to the story’s setting: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I hiked through the woods around Sol Duc, east of Forks, and within the Hoh Rainforest, looking for fungi and forest scenes that I could use in my story.

As you can see, there were a few scenes where I didn’t have my own photos to work from. More on those in a bit.

The next layer in each is a scrim that dims the scene image just a bit so that the text layers above it have enough contrast with the background to be legible regardless of the image.

Yep, top two layers hold the countdown number and the excerpt text.

Beyond my camera roll

Days 1, 3, and 5 needed pictures I didn’t have. Each has a different solution.

Day 5: I started with a picture of myself in hunting clothing.

The plan was to crop it as you see above and turn my whiskers black to match the character in the scene. I could not make the color change work. At all. So, I cheated. I took the picture into Night Café’s suite of AI image generators and told it to replace my face with a “hunter with a black goatee.” After numerous iterations, I found one that satisfied me.

I used Paint.NET’s oil painting filter to smooth out the differences between my photo and the generated face.

Day 3: In the story, Joseph tells Pete about how he felt living in poverty near SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in Texas. SpaceX was kind enough to provide a nighttime launch photo that was free to use via Pexels.com.

Day 1: After a long, frustrating search for a public domain close-up of a brown iris, I returned to Night Café and asked for an “extreme close up lidless bloodshot brown eye wide with fear.” The AI obliged. Pexels ultimately provided a real-life alternative.

I was torn. I understand and am sympathetic to artists’ concerns about generative AI, but the AI eye was so much scarier. I ran the two of them past a friend with more expertise and he said the AI eye had more color, so that’s what I should use from an engagement perspective.

Day 7: I did resist the AI temptation in one case. Day 7’s scene was originally going to be when Pete arrives home to find the cops parked out front. Oh, no! Co-Pilot’s DALL-E generator did a surprisingly good job at conjuring what I had in mind for the house and the overall mood.

I abandon this Day 7 for two reasons. One was reluctance to rely so heavily on a generated image. The other was that the picture was too authoritative. It usurped the reader’s imagination. They should be free to see the shape of Pete’s house in their own mind’s eye. So that picture up there? Forget you ever saw it. It is not canon!

Playing in a small venue

Ten days before launch, I started posting the countdown pictures to both my Facebook profiles and to my author page. A few of my family and friends rallied to my cause and shared the posts, for which I am very grateful. But I haven’t earned a substantial fanbase, so most of the countdown was only seen (shown by Facebook to) a dozen or so people. The exception was Day 9. That one reached 253 people. Or something. Facebook isn’t saying why this one turned from a tiny bud into a small blossom. Being salty and cynical, I think it has something to do with bots. Or bugs in the Facebook code.

ALSO: It’s a fools errand to attempt serial storytelling using social media posts. The quality-of-service guarantee for deliver is rubbish. Don’t let Facebook, X, or whatever fool you into thinking otherwise. Rubbish, I say!

A few folks cheered me on through the countdown (bless them!), but ten days of posts is a bit much to ask anyone to follow. If I do it again, I’ll start on Day 5.

Doing it again is an open question. It took a lot of work—which I had fun doing—for very little pre-launch buzz. I think a countdown could be quite exciting for someone with a big, engaged fanbase. For someone of very small influence, attention might be more reliably drawn with another strategy. Say, making a drunken, naked spectacle of oneself on TikTok. Or whatever it is the youngsters are media-ing these days.

Thanks for reading this far. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, and share widely. Or whatever it is you do on the interwebz. I’ll be back soon with an update on Untitled Science Fiction Project.

Sticky post

The Gray God’s advent is upon us!

August 2, 2024 /

THE WAIT IS OVER! I know the strange joy horror authors feel when their madness is unleashed on the world. Iä! Iä!

Today, August 2nd, 2024, marks the launch of my second novel, The Gray God! Huzzah!

Social media “press release” follows:

Author Sean Flynn and Wicked House Publishing welcome you to Maanberg Springs and the eternal presence of The Gray God.

The job was as challenging and exciting as any high school senior could hope for: Pete Tyler would cook meth for his Uncle Kevin while his cousin Scott hunted for mushrooms to provide cover for their time in the woods. The excitement turns to terror, however, when Scott vanishes in the forest near Maanberg Springs. This isn’t a simple matter of search and rescue. Uncle Kevin is lethally determined to keep the drug lab a secret, and Scott’s father, Dan, is ready to use violence to learn what happened to his son.

When the reclusive Maanberg Society invites Pete to join their retreat for troubled youths, Pete sees a chance to escape his uncles. Maanberg may also hold the answer to Scott’s disappearance if Pete can play its games and solve its mysteries. He won’t be playing those games alone, though; five more kids, drawn by the organization’s promise of a bright future, are caught in the Maanberg Elders’ machinations.

Time is running out. An ancient and alien evil has designs on them all.

With blood we open the door!
Through sacrifice we know the Gray God!

Cover by Christian Bentulan
Interior formatting by Duncan Ralston

An AI's take on a lifting body spaceship in a starport hangar. Not the Duck.

Interlude with Ruler and Compass

January 29, 2024 /

Untitled Science Fiction Project features two teams of hero characters. Each character is cool in their own way, and I want to introduce them with a short scene (or two) so that the reader “gets” them and likes them. I was making good progress on this when I hit the wall with the last three characters. Consternation!

I decided to take a break from the writing and work on the designs of some key locations. Just as writing the main characters’ mini autobiographies will inform their choices and dialog, getting the details of the important settings will inform the action that takes place and help to make them believable “characters” in their own right.

Attribute it to failing memory or naïve optimism, but I thought I’d get this done in Campaign Cartographer’s Cosmographer module. Readers of this blog may remember that my previous attempt to enlist the considerable power of this tool in my worldbuilding project ran into its own wall in the form of CC’s steep learning curve and idiosyncratic user interface. Giddy optimist that I am, I thought that by starting with something simple—the floorplan of Blue Team’s mission pod—I could ease into using the tool before tackling the bigger settings. I can be such a sweet summer child…

Mission pod in Campaign Cartographer.

With some difficulty, I got this far before banging my head bloody against my monitor. I wanted to use a premade graphic to represent the fab(ricator). In any other drawing program, I’d select the graphic from the palette and click where I wanted to place it. Then I would be able to move and resize it as desired by dragging it and adjusting the little handles on its borders, respectively. This is not how it’s done in CC. How is it done? Damned if I know. Something about selecting it (can be tricky), then right-clicking on it, then selecting a command from the pop-up menu, then…??? I just didn’t get it. Per the worldbuilding post, amazing things can be accomplished with this program by a skilled operator. That’s not me. Sigh.

Frustrated, I retreated to what I know: ten-to-the-inch graph paper, a mechanical pencil, a ruler, and a compass. Ahhhhhh. The Good Old Days of drawing up maps and deck plans for D&D and Traveller.

Familiar tools enabled me to sketch out the mission pod with more erasing and less frustration. Yay!

It’s crude. It’s sketchy. It is littered with my handwriting. But it is done.  Enough for my purposes. I’ve accounted for the space and the key features. The textures, decorations, sounds, and smells will come later, as needed.

The Mahaan Batakh (Hindi: Great Duck. Grif insists on calling it Mighty Duck for…reasons.) is our hero spaceship. The Duck is an independent trader captained by a friend of Grif’s from his days with K-A Interplanetary, one of the larger military-security corporations. I had envisioned it as a decidedly non-sexy cargo ship with a general lifting body design. Scenes and actions I scripted during NaNoWriMo, and others that were still in my head, dictated certain features. The worldbuilding around spaceflight in my imagined future dictated others. So, I built the ship from the inside out. The cargo bay is big enough to hold the mission pod and…other…items. The crew and passenger deck connects to the cargo bay via a companionway just so. Cargo loads and unloads through clamshell doors near the bow. The fusion drive pivots downward in spaceflight mode so that acceleration is perpendicular to the decks. There’s room in the right places for the reactionless gravitic thrusters and their gimbals. Etc. This all involved numerous applications of the eraser. (D’Oh! I put the aft gravs where the yoke for the fusion drive needs to go!) Some of these verges on overthinking the problem. I found that some of the overthinking in the worldbuilding phase has been paying off, so better over than under. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The net results are also crude.

The larger scale drawings (one small square per 0.5 meters) are things only an author could love. And I’m probably the only one who can interpret them. Let’s hope I remember what all those overlapping lines are about.

My inside-out construction resulted in a spaceship with similar overall dimensions to Serenity, the hero ship from Firefly. This isn’t a coincidence, as Firefly is an important influence on Untitled Science Fiction Project. Mahaan Batakh and Serenity are also products of convergent/parallel evolution. Just enough spaceship for the characters and their adventures, but no more. The Duck is more aerodynamic and can carry more cargo. I like it and look forward to welcoming you aboard for the voyage to Nordlys.

Mammoths, mountains, auroras. AI generated by Juggernaut XL v5

Untitled NaNoWriMo After Action Report

December 2, 2023 /

By the numbers

NaNoWriMo 2023 is OVER! On the afternoon of November 30th, 2023, I crossed the 50,000-word line to complete the writing challenge. Yay me!

50,000 words in 30 days requires an average of 1,667 words per day. I…averaged that much. My daily word count totals were all over the place. Some days, life intrudes on writing. Such as Thanksgiving.

Writing 1,667 words per day is challenging, to be sure, but it’s below the 2,000 words per day of productive, professional authors such as Stephen King. Sorry. I’ll try harder.

What does 50,000 words mean? Publishers look for at least 60,000 words in a commercial fiction manuscript. Beyond that, it goes up by genre. Raether’s Enzyme is rather large for a thriller at 117,000 words. The Gray God is a healthy 85,000-word horror novel. For a new author’s adult science fiction or fantasy novel, 100,000 to 120,000 words is a good target range. For established authors, these rules are relaxed, as the author has an audience who trusts the author to make whatever word count worthwhile. Translating word count to page count is tricky. Format and typography play a big role. So, 50,000 words of Untitled Science Fiction Project is half, or less, of the final manuscript length. Or it would be if I hadn’t cheated.

Per my pre-NaNoWriMo post, I went into the challenge intending to finish my main character autobiographies and begin work on the story in screenplay format. This is what I did. Ha-ha! I cheated and I’m glad I did it! I regret nothing! At the end of the month, I had about 16,000 words of autobiography and 34,000 words of screenplay.

The bios will continue to inform how I write the characters. Portions of them may surface in the manuscript where appropriate.

What does 34,000 words of screenplay mean? In this case, the 34,000 words print out to about 158 pages. The film industry’s rule of thumb is that each page is about one minute of screen time. My incomplete Untitled Science Fiction Project screenplay is already over two and a half hours long. That’s the length of Dune (Part 1), which covers half of the 188,000-word novel.  Yikes! A more charitable comparison might be the adaption of the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes (144,000 words). The story there plays out over fifteen 45-ish minute episodes (approximately 675 script pages). Not an entirely fair comparison, as the show brings in characters and events from later in the book series before it wraps up the Leviathan plot line. The point is that a long script may still fit into a reasonably sized science fiction novel. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Evolution is a process.

Seasoned authors have a process, if not a formula, for writing their novels. My process is still evolving. With more seasoning, it may converge on something I can prescribe. Like so much in this blog, what I’ll do here is describe. You may scratch your head, stroke your chin, or laugh your ass off.  I’m not recommending you try this at home. I did, and time will tell if it worked.

So far, it never starts in the same place. Raether’s Enzyme started with wanting to tackle the themes of a previous superhero screenplay in a form that could be produced with a sensible budget. The Gray God began with a word picture of cultists worshiping a strange god in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Untitled Science Fiction Project was born of a desire to write a story whose movie trailer would have epic music. I want it to be big and fun.

For this project, I’m bringing together my favorite parts of prior processes and tossing in a few new ones.

Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God USFP
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo-ing a screenplay!
Drafting Planning Pantsing Plantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener Scrivener, Campfire
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile TBD. Maybe none.
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit TBD. Probably: Word, Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

 

I’ve decided I love working through the zeroth draft in screenplay format. I got much more of my story fleshed out during this NaNoWriMo than I did working on The Gray God in a previous NaNo. Bonus: It was easier to hit the word count goals. Once I get characters talking, the words just flow by the hundreds. These people just won’t shut up. In a screenplay, dialog can just be CHARACTER NAME followed by what they say.

QILIN taps his specs and casts a new holo that floats above the map. We see a herd of woolly mammoths grazing on the steppes. Snow-covered mountains rise in the background. The image crossfades to a similar scene at night. Now auroras shimmer and dance in the sky.

QILIN

Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!

SPHINX

Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.

QILIN

Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.

SPHINX

That’s how they went extinct the first time.

GRIF

There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?

No dialog tags (said, asked, whispered, etc.). Bits of action to frame the conversation. All those things will come in time, but here we’re trying to keep up with what’s being said. This does result in Tarantino-esque talking scenes that seem to go on forever. That’s okay because I’ll come back and trim things later. For NaNoWriMo, I wanted the words to flow. It was fun and I made progress in refining the characters’ voices.

Where do I go from here?

I plan to continue to work on the screenplay until the story is complete. It is much less expensive to rewrite or discard a screenplay scene than the equivalent scene in novel prose. The completed screenplay is something I can share with very intrepid early readers. This worked for Raether’s Enzyme. Two friends read the whole script in single sittings, and one of those was on the john. If the script can excite readers and pull them through the story, then you have reason to hope the novel will do the same.

For grins, I asked ChatGPT to adapt the scene fragment above into prose.

Qilin tapped his futuristic spectacles, initiating a holographic projection that materialized above the digital map. The hologram revealed a sprawling expanse of steppes, where a herd of woolly mammoths peacefully grazed. Majestic snow-covered mountains provided a stunning backdrop to the scene. The visual seamlessly transitioned to a nocturnal setting, with the same landscape bathed in the soft glow of auroras dancing across the sky.

Excitement bubbled within Qilin as he shared his discovery with the group, exclaiming, “Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!”

Sphinx, ever the voice of reason, countered Qilin’s enthusiasm, “Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.”

Undeterred, Qilin proposed a compromise, “Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.”

Sphinx, with a hint of sarcasm, responded, “That’s how they went extinct the first time.”

Attempting to restore order, Grif intervened, “There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?”

Fear not, dear readers. I will be adapting Untitled Science Fiction Project by hand.

And I’ll let you go early. This post is only 1,267 words long.

Generative AI has been well-trained on a corpus of generic science fiction art.

Get Ready to RUMBLE!

October 31, 2023 /

Na-No-Wri-Mo, here I come!

Right back where The Gray God started from!

At the gym today, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo 2023, the current iteration of the 50,000 words-in-a-month writing challenge. Yes, I am writing this on October 31st, 2023, the day before the challenge begins. As with my previous NaNoWriMo, an important part of my motivation here is to hold my feet to the fire writing-wise. Also, per my previous NaNoWriMo, I’m charging into this without a solid outline. Hey, I’m happy with the results of the last run, so I’m optimistic.

The same, only different

This time around, I’ll be working on Untitled Science Fiction Project. In previous blog posts, I discussed the lengthy worldbuilding phase of this project. Since then, I’ve been working* on character backgrounds in the form of mini-autobiographies, which flesh out the details of their pasts and refine their distinctive voices.

I’ll be working in Scrivener again. It’s a great writing tool. Its ability to break a manuscript into independent scenes makes jumping around the plotline easy. This is especially boon-i-licious when you have scene ideas scattered from beginning to end. You go where the muse takes you to get your precious word count goal for a given day. NaNoWriMo doesn’t require you to produce a coherent product, just 50,000 words of product.

I’ll be sticking to my plan of developing the story as a screenplay. This worked, albeit unintentionally, for my first novel, Raether’s Enzyme. The screenplay format is brisk, lean, and hyper-focused on key story details: character, setting, and plot. A screenplay can serve as a super outline for a novel. You have the essentials, which can then be developed into prose.

Another key lesson from the previous NaNoWriMo is: Always cheat, always win. The best you can hope for in NaNoWriMo is first draft quality. Unless you’re Stephen King, who routinely writes at 2000 words/day. By cheating, I mean counting material that may not make it into the final product. Say, for example, the as-yet-unwritten mini-autobiographies. Those are pure backstories, but I’ll count them. Bits and pieces of them may get woven into the ‘real’ story.

Wish me luck

Please. To the extent I succeed, I’ll have built momentum for Untitled Science Fiction Project. Yay! Getting it to a good state before production and publicity work for The Gray God kicks into gear is the goal. If you have a NaNoWriMo account, you can follow my progress on my NaNoWriMo here. I’ll be posting updates on Facebook and X as the month progresses.

*Of late, my level of work output brings to mind this scene from Office Space.

Peter meets with the Bobs in Office Space.

“Well, I Wouldn’t Say I’ve Been MISSING It, Bob.”

Hotel hallway
The ghost is hiding around the corner.

Get Short-er

September 20, 2023 /

Short form ambivalence

Short stories aren’t my thang as a reader or a writer. Which isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed them; The Rule of Names is a terrific short story. More often than not, I just don’t find them satisfying. To the extent that I can get invested in the characters and their worlds, that investment is short-lived. The plots are simple, out of necessity, even when the endings twist or sting. These issues bite me on the writing side as well. Building up the creative head of steam to write is harder to amortize when the story is short. Walking away from characters and worlds after less than ten thousand words is hard to justify. The ideas that excite me invite lengthy exploration. All that, and I lack the skill and experience to efficiently craft short fiction.

That’s something I want to correct, but not enough to abandon my novel-length projects. Or so I thought…

Roadside targets of attractive opportunity

I didn’t set off on my recent road trip with the intent of anything other than visiting friends I hadn’t seen since the Before Time. My journey took me to central Nevada, where I stayed several nights at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah. The Mizpah is a grand old hotel, built during a silver boom in the early 20th century. The silver ran dry long ago, but US 95, connecting Reno to Las Vegas, passes through the town and life goes on. And so does the afterlife. The Mizpah is haunted.

Modern connectivity allowed me to share this interesting feature with a friend in a different time zone. The conversation went something like this:

The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, NV.

Tonopah, NV. Rumored to be haunted. Didn’t see any ghosts last night.

You don’t see them when they possess you.  Any missing time last night?  If so might be time to leave town

Good point

And now that you mention it, I can’t account for most of the time between 10pm and 6am…

My friend had given me a rare and special gift: a story idea. Writers’ friends and acquaintances have no shortage of story ideas that they’re happy to offer you. Most writers aren’t wanting for ideas. Time, energy, and discipline to pursue their copious ideas tend to be what is in short supply. I can’t say for sure that my friend wasn’t deliberately seeding a story idea, but having this come up during our typical banter got the idea past the defenses I put up when someone says, “Hey, I’ve got a great story idea for you to write.” What made this extra special was that my gut told me I could turn this into a short story.

The horror, the horror

One of the challenges in fiction is building reader empathy for the main character (MC). You generally need the reader to like the character, even an anti-hero, enough to follow the MC through the story. Wide swaths of the general readership will tune out if the character is ‘unlikeable.’ And a fraction of those will take a dump in your Amazon reviews. It is what it is.

The rule is relaxed for short fiction. Perhaps even inverted. When space and time are in short supply, it’s a lot easier to get a reader to hate a character. The MC can be dastardly on the condition that he gets his karmic deserts at the nearby end of the story. Horror, macabre, and mystery fiction have exploited this since at least Edgar Allan Poe’s time. Tales from the Crypt and other horror comics from the 50s skated the censorship regime of the times by having bad people meet terrible, ghastly, horrific ends. It’s a morality tale about the wages of sin! See? No? Yeah, the ploy didn’t always work, but it did allow us to rationalize our sadistic glee by telling ourselves justice prevailed. Prevailed in the goriest, most ironic way possible. Yay, justice!

Rebecca’s Curse – The Short-er Story

The MC for my ghostly possession story is a bad man. I won’t spoil whether I deliver on, or subvert, your expectation of justice by the story’s end. What I will spoil is that I failed to write a proper short story. My preferred draft is 11,300 words long. I call this the Director’s Cut. That’s technically a novelette. There’s very little in the way of a market for a novelette.  I did edit it down to a Theatrical Cut of 7300 words. That’s a beefy short story. It’s also not as good.

It remains to be seen if I’ll place the story anywhere other than this blog. When I know, you’ll be the next one to know. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading!

The Gray God will be published by Wicked House in 2024!

June 27, 2023 /

I’m happy to announce that The Gray God has found a publishing home with Wicked House Publishing. Stay tuned for updates as my novel of cosmic horror progresses down the road to publication!

The Fractal Dimension of a Half-built World

March 18, 2023 /

All the world’s a stage

Every story requires worldbuilding on the part of the author. The stage must be set, and the lights hung, before the audience files in. For historical fiction, the author reconstructs the world of the past such as the story demands.  Contemporary stories also require research. Readers are distracted by flaws in 1:1 scale models of subjects they know well. The audiences for science fiction and fantasy don’t demand realism per se, but they want a measure of consistency that respects the effort they put into suspending disbelief. They reward the crafting of fantastical worlds that exceed their expectations.

Untitled Science Fiction Project (USFP) requires worldbuilding on my part. I’ve been working at it for a while now and think I’m where I need to be to shift my emphasis toward the characters and plot of an actual story set in the world. This post outlines how I came this far and owns up to some of the mistakes along the way. More experienced writers may notice unowned mistakes.

Genesis Vector

My previous two projects, Raether’s Enzyme and The Gray God have been described as dark. (I like to think Raether has a dazzling and beautiful light at the end of its tunnel.) While I was writing The Gray God, the red band trailer for Hellboy (2019) dropped. When I realized it was a reboot, I lost interest in the movie. But I’m a sucker for epic trailer music, and the cover of Smoke on the Water by 2WEI got its hooks into me in a good way. I knew then that I wanted the next project to have an epic score. I wanted it to be awesome and fun. That’s all I knew. Was it science fiction or fantasy? Didn’t know. Just knew that it would be cool.

Spoiler: It’s science fiction

Yeah, you knew that already. USFP. I didn’t know it until The Gray God was off with the developmental editor. I just have more science fiction in me than fantasy. To honor the original intent, I set some stakes in the ground early on.

  • It’s not hard science fiction. Well, not The Martian levels of hard. Meeting that bar and leaving room for epic Rule of Cool shenanigans is, well, very hard. So: reactionless thrusters and faster-than-light travel are in play. Aiming for 3-4 on the Moh’s Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
  • Adventure is possible. So, no 1984 levels of dystopia.
  • The Singularity hasn’t happened. The emergence of godlike AI or similarly godlike post-humanity rewrites all the rules and dominates the world. By its very nature, the world after the Singularity isn’t one we can anticipate. There’s room for recognizable stories among the still-human survivors, but my last two stories had eschatological overtones. I need a break from that. Maybe you do too.

I strive to tell interesting stories that are fair to their characters and worlds. Towards those ends, I’ve set additional constraints.

  • Humanity tends to make a muddle of things. The future holds progress, but we’re still a bunch of primates prone to screeching and flinging poo. Nation-state conflict is still a problem, but systems of cooperation have prevented Armageddon.
  • It’s not your utopia. Or mine. We all make mistakes. Sorry.
  • People are still people. Genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation are enabling technologies, but they operate on the periphery of what it is to be human.
  • People still fight. Yes, there are killer drones and robots, but their hackability has prevented warfare from being completely automated. Attempts to do so ended badly.
  • No near-peer aliens. The odds of encountering intelligent life that happens to be technologically on par with us is too low. It could be rationalized somehow, but to be fair, I think the odds favor our finding Precambrian swamps and/or being found by aliens that operate in Clarke’s Third Law territory.
  • No force fields. This one’s really arbitrary. A line drawn between USFP and free-wheeling space opera. This is a tough one that I may revisit. Characters and ships having ‘shields’ allows for more spectacle, but it seems like a technology that would permeate its world. I want to see if I can pull my adventure off without relying on this trope.

The sum of these constraints suggests the science fiction space inhabited by The Expanse. Sure enough, it does. I dig The Expanse. An interesting (and certainly deliberate) feature of that world is how it downplays computer and information technology in human space. People use computers, but they remain the sole agents of change before the arrival of the alien protomolecule technology. I respect that choice. It keeps the story centered on people and allows the action to be driven by human nature and human politics. Writing in today’s world of emerging AI applications, I feel that pending a Butlerian Jihad (Frank Herbert’s way of factoring AI out of his Dune universe), a future world should have forms of machine intelligence. That pulls us toward the kaleidoscopic virtual worlds of cyberpunk.

So, one more stake in the ground:

  • Artificial intelligence, robots, and networking are prevalent, but not dominant, in human affairs. We’re somewhere short of the Singularity and our interaction with the machines hasn’t transformed us into something unrecognizable.

Science Fiction is home to numerous subgenres. My constraints exclude some and contain others. Choosing among the available subgenres further informs the worldbuilding by highlighting tropes that characterize the subgenre. Within limits, you can blend subgenres in a way that pleases readers. As The Gray God embarked on its journey through the submission process, the component genres coalesced in the space bounded by the constraints. USFP would combine military science fiction with (post-)cyberpunk skullduggery.

Then I thought of an entertaining way to bring the two subgenres together. I’ll leave it at that, for now.

Exploring the Trope-iary Maze

Genres all have characteristic tropes associated with them. I read many of the foundational works of military sci-fi and cyberpunk over the years. In the lead-up to USFP, I read more recent works. I saw which tropes carried their weight across the years and I had a good time. Too good. There are legions of books, movies, anime, comics, and video games that play in these genres. I risked cheerfully chasing tropey knowledge across source material indefinitely. It was time to cheat.

The internet abounds with communities who delight in building encyclopedias or wikis. Wikis exist for anything that has a fandom. There are wikis for tropes. TV Tropes started with the modest goal of cataloging the tropes of television shows. Over the years, it expanded to cover all media with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy. It names tropes great and small and provides positive and negative examples from books, movies, television, games, and more. If you love stories, trivia, and encyclopedic scope, it is as glorious as it is dangerous. I spent untold hours of my youth studying The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Star Trek Concordance, and the D&D sourcebooks. That joy in disappearing down a rabbit hole came back in force as I plunged into TV Tropes to explore my genres. It’s light, fast reading. You can argue with some of its examples and make note of others as source material that demands attention. And you can wander off course chasing the patterns of themes and ideas in unexpected directions. I did all these things and had a great time doing them. And I wasn’t getting a world built. I had to stop, or I’d need an intervention.

It was time to start filling in the space whose borders I’d defined. Thanks to the TV Tropers, I had a wealth of blocks to fit between the lines and a better sense of how they might fit together. And I found peace with the certainty that whatever I came up with, it probably already had an entry in the trope wiki.

Fire and Anvil

Organizing a worldbuilding project has come a long way since the days of notepads and graph paper. For Raether and The Gray God, I relied on OneNote and Scrivener to record the research and imaginary elements I was adding to our present-day world (Pacific Northwest Edition). USFP is all imaginary elements. Organizing the planets, technologies, governments, megacorps, and history could be done with the previous tools, but it turns out there are better ones for the job. I experiment with my writing process with each new project. USFP’s experiment includes using the new tools.

Worldbuilding–whether in service of story development, RPG campaign planning, or for the fun of it–created a market for specialized software that is up to the task. Two of the big players in this space are WorldAnvil and Campfire. Both offer a suite of modules to support maps, encyclopedias, timelines, character development, and more. So much more. Both are fundamentally web-based and have a subscription business model. Being web-based permits you to share your projects with other people in their worldbuilding community and collaborate on development. Subscription levels determine access to features.

Both products offer a rich feature set and showcase the users who have done amazing work with the tools. Two things tipped the scale for me.

  1. WorldAnvil is a purely online service. Campfire has a desktop client that can work offline.
  2. WorldAnvil projects default to public. Campfire defaults to private.

Call me old-fashioned. I’m just not excited about all the things being in the cloud all time. I also don’t think I should have to pay for a baseline level of privacy. So, I went with Campfire.

Fits and starts

The shape of the story world was bounded and a constellation of tropes floated about waiting to be placed in the puzzle. I had ideas re the characters and story in very general terms. My thinking was that by fleshing out the world and its history, I’d have a substrate that would inform both the characters and the action.

I jumped into the Campfire timeline module to sketch history over the several hundred years to come. Some combination of my thinking, the process, and the tool didn’t click. I set dates for key technological development and First Contact. The latter marks the end of Earth, Inc. and the beginning of the Probationary Era. And then I stalled. I couldn’t identify how granular I needed to be. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t patient or clever enough to build a history that delivered the world I wanted for my story. It was time to cheat again. I would build the world that suited me and write as much of its history as I needed to rationalize it.

The encyclopedia module would capture a snapshot of the story world. Tropes would find their homes among its articles. This clicked. Articles spawned other articles. Tropes were embraced or discarded. Technological limits came into focus. Research ranged far and wide. Ecological succession. Fusion power. Wabi-sabi. Terraforming. Torchships. Principal classes of naval ships. Intermodal cargo containers. Synthetic biology. Multinational corporations. NGOs. PMCs. Drone warfare. Cyberwarfare. Transhumanism. Corporatism. Social credit. Keiretsu. Lines extending from the present to interesting places in the future.  Each new article brimming with potential for more detail and suggesting related topics, demanding their own research.

It was a process that wanted to branch and grow forever. I realized that I don’t have forever. It was time to stop. For now. The systems of the world exist in sketch form. Political and economic ecologies provide opportunities for conflict and cooperation. Mysterious alien benefactors offer humanity new worlds for an unexpected price and threaten us with extermination for a specific transgression.

Mapulation

One of the joys of old-school worldbuilding was sitting down with some graph paper and mapping out planets, continents, kingdoms, cities, towns, and dungeons. As you might expect, the modern era has software to help you out with that. Campfire (and WorldAnvil) have tools to integrate maps into your worldbuilding projects, but both defer creating the maps to third parties. For good reasons. It turns out that a fantasy map-making program is a complex drawing tool in its own right. Two major players in this market are Worldographer and ProFantasy Software. They offer feature-rich packages that enable dedicated users to create rich maps ranging in scale from astronomical to humble abodes. I decided to take them out for a spin.

Fractal Terrains 3 from ProFantasy. The use of fractal algorithms to generate realistic rugged terrain goes back to the 1980s, famously starring in the Genesis planet sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Fractal Terrains harnesses that magic to create worlds with intricate mountain ranges and crinkly coastlines that you can zoom into from a global perspective down to a tiny island off the coast. (There’s a certain point in the zoom spectrum where things start looking strange.) You can control a wide variety of parameters: climate, sea level, tree line elevation, map projection style, and color scheme, to name a few. It’s pretty neat and there’s a free trial version to play with.

Campaign Cartographer 3 from ProFantasy. This will let you do any sort of map you want. In the hands of a skilled artist, it enables the creation of fantasy maps that are worthy of publication or inclusion in a AAA video game. It is incredibly powerful and flexible—to a downright daunting degree. For a newbie, its complex palettes of tools and customization options are labyrinthine. Everything you need is there…somewhere. YouTube tutorials are a must to even get started.

Worldographer has its own complexities, but like Fractal Terrains, it will offer to make a map to start you out. You supply the parameters, and it conjures a map for your world in the style of your choice. I found it simpler and more approachable. With my background in worldbuilding for Traveller, Worldographer’s process for setting up an icosahedral planet hex map was straightforward. This simplifies a globe into twenty flat triangles. You don’t have to worry about whether Greenland is bigger or smaller than it appears.

I set my parameters–I’m looking for an Ice Age world with more land relative to ocean than Earth—and rolled the world-making dice in Worldographer many times. The results were interesting but not satisfying. Part of it was that I had a vague notion that action on the planet would be split between a more temperate equatorial continent and an unsettled polar land mass. Rolling the dice wasn’t delivering that. No problem I could do that on my own. The other thing was the map was, for a lack of a better word, arbitrary. It wasn’t completely random. There was a system in play. It just didn’t feel right. I got it into my head that what was missing was plate tectonics. There were no great mountain ranges thrust up by colliding plates. It bugged me. More than it should have.

So off I went down a geological rabbit hole. It turns out that plate tectonics is hard and not thoroughly understood. The number of plates in play on Earth changes depending on who you ask and how close you look. And their movements are…complicated. So, I spent some time trying to build my world from the plates up and failed. A cool online simulator tried to help me, but still I floundered. Ultimately, I wound up drawing my world’s equivalent of Pangea, breaking the supercontinent up and utterly faking it.

With my continents in place in outline form, I iced things over from the poles based on Earth’s last glacial epoch. It turns out that my North American perspective made my idea of how icy Earth was rather exaggerated. Sure, Canada and much of Europe were unrecognizable. Many other areas weren’t that bad. It made sense when I thought about it. There were still tropics and hot deserts. It’s not like those ecologies evolved after the glaciers retreated. With that in mind, I tried to fill every hexagon on my map with something that made sense. It also turns out that climates and biomes are…complicated. I was obsessing over details that could inform my story, but they probably wouldn’t.

The mapping process had gone over budget. Just like the encyclopedia. It was time to put it on hold until I could focus on regions that the story needed. I wouldn’t know which until I had more of the story in mind.

How long is the coast of Britain?

By the light of fractal geometry the answer is: It depends on the length of your ruler. The coast “gets longer” the closer you look at it. If your ruler is 200km long, then the length is 2400km. With a smaller ruler, say 50km, you can trace out the details of the coastline more precisely and get a result of 3400km. We see increasing complexity as we zoom.

In each phase of my worldbuilding adventure I had no good idea what the right size was for the ruler. I kept zooming in and finding/inventing ever-increasing detail. My trope research, timelining, encyclopedia writing, and map-making overshot what I likely needed to make my story work. If this story leads to a series, I might recoup my investment. As it is, I won’t be able to work in all the detail I’ve come up with, but I’ll have plenty of things to choose from.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s to set a time budget for your worldbuilding and stick to it. You can always come back a fortify your imaginary world later. Better a half-built world and a story than an exquisitely built world where nothing ever happens.

Moving forward, I plan to focus on characters and story and build whatever else is strictly needed. Like hero spaceships and villain lairs. Such fun!

Guest Blogger Book Marketing Tips

February 20, 2023 /

I’m busy worldbuilding for Untitled Science Fiction Project, so I’ve enlisted a guest blogger to write a post of interest to readers of this blog. It’s everyone’s favorite robo-scribe: ChatGPT!

Here’s the prompt: write a blog post about how to market your novel and make it a bestseller

And without further ado:

Writing a novel is an impressive achievement, but getting it noticed by readers can be a daunting task. While publishing a book is a significant milestone, the real challenge lies in marketing it effectively. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some tips on how to market your novel and make it a bestseller.

  1. Build your author platform Before you start marketing your novel, it’s essential to establish a platform that helps you connect with your target audience. A platform can include a website, social media presence, blog, podcast, or any other channel that allows you to engage with your readers. Your platform should showcase your personality, writing style, and any other relevant information that can help you connect with your readers.
  2. Leverage social media Social media is an essential tool for marketing your book. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provide a free and easy way to connect with readers and promote your book. Make sure to create a professional profile that includes your author bio, book cover, and links to your website or blog. Engage with your followers by posting interesting content related to your book, hosting giveaways, or creating polls.
  3. Book reviews Book reviews are essential for promoting your book. Positive reviews can help you gain credibility and attract new readers. There are several ways to get book reviews, including reaching out to book bloggers, offering free copies to reviewers, and participating in book clubs.
  4. Book trailers Book trailers are like movie trailers but for books. They can be a powerful tool to promote your book and generate interest. A book trailer is a short video that showcases the main plot, characters, and themes of your book. You can create a book trailer on your own or hire a professional video production company.
  5. Book signings and readings Book signings and readings are a great way to connect with readers and promote your book. You can host an event at your local bookstore, library, or any other venue that attracts book lovers. Make sure to promote your event on social media, your website, and other relevant channels.
  6. Build a mailing list Building a mailing list is a great way to stay in touch with your readers and promote your book. You can use email marketing tools to collect email addresses from your website visitors, social media followers, and event attendees. Make sure to send regular newsletters, exclusive content, and promotional offers to keep your subscribers engaged.
  7. Offer freebies and incentives Offering freebies and incentives can help you attract new readers and promote your book. You can offer free chapters, short stories, or other exclusive content to your subscribers. You can also run a promotion where readers can get a free ebook when they buy a paperback version.

In conclusion, marketing your novel can be a challenging task, but these tips can help you connect with your readers and promote your book effectively. By building your author platform, leveraging social media, getting book reviews, creating a book trailer, hosting book signings, building a mailing list, and offering freebies and incentives, you can increase your book’s visibility and make it a bestseller. Good luck!

As you can see, it’s easy-to-read, actionable, and a regurgitation of conventional wisdom. And it only took a few seconds to generate! I’ll have spent much longer on my commentary and NightCafe image generation (prompt: robot novelist struggling with writer’s block renaissance painting oil on canvas) than either AI spent generating their contributions. All hail our robot overlords content producers!

The Gray God’s Editing Odyssey

April 11, 2022 /
Witch's Jelly/Butter.

Absolutely not from outer space.

Almost three years ago, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete milestone.  I had a story with kids, cults, and monsters. It was okay, but very much an early draft. I put it on the back burner while I prepared Raether’s Enzyme for submission to literary agents and then self-publishing. My mushroom monsters simmered all the while, getting varying amounts of editorial love, evolving into something that you might want to read. This is the story of that evolution.

Reader Zero

A good friend volunteered to read the Narrative Complete draft. This was a generous offer given that he has negative interest in stories featuring young people making bad decisions. He returned with numerous useful notes and keen observations, the most important of which was that my main character was playing hard-to-like too well. I had intended Pete to be rough-edged. You don’t get into his sort of troubles by being a shining beacon of humanity. Nonetheless, the reader wants to either feel for the character, look forward to his downfall, or secretly revel in his transgressions. Fixing Pete to Reader Zero’s satisfaction wasn’t in the cards, but I resolved to smooth and soften some of the kid’s rougher edges.

The Real First Draft

The Gray God sim-sim-simmered. I reread it and studied the distribution of word counts across its chapters and acts. Some of the chapters ran long. I identified new chapter breaks, which gave scenes more room to breathe. When I look at the chapter breakdown now, it seems like it’s the way it always should have been.

The ending was too short. It wasn’t strange or horrible enough. I had teased monsters, alien horrors, and certain conflicts, but the pay-off was perfunctory. I split the final chapter in two and did my best to deliver blood, gore, madness, and cosmic horror.

As I made these changes, I kept an eye on the growing word count. The sages of the internet recommend that horror novels weigh in at 80,000 words or less to have the best chance of acceptance by agents and publishers.

My second courageous early reader took The Gray God home and returned with helpful notes and positive feedback. The characters worked as I’d hoped, as did a plot twist I was particularly happy with, in an evil way.

Wise of the Machines

Bad writing is noise that obscures the signal of the story. Computers can’t identify plot holes, weak characterization, wooden dialog, or a host of other story flaws, but they’re pretty good at spotting typos, misspellings, some grammatical errors, and overuse of words. Playing to the strengths of the machines, I enlisted Word, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and AutoCrit to filter out some of the bad writing noise than was fuzzing my story. None of these tools plug into Scrivener, so the process included exporting (compiling) the Scrivener project into a Word document for analysis. Errors and improvements then had to be made in the Scrivener project.

At the end of the process, I had a reasonably clean 80,000-word manuscript. I was ready for the next step in my insidious plan.

The Voice of the Outer World

Reducing the noise to expose the story was important for the next step: Developmental Editing. In a developmental edit, the editor is looking at how well the story works and provides feedback on the plot, characters, tones, themes, and general story quality of the manuscript. Any editor you’d want to hire for this service should have industry experience. That means they’ll have a keen eye for writing errors. It will probably be difficult for them to silence their inner copyeditors. To make it easier for them to focus on the story, it behooves one to deliver as clean a manuscript as practicable.

Developmental editing was a step I skipped for Raether’s Enzyme. It was important to me that Raether be my story—sink or swim—from beginning to end. I’m not as protective of The Gray God. It’s a more conventional—and possibly commercial—story. I went into the developmental edit intent on improving it in the direction of salability.

I returned to Reedsy to find a freelance developmental editor who worked with horror.

Ambitious amateur tip: Line up your developmental editor well in advance.

Of the three best matches for my project, one couldn’t take on a new project and the other two were booked months out. After toying with the idea of enlisting the other two, I settled on one and arranged for The Gray God to pass under her red pen later in the summer.

Once the ball was rolling, I soon had an editorial assessment, matching developmental notes for the manuscript, and some quality copy edits (she said she couldn’t help but fix errors when she saw them).

Her assessment highlighted what worked in the story and outlined areas for improvement with specific examples drawn from the text. It was well-written and full of actionable insights that I’ll apply to future projects.

Her manuscript edit was thorough and clear. I know what scenes and passages worked well for her. She flagged each point where the plot, setting, or character motivation was unclear. All the issues summarized in the assessment were noted in the Word comments with precision and the encouragement and coaching I need to make the story better for readers.

There was much to think about and to do. Specific issues called for delicate surgery in situ. The editorial assessment called out general patterns of weakness. I was light on character and scene descriptions. The longer dialog scenes drifted out into voids, unanchored by place or motion. It was a fair cop. I needed to fortify the descriptions and break up the dialog with meaningful actions. My inner screenwriter had delegated those details to the set and costume designers, and the actors, respectively. It was a problem I needed to fix.

Plot complication: The manuscript was already at the upper end of the word count for my genre. I consulted the editor and she said I could cheat it up to 85,000 words if I did it well. Doing it well (I hope!) and under budget required finesse. And removing a whole scene. Five hundred words mattered. The final total was just under 85,000 words. I won’t lie. I kept tinkering until I hit the limit.

The Chicago Way

The winner of a Clash of Copyeditors had an opening in her schedule and I jumped right in. She worked her diligent, painstaking magic to cleanse my manuscript of error and bring it into the light of The Chicago Manual of Style. She noted where things were unclear and offered improved word choices. The Gray God is mightier for her efforts.

I had come into a new pattern of error, which I will blame on Word. Word had been encouraging me to omit commas before conjunctions where the clauses were short. This may be what’s hip for business writing these days, but it is not the Chicago way. And given the alternative of sticking with Word’s suggestion or the corrections of a professional editor, I had to go with my editor. I spent a good long time porting commas back into the Scrivener project.

Another place where Chicago and my manuscript differed was on capitalization. Chicago has deprecated the capitalization of Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force as stand-alone terms. That doesn’t strike me as right. And it would likely…disappoint…friends of mine who are veterans of those services. As used in the story, these words are short for United States Marine, United States Army, United States Navy, and United States Air Force. Those are capitalized.

Chicago has also chosen to not capitalize God’s pronouns and epithets. I get the idea of not capitalizing these words as a matter of secular style. When they occur in dialog from religious characters, I think capitalization should apply.

If I wind up self-publishing The Gray God, I’ll have the last word on these controversies, at least within the scope of my book.

My editor also informed me that in the interest of inclusivity, words from other languages are no longer set off in italics. There are always trade-offs.

The Package

A clean, polished manuscript is a fine thing to have, but delivering it to an agent or publisher comes after you pitch the book via a query letter. The Gray God needed a short, punchy query letter to intrigue the industry folks, or at least let us all know that the book isn’t what they can risk their time championing before gatekeepers further down the line. Some agents also want to see a short synopsis that lays out the main beats and ending of the story. Spoilers be damned! The manuscript, query letter, synopsis, and author biography form the package of documents you need to have ready before you submit your first query.

The Gray God’s package is complete. It is time.

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