Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Category: Author’s Journey (Page 3 of 3)

Things to Do in Denver While You’re Read

June 19, 2018 /

No, not the movie.  I’m referring to the song that the movie borrowed its title from.

I called up my friend LeRoy on the phone
I said, Buddy, I’m afraid to be alone
I got some weird ideas in my head
About things to do in Denver when you’re dead…

It was exactly like that, except completely different. As readers following these posts in chronological order know, the simply difficult process of adapting the screenplay for Raether’s Enzyme into a novel manuscript reached narrative complete in October 2017. I wasn’t dead, but it was a period of relative quiet. My brain was cooling with subtle ticking noises and spurts of steam. Sizzling drops of cerebrospinal fluid hit the floor.

Friends help you move read your Facebook posts.
Real friends help you move bodies read your first drafts.

Unresolved bugs and story ideas lurking in OneNote invited me to dive into editing and rewrites, but the writings of the Ancients said that I should step back for at least two weeks then approach those tasks with refreshed eyes. My own experience in the software industry also argued that I should wait for feedback from my beta readers before making any big changes to my story’s code. That feedback would reveal a heat map of where the writing and story were strong and weak. The heat map would shape edits and rewrites, steering me towards what needed fixing and away from breaking things the readers already liked.

My courageous beta readers needed time. They had jobs, families, and lives of their own that somehow had priority over reading hundreds of pages my freshly-picked words. After months of working with imaginary people who existed to advance my narrative, the loss of control inherent in handing work off to real people was…grounding. While the beta readers worked, I was alone with some weird ideas in my head.

Doomsday Prepping

In the 20th Century, failure to secure a publishing deal all but doomed a novel. Vanity press was an option, but an expensive one with a low chance of successfully connecting the story to its audience or making money for the author. The new millennium saw the advent of eBooks and Print-On-Demand (POD) services. These disruptive technologies lowered the cost of “vanity publishing” to the point where any author could put their book up for sale in digital form or actually hold a bound copy in their hands for a modest price. These options have advanced to a point where they have challenged the traditional publishers and sparked lively debate as to whether authors of any level of success should submit their manuscripts or self-publish.

So, the arrival of that last rejection letter is no longer doomsday. Preparing for self-publishing is prudent. That’s what I told myself when I prioritized an exploration of self-publishing over working on a query letter, writing synopses, proofreading, and sundry other tasks. A friend had a good experiencing publishing a how-to book via CreateSpace, a POD appendage of Amazon. He assured me that I could hold a proof copy of my story in my hands without committing to publishing on the platform. It was irresistible.

CreateSpace-ing RE Draft 1.0

I was still a bit leery of committing my work to CreateSpace, so I set up the project to “publish” a novel titled RE Draft 1.0.

CreateSpace will walk you through the pre-press process, which has a small number of steps and some of the pitfalls along the way. I reached the point where I had selected the 6”x9” trade paperback format and was ready to upload my manuscript. I hope that magic on their end would reformat the text as necessary. It didn’t. The file was rejected. The site listed a number of general errors regarding content being out of bounds. It said the book would be over 700 pages long. I was stunned.

CreateSpace is not without mercy. It wants to help. It produced its best effort to wrangle the manuscript in the form of a downloadable Word file. From that, I could see where certain graphics embedded in the text broke through the margins. The high page count came in part from the manuscript’s double spacing. There were problems page numbering and chapters starting on the backs of pages that CreateSpace didn’t flag. It was a mess. After another iteration, I broke down an enable Adobe Flash to run on the site, which enabled CreateSpace’s previewer to give me a good look at the book’s contents. A bit more fiddling and an argument over who was responsible for what part of the front matter later, and I had what I thought was a good interior.

Dev Art

With the interior settled, CreateSpace said I was ready to work on the cover. The site has a library of design templates and stock photographs you can combine for a professional-looking but generic effect. I had something more specific in mind, so I picked the Simplicity theme, which allowed me to supply an image file that defines the whole cover.

Those who have read my bio and have worked in the software industry are rolling their eyes. In the early stages of app development, the graphic design team is busy working on the art that will be folded into the product to make it beautiful and useful. To keep the project moving along, the software engineers supply placeholder art. The quality of these placeholders varies from crude scribblings to carefully crafted work that the engineer secretly hopes everyone will fall in love with and ship to the customer. These placeholders are known as ‘developer art’, or ‘dev art’. They are almost always far below the quality required to ship and are rarely seen outside the company. I knew what I was setting out to do was dev art. I knew that in the end, I would hire a professional artist to do a proper cover. But I just had to try.

I’ve seen thousands of book covers in my life. There was I time when I would buy a book if it had cool cover art. I could see the cover for Raether’s Enzyme in my mind. Our protagonist is in the foreground. Her hands are pressed against her solar plexus, trying to contain the luminous vapors of Raether’s enzyme. Her trusty dog stands watch behind her, where the villains of the story loom. It’s all dark and all the characters are backlit, appearing as silhouettes. The title is corrupted by digital noise. This is a techno-thriller.

My search for public domain and stock photos to build this tableau went nowhere slowly. I couldn’t even find a dog of the right breed in the pose I needed. A professional artist can draw people and animals. I was stumped and went back to the stage before the drawing board. What I came up was to combine a picture of a mountain lake here in the Pacific Northwest (setting) with a stylized DNA double-helix (Raether’s enzyme arises from a rare mutation).

I enjoy hiking in the Washington Cascades, so my photo library has a number of picturesque lakes to choose from. The best fit based on lake size and picture angle is Snow Lake. Of the many pictures I’ve taken there over the years, I picked this one as my backdrop.

For the DNA, I went to Google image search. I told Google I wanted a DNA helix that was large and free for commercial use with modifications. It needed to be big so that it could fill the 6”x9” cover without the loss of quality that occurs when you enlarge a photo or bitmap. From the results, I picked the following.

Which no longer appears in the free-to-use results. 🙁

The glowing orange contrasts nicely with the blues and greens of Snow Lake.

I loaded these images into layers in Paint.NET. To help the helix and the title text pop, I inserted a dark translucent layer in front of the lake scene. The result was also less cheerful, which is fine for a thriller.

Given the format (6”x9”) and the page count, CreateSpace will produce a template image with guides to where the art must fit.


Not actual size

I resized the background image to match the template and added the template as a translucent layer in front of the background. It was time to add the title, author, and back cover blurb.

Experiments with various recommended fonts were not satisfying. I wanted the title’s style to reflect the dangerous world between the covers. My search for a menacing (and free) typeface lead me to FontSquirrel. Oh. My. As someone who reveled in inappropriate typography when the Macintosh first unleashed bitmapped fonts on the world, I was in heaven. (FYI: Chicago+bold+shadow+outline is never the right answer to your typographic problem.) I downloaded several candidates. Conspiracy was the best fit.

A few layers more and I had my cover. I’d share it with you now, but… At the time I was satisfied with the cover as a prototype. It was dev art and thus doomed, but it would do for the time. After a few rounds of argument with CreateSpace later, the system green-lit my book for production. I was free to order proof copies. Giddy with optimism and delighted with the under-ten-dollar price, I ordered five copies.

Draft 1.0

What arrived in the mail was disappointing.

I’ve been around desktop publishing since before color was really an option, so I knew that there is always a difference between the colors the computer displays on the screen and the colors the printer can produce. I had naively assumed that CreateSpace would make a quality effort to translate my cover art from RGB to the printer’s CMYK colors with maximum fidelity. I was wrong. I found a handy site that will convert an RGB image to CMYK. All you need to do is pick the right CMYK color profile from their menu. CreateSpace technical support was unable to tell me which profile to use. Grrrrrrr! It took a couple rounds of ordering new proof copies to find one that worked. FWIW, that’s GRACol2006 Coated1 V2.

The interior was a mess as well. This was entirely my fault. I failed to change the text justification from left-justified to full-justified. The book had ragged right margins. That looks so wrong.

The manuscript->book recipe I arrived at is:

  1. Upload manuscript.
  2. Get errors.
  3. Download resized version.
  4. Change Body Text style to single-spaced, full justified, Garamond 12pt.
  5. Change Handwriting style to single-spaced Garamond 12pt.
  6. Resize MAPP/MOPP tables.
  7. Substitute ⁂ for # scene breaks. Add 6pt before and after.
  8. Change Chapter Style to Garamond 16pt.
  9. Check spacing around embedded text messages.
  10. Page headers – remove author/title. Garamond 12pt. Outside corner odd/even.
  11. Chapters begin on odd pages. Delete page break and insert section break as needed.
  12. Map cover art from RGB->CMYK:GRACol2006_Coated1_V2 via https://www.rgb2cmyk.org/.

(Scrivener is a promising option for the next book project. It abstracts the writing from the format, turning my hand-tuning recipe into something resembling a simple ‘Save As…’ operation. There are trade-offs. If you render your Scrivener project as a Word document and hand that off to an editor, all the edits have to be merged back into the project by hand. Or so I suspect. More research is required.)

I am done with my doomsday prepping for now. I can produce bound copies of my story with a modicum of effort. The proof copies preview how various formatting games might play out in the real world. I can offer them to beta readers as a friendlier alternative to a stack of loose pages or an electronic document. And I get the warm, fuzzy joy of holding a copy in my hands and gently stroking the dev art on the cover. Insert purring noise here.

Adapting the Screenplay

June 4, 2018 /

The previous post tells the story leading up to writing my first novel.

I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.

The Plan

I stood at my workstation with the screenplay PDF on the right side of my monitor and a novel manuscript template document open in Word on the left. The plan was to make the first draft as direct an adaptation as possible.

  • Lift dialog directly.
  • Grab the best descriptions with minimal modifications.
  • Translate the screenplay’s present tense action to the novel’s past tense.
  • Fortify scene and character descriptions minimally.
  • Defer addressing the impacts of advancing technology.
  • Complete first draft and work from there.

I tracked my daily productivity over the course of the first two weeks. Comparing the number of pages in the manuscript to the number of pages covered in the screenplay allowed me to estimate how long it would take to complete the first draft and how many pages I could expect it to be. Early on, it was looking like I would see two to three pages of manuscript per page of the screenplay and that the process would run for ninety days. I knew that was at best a lower bound, but still hoped it was in the ballpark. With one hundred or so pages of screenplay, the math said the manuscript would be 300 pages. I was worried that the book would come in too slim. I was very wrong.

Divergent Points of View

Before I got into serious trouble, I went off-plan in a happy way. Screenplays are generally written in the third person and the present tense. The tone of the narration, which is being delivered to the filmmakers as scene descriptions and stage directions, is consistent from beginning to end. It matches the overall tone of the script.

The script for Raether’s Enzyme does not stick with the protagonist all of the time. An early scene features a deputy sheriff confronting one of the problems that threaten the protagonist, who is off doing something less interesting. In the course of adapting this scene, it occurred to me that the tone I had been using didn’t fit. The third person narration was sympathetic to the protagonist. It reflected a young person of nerdly disposition who was struggling with depression. The deputy was more mature. She was also harder, more cynical, and more determined. If the tone and word choices gave the deputy’s perspective voice, the reader would see the story through new eyes. If I did this with the villains, I could show the reader how the bad guys were the heroes of their own dark stories. This was exciting.

This resulted in some dramatic tonal shifts between scenes. Early readers flagged cases where I needed to make it clear who the scene was tracking early on.

First Contact

Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
– Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

With hindsight, the clues were there. What I called the unpacking ratio, the number of manuscript pages for each screenplay page was drifting upwards. I was deviating from the plan.

The screenplay is a brisk thriller. Like many such stories, it moves through the complexities of the characters and the scenario very quickly in the interest of pacing. As I progressed, this seemed unfair to the characters and the world the story presented to the reader. It still needed to move along, but our hyperconnected modern world is wired to change in more extensive and dangerous ways than the world of 2003. As a smart, analytical person, our protagonist needed to react to the enlarged scope of her problem.

I accepted that this required a shift in strategy. I pushed ahead with the unpacking until I reached a critical juncture near the end of the first act. The scene in the screenplay is surprising, psychologically violent, and very short. It unpacked to something more revelatory, truer, and which was ultimately incompatible with the diabolical twist at the end of the second act. Damn. I loved that rug-pull.

Zeno’s Plot Point (with a whiff of spoiler)

Work on the second act proceeded, but I still didn’t have a replacement for my broken twist. It needed to flow naturally from the story before it and I wanted it to lead to the screenplay’s third act. Work became harder the closer I got to this hole in my story. I didn’t want to write anything I’d have to scrap on either side gap. That fear birthed a variation on Zeno’s Paradox of Motion and a perfect rationalization for stepping away from the work to enjoy the Northwest’s glorious summer.

I spent time with my villain wargaming evil schemes. He studied the protagonist, identifying her wants and needs. He found a weakness he could exploit. A new trap was set. I could move forward.

Narrative Complete Milestone

I come from the world of software development. Various old-school development models have points on the project schedule known as milestones. Reaching a milestone is cause for celebration. One such milestone is feature complete. This is where the team has delivered code to implement all the planned features but knows there is work to do on bugs, performance, fit-and-finish, etc. It is acknowledged that early user feedback from the subsequent beta testing may suggest important revisions.

In October 2017, I completed my first draft and declared Raether’s Enzyme narrative complete. The story I wanted to tell was all there, as were various typos, incorrect word choices, incomplete sentences, plot holes and narrative burps. While I made my first editing pass, I had beta test readers who offered to drive over the bumps and give me notes on the story as a whole.

There was much work to do but reaching narrative complete was cause for celebration.

Raether’s Genesis

May 30, 2018 /

In which I recount the origins of Raether’s Enzyme.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Way back in the 20th Century, I lived in Silicon Valley and did the sort of work you’d expect. I enjoyed hanging out with my friend M, who rented a real Eichler house in Mountain View. M is a talented hardware engineer with a strong entrepreneurial streak. We amused ourselves by dreaming up new devices of dubious utility aimed at people with more money than good sense. M’s residual ethics kept us from making millions by actually bringing the gadgets to market. One day, he took a break from suggesting a new Scam-u-tron to declare that we should make a movie.

Understanding the limited resources we had to work with, I spun-up the premise of our low-budget masterpiece. The Bay Area of that era was a hotbed for various self-improvement “technologies”. The Forum and NLP were in their heyday. The whole scene had a cultish vibe to it. In our story, a new mind technology hits town. Using Eureka, you can organize your thoughts and acquire knowledge in a way that reliably builds towards those elusive flashes of insight. Come to our seminar, we’ll show you how. The New Cognition™ may actually work. It may work too well for some people, who slip into a “hypercognitive coma” and emerge…changed.

It wasn’t what M was looking for, so I let it drop. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it really was an alien invasion via SETI or how the story should end.

The Dawn a New Century

Ten years later, I was taking a break from the open bit mines. Before I found a new corporate master, I wanted to try my hand at writing. In all those years, I hadn’t found a way around issues troubling Eureka and renewed efforts were unproductive. It bothered me that I was going back to such old story ideas. Couldn’t I come up with something fresh?

Yes, yes, I could. What I salvaged from Eureka was the format. A novel’s worth of writing was too daunting and I wasn’t clever enough to tackle my themes in a short story. Screenplays are lean, short, and at least comparable to a novel’s narrative payload once the artists and technicians of the film industry work their magic.

My first screenplay was an effects-heavy epic that combined hard science fiction with superheroes. The budget for The Atlantean would have been astronomical. At the time, superhero movies were not mandatory. Even today, no one would greenlight a spec script for a non-existent franchise. I figured that much out after completing the script. There was another problem. The audience for sci-fi superhero stories skews heavily adolescent male. Was there a way to explore the themes of The Atlantean in a genre that didn’t narrowcast? Could it be done on a small budget? Could I tell a superhero story that didn’t require super-sized willing suspension of disbelief?

Raether’s Enzyme was the answer to those questions. It was a techno-thriller with an appealing female protagonist. Its Pacific Northwest setting meant the production could leverage the economies of Canada’s film industry. Raether’s enzyme, the mysterious biomaterial, was a startling world-changer that didn’t dump a bucket of luminous iridescent goo over Science’s head. It felt almost-real, like something that could make headlines in tomorrow’s news.

Two of my early readers testified that they sat down planning to read a few pages and were drawn through the whole script. Where this happened to each of them was…amusing. It gave me hope that I was onto something worth pursuing.

An invaluable resource during this writing process was Dave Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible. Mr. Trottier also offers a script evaluation service. His critique was insightful and constructive. I balked when he suggested that I end the story earlier. He identified a specific point to close it off. During our phone consultation, he convinced me to cut the dénouement. The script and the novel are better as a result.

I submitted the improved script for the second season of Project Greenlight. Greenlight was a fascinating exercise in game theory. Contestants scored each other’s scripts and optionally provided feedback. Higher-scoring scripts advanced to subsequent selection rounds. Players had a choice of strategies. They could be fair and honest or they could work to knock strong players out of the competition to improve their own chances. Raether’s scores were split between people who really liked it, and said so in the comments, and those who silently gave it a minimum score. It sank without a trace.

Further exploration of the “breaking into the industry” process culminated at a big screenwriting conference in Los Angeles. There were so many aspiring writers in one place. We were all so sure that our story was the one The Industry was hungry to tell. The need for high hurdles and brutal gatekeepers became clear. As much as I loved my story, I couldn’t bring myself to move down there and run the gauntlet. I shelved my script and returned to the world of software engineering.

A Novel Idea

Long years of work for my benevolent overlords afforded me another opportunity to step away from gainful employment. It was time to give storytelling another try and see how much value I could create outside of the corporate matrix. Technological disruption created paths around the gatekeepers. Andy Weir and Hugh Howey provided proof that it was possible to connect compelling stories with their audiences. It was time to write my first novel.

I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.

How hard could that be? Well, that’s a story for another post.

In Medias Res

May 12, 2018 /

It is the Spring of 2018. Raether’s Enzyme is off with the proofreader. I have been over its 117,000 words many times, applying my own eyes and the mechanical expertise of Word and Grammarly until we reached editorial equilibrium. I deeply love the story, characters, and setting. I am at peace with the intricate body of words used to tell the story.  I have the resources to hire someone with the diligence to spot the remaining errors and the objectivity to call shenanigans on my stylistic experiments that don’t pay off. By the time you read this, the job should be done.

Work on the novel began in early 2017 with a blank template document and a screenplay. Borrowing nomenclature from my native software trade, it reached the narrative complete milestone on October 7th, 2017. In the intervening months, I have been fixing known bugs, addressing issues identified by early readers, and attending to general fit-and-finish.

Attending the 2018 Seattle Writing Workshop provided an opportunity to get a professional critique of my literary agent query letter. The feedback was detailed and actionable. It moved the meat of my query from teaser to a nano-scale synopsis. The query is better for the changes.

Before I send my first batch of queries into the world, the experts on the Web say I need to have an author platform in place. It should include outposts in social media and an author blog. So, here we are.

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