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.
Raether’s Enzyme launched to modest fanfare last week. The event marked the first time its cover was seen by anyone outside the small circle involved with A Dance with Designers. Established authors include a cover reveal event as part of the lead-up to a book’s release. Given how late in the game I committed to the final cover design and the small audience for a reveal, I decided to defer the reveal to the book’s launch.
The social media ads and assets I prepared in A Dream of Launching featured the cover at thumbnail size and exploited design elements extracted from the cover art, but they didn’t give the cover the stage to itself. It’s time to correct that. But first…
Left to right: First Dev Art Proof, Improved Dev Art, First Pro Art (Matte), Pro Art (Glossy), Enhanced Colors Matte, Launch Colors Glossy
Now witness the artpower of this fully developed and released book cover!
Cover Design: Stewart A. Williams. Cover photos by Pawel Czerwinski, Rodion Kutsaev, Roman Mager, Annie Spratt, Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona, all on Unsplash.
It’s really something. Just what that something is, I won’t dictate to you. I believe it embodies themes and ideas from the story with a strange beauty that conveys an honest promise. If the cover intrigues you, there’s a good chance that the story will satisfy you. That is my hope.
In A Clash of Copyeditors, two talented freelance editors improved my Raether’s Enzyme manuscript and I then struggled to merge their edits into a final draft. I bought my own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and verified that we now use the lower-case internet. There was much rejoicing.
Two is Good. Three is Better. Right?
Clash’s dual-slit copyeditor experiment went well enough that I was keen to try it again with the cover and interior design. I liked Reedsy as a place to connect with freelance professionals but it was too early to put all my eggs in their walled garden. One of my eggs, yes. The other I would entrust to someone else. Someone out there.
Be careful for what you wish for. To that end, I started my search with the following criteria in place and immutable:
One stop shop. For the cover, interior, and eBook to be consistent, I wanted one designer (or team) to develop all three. Typography on the cover should inform the interior. On a more concrete level, the dimensions of a paperback’s cover spine depends on the page count of the interior.
Genre agility. Raether’s DNA contains thriller, sci-fi, and a dash of superhero story. The designer portfolios I was looking for needed breadth. There are artists and studios out there who can land your cover solidly within the romance, science fiction, or fantasy spaces. I was looking for an artist who could compose from a multi-genre palette.
License free. Once I had the completed work, I needed to be free to use it without accounting for additional use fees. You know, in case I sell too many books.
I strive to be clear and forthright in my dealings. I prepared a project brief describing scope and challenges as I saw them. The designers I wanted to work with would cite details or ask pertinent questions in the course of formulating their offers.
The project brief I sent to each designer began thus:
Short version
Cover and interior design for eBook and print. 114,000-word manuscript. Mixed genre – a contemporary thriller with elements of science fiction and superhero origin story. Includes text messages, email, simple tables, and a few other stylistic flourishes that preclude direct application of a template.
I am exploring this process for the first time. I may hire more than one designer. In that scenario you would be paid in full and thanked profusely but might not see your contribution to the book go to market.
The long version goes on from there into spoilers territory.
After a long search, I landed on a book design site that I liked. Their portfolio was diverse and included authors that I recognized. The prices were higher than I expected and did not include eBook formatting in the package that was otherwise right for my project. There was space for my brief in the request-a-quote form, so I added it. I clicked submit and waited to hear back via email. The response was disappointing. Boilerplate outlined a cover and interior package that started out $500 more expensive than the package I had asked about. That base figure covered a page count that was much smaller than I knew Raether would need. The quote disagreed with the web site and indifferent to the details I had provided. I chose to go no further.
I approached the next design site with the same brief and more trepidation. Unnecessary trepidation. The designer (interior) had read the brief and asked to see the manuscript to better set the bid. These were folks I could work with. I had my non-Reedsy design team.
All this while, I had encoded most of my criteria into Reedsy’s marketplace search queries and spent many hours reviewing bios and portfolios. After much sifting and sorting I got it down to two candidates. One had a strong, broad portfolio and a background that fit the project well. The other had a distinctive distinctiveness to his work. I wanted to see what he would do with the project. I requested quotes from both. Be careful what you wish for. They were both available. Both were interested in the project and attentive to its requirements. Both were fair and reasonable in their offers. Dangerously reasonable. As in: I could hire both of them for what that first design site was asking. So that’s what I did.
Dosado and Away We Go
Every dance has certain steps. The copyediting dance is relatively simple. The writer presents the editor with a manuscript and any notes that might be helpful. The editor may in time respond with questions about the manuscript’s idiosyncrasies. The editor delivers a version of the manuscript with their recommended changes tracked by Word. The writer happily clicks ‘Accept’ on 95% of the changes and agonizes over whether the remain errors are something super clever and special. The dance partners thank each other and move on.
The book design dance is more involved and iterative. The steps I observed while collaborating with all three teams went like so:
The writer supplies the manuscript, notes about what they are looking for, and examples of relevant cover art.
The designer creates two or more preliminary cover designs.
The writer spends a day thrilled with and fascinated by the designer’s imagination and skill.
The writer agonizes about which design to choose.
The writer picks one design to move forward and writes up their thoughts on the cover.
The designer evolves the cover in response to the writer’s notes and delivers one or more variations of the core cover.
Repeat steps 5 and 6. The designers I worked with offered more than one revision as part of their services. If you need more than three, chances are there’s a communication problem or you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
The writer signs off on the cover design.
The designer takes the manuscript, front matter (copyright, dedication, etc.), back matter (acknowledgments, author bio, etc.) and instructions from the writer and combines them into a print-ready PDF.
The writer reviews the PDF and responds with any notes and corrections.
The designer updates the PDF in response.
Repeat steps 10 and 11 as needed. (Raether needed due to its formatting extravagances.)
The writer signs off on the interior. The page count is now known and fixed.
Optional: Paperback full cover design. Skip if the project is eBook only.
The writer supplies back cover blurb text and ISBN number.
The designer extends the cover design to include the spine and back cover with barcode.
The writer reviews the full cover design and responds with notes.
The designer updates the full cover design.
Repeat steps c and d as needed.
The writer signs off on the full cover.
Optional: eBook interior design. This is like the print interior design, with EPUB files taking the place of the print-ready PDF.
Working with one designer, a manuscript with conventional formatting, and a story with clear genre, this dance is intricate but the choreography is straight-forward. Working with three designers on a more complex manuscript (by novel standards), a mixed genre story, and consulting with my beta readers, is where the dosado comes in. From my perspective, it was more of a square dance than a waltz. I was switching partners, repeating steps, and listening for the next call. The extra work was rewarded with sustained excitement.
The Covers
In the first draft of this post, I went into detail about dance Steps 1 through 8. I described each of the cover candidates, my reactions to them, and which ones I chose to develop and why. That was the right thing to do for a private journal and the wrong thing to do for a blog post. While I had anonymized the designers, I was still exposing details of our collaborative dialog and painting with words works-in-progress that were not intended for a wide audience. To put it lightly: It was unprofessional. To put it honestly: I was betraying the designer’s trust.
Allow me to summarize. Each design team started with the manuscript, some notes, and a link to the educational saga of my own attempt at designing the book. The preliminary designs were exciting and diverse. Each artist found their own themes to emphasize and each of these pictures spoke a thousand words about what I had written. Each was a key with the potential to unlock the interest of readers who will enjoy the book. Studying the designs and writing feedback for the artists sharpened my understanding of what I was looking for. Picking one design from each team to develop forced me to separate what I wanted and liked from what the book needed. Reaching Step 8 was an awesome milestone, repeated three times.
Here are five of the things I learned during this part of the dance:
Don’t over-specify the design. What the designers created was far more interesting and original than what I had in my head. I put that creativity at risk by sharing too many of my own thoughts. If the designer’s process includes reading the manuscript, let the story itself make the suggestions.
Write good feedback on all the preliminary designs. You’ll only develop one, but what you loved about the others (and what didn’t quite work) will inform the evolution of your preferred cover. Getting your reactions and reasoning down in writing clarifies your thinking.
Putting your characters on the cover is hard. I read that without searching out a model and commissioning a photo shoot, you aren’t going to get a great match for features, expressions, or poses. This turned out to be true. Working with glimpses, abstractions, or silhouettes can put your protagonist on the cover without stealing the one of the most important things the reader imagines.
Test the designs at thumbnail size. Beautiful, subtle images and typography weaken when the cover is one of many thumbnails the reader is browsing through an online catalog. Unless or until the reader is looking for your book, the cover has to do its work when it’s small.
Favor fuel over maps when providing feedback. Inspire change rather than direct it. Request amplification or reduction of emotions instead of dictating new design elements. Identify problems in terms that allow the designer to find the solution. I did make some very specific requests. “Could we see the apostrophe more clearly?” The most nit-picky was: “Could we increase the kerning here?” Picking of nits should be the exception, not the rule.
On to the Interior
Dancing with designers inside the book’s cover is less emotional than the cover design. Absent interior illustrations, it’s all about layout, typography, and getting the fine details right. Some people have passionate opinions about fonts and might argue with their designer over which style of Baskerville to use for the body text. I’m not one of those people. Each design team picked a different set of fonts and all are pleasing to my eye. For a novel with the usual mix of narration and dialog, the first version of the interior may be the final one. Reviewing might catch widows and orphans, which are easily fixed.
Raether features stylings for which there appear to be no industry standards: dialog via text messages, email, and Slack chats. Its scene breaks take the form of headlines culled from the internet. These features presented a creative challenge for the designers. I had solutions for these problems and corresponding Word styles for the manuscript. The trick was to make them clear and pleasing on the printed page. As a general rule, a novel uses one font in its body text. There may be bold face in the chapter headings and occasional italics. After seeing the text messages in the main font, I asked the designers to use a sans serif font, like the ones you’re used to seeing on your devices, for all the electronic communication. This made the transitions between the digital world and the regular narrative clear.
The text messages were not done making trouble. In the manuscript and in each interior design, you see them as on your phone, with the messages from one person on the right and the other on the left. The designers had trouble keeping the messages on their correct sides. My bafflement turned to frustration. How are you getting this wrong? It’s right there in the manuscript! I didn’t actually blow up like that at them. I just made notes off all the places where the errors occurred. The errors were fixed. I cooled down and realized that if they were all having the same problem, it might well be in the manuscript. In the course of formatting the messages, I had allowed Word to spawn sibling styles for right and left side messages. Failure to consolidate those styles meant that while it looked right in the manuscript, the work the designers did to transform the message styles was error-prone. Document your fancy-pants styles and apply them with rigor.
The upside of needing revisions to the interior PDF was that I found seven manuscript errors that had slipped through copyediting. The designers were all kind enough to work those corrections into their revisions.
Popping down to the EPUB
EPUB is the (family of) standards underlying most eBooks. Under the hood, your typical EPUB eBook is a ZIP file containing XML documenting the book’s structure, CSS files describing its stylings, HTML files for all the chapters and sundry sections, and image files for the cover and any interior artwork. Having worked on Microsoft’s XPS documents and early versions of its web browser, this isn’t unfamiliar territory for me. Nonetheless, I sought help to ensure Raether’s eBook offered readers a polished experience.
Two of the three design teams opted out of the EPUB part of the project. To their credit, the Word files for the interior PDFs can be converted to EPUB and Amazon’s corresponding format via tools like calibre and Kindle Create. The process turned out to be mostly automated and otherwise straight-forward.
The third designer signed up for the job and probably wishes he hadn’t. Little did he suspect I would draw him into a vortex powered by my neophyte ignorance and long history in software development. He provided me with .EPUB and .MOBI versions of the book. I downloaded a variety of eBook readers to my PC, iPad, and iPhone to test out the file. I sideloaded the MOBI onto my Kindle Paperwhite. I changed color schemes and font sizes. There were problems. Some of them I attributed to dodgy apps. But on the Kindle, Kindle apps, and Apple’s books, I expected perfection and got bungled drop caps at the beginning of each chapter. The cover image was either clipped or stretched. I freaked out.
The designer was flummoxed. It looked great when he tested in Kindle Previewer 3. I downloaded this program and told it open the file. The other eBook readers had opened the file instantly. Kindle Previewer 3 popped up a little progress window. It wasn’t just opening the file. It wasingesting it. In the progress window, text flashed by. Something about ‘Enhanced Typesetting’. It turns out that drop caps are facilitated by ‘secret sauce’ that Amazon adds to the file as you hand it off to their KDP self-publishing site. Apple and the other big eBook sellers likely do the same. EPUB is an independent standard, but the big players “add value” to provide a more premium experience than the core standard allows. I needed to trust the system(s) to make things right. I apologized to the designer for raising the alarm. Ever the professional and diplomat, he said the project had been a learning experience for both of us.
When the Music Stops
I have three great designs. Each captures an aspect of my story and illuminates it with an artists imagination. Each is right in its own way. I want readers to see all three and pick the one they like best. But that misses the point. There aren’t any readers out there who will pay their good money for my book based on the strength of my name. I tempt myself with the possibility of selling different designs through different channels and tell myself it would be a form of A/B testing. Traditionally published books get different covers in different markets. I have spare ISBN numbers to apply as needed. Could I attract attention with such a stunt? Yes. Would I sow confusion where I need clarity? Probably. Am I trying to rationalize avoiding a hard choice? Definitely.
When the music stops, there can be only one. Somewhere down the line there may be an opportunity to share the other designs via special editions. For launch, I need one cover to share and advertise.
There is one more test to run. One more set of data to collect. I need proof that that each design works. Please stay tuned.
No, no, the cat hasn’t been partying on the keyboard. There is no cat. NaNoWriMo is the friendly abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. It isn’t so much a contest as a creative writing challenge. Can you write 50,000 words of new fiction in 30 days? That’s an average of 1667 words per day, each and every day. For reference, paperbacks run 300-350 words per page and the larger 6”x9” trade paperbacks are about 350-400. Four or five pages in a book you’d read. If you do the math, 50,000 words is a very slim novel. These days, novels with only 60,000 words are on the slender end. 120,000 words is considered bulky for a first-time author. Established authors can publish as many words as they want. For better and worse. If you reach the NaNoWriMo goal, you’re probably more than half-way through an initial draft. Yay!
PoMo is usually an abbreviation for postmodern. Here I’m saying it is short for postmortem. This is cheating in service of a bouncy blog post title. The corner of the software industry that I used to inhabit used this term to describe analysis and discussion after a project’s completion that focused on questions like: “What went well? What went wrong? What can we do better going forward?” Participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time provided a great opportunity asking such questions.
Pantsing Not Optional
And whose fault it that? Mine. I dithered about doing NaNoWriMo as Summer gave way to Autumn. I lied to myself about resolving the question during my October road trip. As November loomed, I had a story idea, a setting, a few characters, a couple of scenes, a couple of monsters, and the hint of a theme. I also had months of not-writing on my conscience. I needed to shake the funk of Raether’s Enzyme’s submission/rejection cycle.
This meant taking a trusting, desperate leap into Chapter 1 with no story outline and only a vague sense of the ending. This was at odds with my engineering mindset. I am a planner, a plotter. I want to hold the architecture and structure in my mind and work towards a design. For this project, I would be flying by the seat of my pants. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I was about to become a pantser.
On the Precipice
In the last week of October, I set up my NaNoWriMo profile under the alias Scriblius (contains spoilers for this metastory). The site encourages participants to supply book cover images for their novels. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I have an enthusiasm for dev art that is coupled with a serious deficit of artistic talent. I combined some dubious Microsoft Word WordArt with a crude approximation of one of my monsters. The result was art only a developer could love. To be honest, I did not. But here it is.
So wrong.
Scrivenering Things Up
As part of the whole experimental/improvisational thing, I decided that The Gray God would be my first attempt to use Scrivener. Scrivener is a creative writing tool that fills the role of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in the software world. It combines a word processor with tools to organize, reorganize, annotate, research, and format projects ranging from articles to screenplays, short stories, and novels. It doesn’t impose a workflow. Its outliner is useful for planners. Its ability to shuffle sections and scenes around is a boon to pantsers.
Into the Breach
The plan, or perhaps intent is a better word, was to write 2,000 words per day for a long as possible. For the first week, I did just that. If I had kept that up, I’d finish on the 25th, or have a chance to be properly human for a few days that month.
To reach that goal, I had to set aside editing as I went. I stopped stopping to correct and improve the text. Mostly. I just let it flow. If a sentence ran on or a scene was unnecessary, I kept it for the sake of the word count. This felt dirty. It felt like cheating. If I slowed down, I’d bail out of the scene and move on, sometimes jumping to some unknown point in the story and filing the material in the Chapter Pending folder in my Scrivener project. It was disorganized. It was naughty. It was fun. The results are…rough…to put it politely. To see what I mean, check out the excerpt I posted to NaNoWriMo from Day One’s writing. Yeah…it needs work. Lots of work.
The Joys of Pantsing
Pantsing offers the thrill of discovery. I started with what I intended to be the prologue. Two young men, Pete and Scott, are heading off into the deep woods with a nefarious purpose. Pete will cook meth while Scott collects edible mushrooms. At the end of the weekend, they’ll come back from “mushroom hunting” with no one suspecting they were breaking bad. Something supernaturally terrible happens to Scott. The original idea was that our main character would meet Pete later in the story and they’d reluctantly work together to survive our horror story. What I discovered was that Pete and Scott were younger than I expected. They were the same age as the main character in the story. I discovered that Pete was the main character and that Scott’s disappearance is what drives him towards confronting Lovecraftian horror.
This meant that my prolog needed to be the first act. Wow. It also revealed the template the evil cult used to select its victims. These kids were all at-risk youth, like Pete. I might well have sorted this out during planning. We’ll never know.
The Perils of Pantsing
Letting things flow and discovering the characters and the narrative voice on the fly is all well and good, but it does entail risk. The Gray God was intended to be straight-up Young Adult (YA) fiction. Pete and Scott are contemporary adolescent males who drop F-bombs with coarse frequency. Don’t get me started on their insidious Uncle Jack, who was another discovery in this early writing. That’s uncool for the audience of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. Can you imagine J. K. Rowling allowing Ron Weasley to curse like a soldier? “Bloody Hell” has a certain weight of profanity to it, but it’s still PG-13. Harsher language is alluded to while Rowling uses her fantastic setting to substitute more wizardly oaths for common profanity.
So, pending significant adjustments to tone and language, pantsing blew my marketing plan to smithereens.
The Terrible Two
NaNoWriMo encourages its writers to update their word counts daily. Combine that raw data with anecdotes from its vibrant user community and a pattern emerges where the second week is when things get more difficult. The initial adrenaline is spent. Mistakes made in the opening rush have been accumulating, threatening the narrative integrity of what follows. If you’re pantsing, the number of directions the story could go is rising with the square of the number of central characters.
As I reached the end of the second week, I had most of the unexpected first act down. In a desperate bid to escape the aftermath of Scott’s disappearance, Pete unwittingly crossed over into a realm of eldritch horror. I had scattered scenes ahead of him, but the threshold he crossed was a major reset to the thriller/mystery balance. I struggled for word-count. This was bad.
How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo
Short version: Write backstory for your characters.
Long version: I was stuck going forward, so I went back. Pete’s uncles, Jack and Dan, had a history of violence that informs Pete’s actions in The Gray God. I hadn’t worked out many of the details, but I did have a few of lines of dialog from different scenes:
Uncle Jack (threatening Pete): “It’s another sort of sin to make your mama cry. One I am ashamed to bear. Don’t make your mama cry, Peter.”
Leah (Pete’s mother): “Don’t even think about it. I’m sure Jack told you stories about what Dan was like before he met Aunt Jan, but you haven’t seen him in a fight. It’s scary as s**t, Peter. Look, I know he did some bad things to Scott, but the counseling really did help. If he lost control again…”
Pete (to his new friend, Joseph): “My uncle says I should kick the guy in the nuts and punch him the throat. Then, I guess your mom hasn’t done time for aggravated assault.”
I logged 3,888 words over two days with a short story that ties these lines together. Writing The Steve Incident taught me about the dynamics of Pete’s family.
Breakfast of the NaNoRhinos
NaNoWriMo is an event that brings a vast and far-flung community of aspiring novelists and self-publishing authors together for a frenzy of artistic creativity that is bigger and longer than Burning Man, if not as flamboyant. The website buzzes with updated word counts and discussions in its various forums. Out in the real world, volunteers organize meet-ups and write-ins where participants can share the joy and pain of the thing. They work hard to make NaNoWriMo both fun and a catalyst for ongoing writing community.
My home region for NaNoWriMo is the Snoqualmie Valley. Our Municipal Liaisons put together a full calendar of events and entertainments. Lacking a laptop to take my work on the road and being overwhelmed by the self-imposed workload*, I missed most of these events. I did make it to the Traveler’s Breakfast Meet-up at the Fall City Roadhouse. It was a good time with friendly, interesting folks. The slice of the valley’s sixty-nine writers were busy with projects generally fantastical in genre and varying in tone from horror to whimsical mystery. I enjoyed the company and the eggs Benedict. If you decide to NaNoWriMo, avail yourself of the community events set up by your local volunteers.
Dreams and Horrors
As you may recall, before the pleasant interlude with NaNoRhinos, I was getting stuck as to how Pete’s journey into horror and madness should proceed. While I struggled to sort that out, there was work I could attend to. The Gray God is a story of Lovecraftian horror. It needed more horror. There were characters that my planner side knew were doomed. I set to writing scenes describing their ghastly fates. When these events occurred wasn’t set yet, but the power of Scrivener allowed me to park those chunks of text in Chapter Pending for safekeeping.
Another important aspect of the Lovecraftian fiction is dreams. Great Cthulhu torments sensitive minds and incites his followers with dreams of monstrous alien cities and worlds afire with chaos and death. Dreams reveal the Doom that came to Sarnath. Dreams in the Witch House transport poor Walter Gilman to frightful dimensions and ensnare him in hideous rites.
Many writers (and not a few readers) will roll their eyes at the prospect of a dream sequence. And, yes, they can be abused to shoehorn in exposition and/or heavy-handed symbolism. In Lovecraft’s work, dreams are frequently either an experience of an alternate dimension or something the character uses to rationalize a horrible experience. It was only a dream. It had to be a dream. I chose to break from the subgenre in this regard and give the dreams in The Gray God the realism of weirdness. The characters in question have reasons to suspect something is very wrong, but what is wrong is beyond their reasoning minds’ abitility to accept. It’s up to their subconscious minds to raise the alarm. The dreams are short and very oblique. The alarm is raised but the danger is not revealed. To get the surrealism and disjointedness I was looking for, I wrote backwards from the ending event or realization that snaps the character awake. There’s a flow to it, but it’s not normal. I think it works. Some day soon, you’ll have a chance to judge for yourself.
How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo – Part 2
Entering the home stretch, I was pantsed-out. Dreams and horrors were duly recorded. Numerous scenes between the heroes and villains made the characters and conflicts clear, even if the plot wasn’t. I was still thousands of words short of the goal line and I didn’t have another short story dangling before me.
What I did have was memories of fast and fluid work in the screenplay format. Descriptions are lean. Grammar is relaxed. The format itself decides how and when to interleave action and dialog. If you want to fly through a story, write it as a screenplay. Scrivener is happy to help with that. You can drop into screenplay format for any scene and it will attend to the format and auto-complete your character names.
To make things fun, I sat the villains around the dinner table and had them talk freely. This was inspired by the Villain Pub series on YouTube. They are in a safe place where everybody knows their name. They discuss what they each plan to do once their evil scheme succeeds. They argue with one another. I learned more about them. Perhaps I can salvage some of the better lines for the main story.
To balance this out, and cheat a little less, I also screenplay-sketched a scene that I did want for the main story where the heroes are gathered for a brief respite. It’s cold and wet, but Joseph brought some beer and Amber has a joint to share. Kids around a campfire. What fun! Why on earth would you think it’s the last time any of them will be happy? Oh, it’s a horror story. Yeah. Sorry, kids…
Always Cheat. Always Win.
I kept the campfire scene going until Scrivener and the NaNoWriMo word-counter agreed that I was over the finish line. Scrivener says 50,347. NaNoWriMo credits me with 50,087. I won! Yay!
PoMo Take-aways
Things I learned in my first NaNoWriMo
Pantsing can be great fun. It offers exciting opportunities for serendipitous discovery.
Pantsing allows the story to go where it wants to.
Allowing the story to go where it wants may not get you to where you want and need to be.
I would prefer to have an outline or other roadmap of the characters, conflicts, and story beats before diving into Chapter 1.
I enjoy talking with folks about stories and storytelling. Maybe even enough to join a writing group.
Scrivener is a solid tool for the early phases of creative writing. I will continue with it at least through the first drafts of The Gray God.
Thanks for reading this far.
* 2,000 words per day is an ambitious goal, but not an outrageous one. Professional authors range from 500 to 10,000, with prolific and skillful Stephen King right at 2,000. King also writes every day of the year except his birthday and Christmas, if you were wondering. And he doesn’t stop after one month to play Red Dead Redemption 2, catch up with his Netflix, and travel to see his family. Unlike some aspiring authors I could mention.
For reference: Word says this post is 2,522 words long.
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:
Upload manuscript.
Get errors.
Download resized version.
Change Body Text style to single-spaced, full justified, Garamond 12pt.
Change Handwriting style to single-spaced Garamond 12pt.
Resize MAPP/MOPP tables.
Substitute ⁂ for # scene breaks. Add 6pt before and after.
Chapters begin on odd pages. Delete page break and insert section break as needed.
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.
Which no longer appears in the free-to-use results. 🙁
