Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: process (Page 1 of 2)

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.

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.

The Prints of Proof

October 10, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Dance with Designers, three talented teams of freelance designers produced covers and interior book designs for Raether’s Enzyme. Each team’s cover captured a different aspect of the story and were viable keys to unlocking readers’ interest. The teams mastered the layout challenges posed by the manuscript’s stylistic flourishes. The dance ended with a cliffhanger: I had three great designs and could only bring one to market. There was one last test.

Kindle Direct Proof

The final test was to upload the designers’ files to Amazon KDP and request proof copies of the paperbacks. This would get me as close as possible to what a real reader would experience. I had prior experience with the system that gave me cause for concern. This time I had professional design products, not dev. I was optimistic. Too optimistic…

I’ll break here and to say that the trials I recount here are 21st Century First World Problems™. KDP and IngramSpark afford indie authors an amazing opportunity to create real live books without the overhead of a full-blown print run. Raether’s Enzyme would not be available in paperback if it wasn’t for Print On Demand.

Okay, back to our story. I chose the design I favored ever-so-slightly for the first proof. With the files uploaded and the automated tests passed, the online preview of the book looked promising. The cover was a bit dim, but the interior tracked the designer’s PDF file perfectly. I ordered four proof copies and sat on the porch steps waiting for the delivery.

The covers were rather dim. Areas that glowed on the screen with red were like dried blood. The magical cyan was the green of chalkboards. Whole areas of subtle detail were lost in the darkness.  I’ve worked in and with computers long enough to know that unless the screen to printer pipeline is calibrated, what you see on the former isn’t what you’ll get on the latter. The additive colors on your screen work differently than the subtractive colors used by printers. Gamut mapping is a science. But it struck me that in the years that KDP had been serving indie authors, it should be able to print the users’ cover files with greater fidelity.

Diving into the KDP community forums revealed that dark covers were a persistent issue. The best advice anyone had to offer was to print on glossy paper (I had chosen a matte finish) for a 10%-20% boost in brightness. That was useful. I would try that. But that would mean another week or so before the next (single) proof copy arrived. The process was broken. For the time being, I had to deal with it.

I imagined ways it could be better, wrote them up, and posted them to the section of the KDP community forums dedicated to feedback and feature requests.

First things: I’m still new to this but have been in the system since CreateSpace. I know that printing cannot deliver the luminosity and range of colors that you can see on the screen. I recognize that an ideal pipeline would include calibration of the monitor to the printer. I understand the difference between RGB and CMYK but am not versed in the art and science of gamut mapping.

KDP has done an excellent job with my books’ interiors. The covers of my proof copies are invariably MUCH darker than source PDFs and images. The new previewer hints and the darkness to come, but IMHO understates it. The availability of proof copies on demand is a miracle of 21st Century publishing, but the one-week time between requesting a proof copy and having one to evaluate makes an iterative approach to getting the desired cover very, very slow.

Any or all of the following would improve productivity and reduce resource use. Please consider implementing these features for KDP.

COVER PROOF COPIES. Allow the author-publisher to request a printing of just the cover.

FILTERED COVER PROOF GALLERY. Like a cover proof copy, but with multiple miniatures of the cover on a single sheet. One displays the cover as uploaded. The others show the printed results with variations on the cover. RGB vs. CMYK. Selected embedded color profiles (community wisdom is that these are discarded by KDP, so maybe not). Gradations of enhanced saturation and/or brightness. Label each so that the customer can adjust their cover to match the one that looks best to them.

SMARTER COLOR MAPPING. Amazon’s a smart, capable company. Do a better job at translating the customer’s colors to what the printer can deliver. Train a machine learning system to provide customer-satisfying results. Something to keep my spirits from falling when I open the box of proof copies.

GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND BETTER GUIDANCE. Community members have done heroic work in offering workarounds to weaknesses in KDP. They aren’t in a position to solve our problems with this aspect of self-publishing. KDP should tell us up-front how to get the best color fidelity for our book covers. At the very least, it should document which printers to target so that we have a better chance to get things right the first time.

KDP is an important partner in getting Tensile Press books to market. Addressing the issues around cover color fidelity will make it a cherished partner.

Thank you for your attention.
Sean Flynn
Tensile Press

This is a “compliment sandwich” with some “plussing” in the middle. These was no response from the KDP team. Various jaded community members took time out of their days to tell me that it was foolish to expect any improvements to the system. One helpful soul recommended that I send the same message to KDP tech support. I did. The response was a polite email thanking me for my input and assuring me that they would forward the message to the business unit. Time will tell.

With help from the designer and a glossy cover, the second-round proof copy looked great.

I still had two more designs to proof. Swapping in their cover and interior files one after the other would take weeks—possibly months if changes were required—before I would have all three in front of me to compare. I cheated by creating two new books with slightly different titles and KDP-supplied ISBNs. With the files uploaded for each, I ordered both as proof copies. In these cases, the covers and interiors were fine.

Proof of spines

Now there were three real-world copies of Raether’s Enzyme, each a unique embodiment of the story. The fruit of the dance with designers lay on my dining room table. I studied the covers under sunlight, LEDs, and the sky. Magical. Sophisticated. Electric. I paged through them all, weighing how each rendered the general text and played my various formatting games. A favorite emerged. A personal favorite. For a final final test, I met separately with two of my stalwart beta readers and asked for their impressions. Both preferred two of the designs. To my great relief, one of the two was my favorite. My marketing-savvy reader told me that an image should contain one, or at most two messages. He pointed to one of the proof copies and said that it had the most direct message. It was the design I had chosen based on the emotion in its cover and the way the design infused the interior. Sometimes marketing and personal taste converge.

The Bill-ion-aire, and the rest…

Amazon (via KDP) is a big market for independent authors. It is not the only market. I want Raether to available to as wide an audience as possible. Or at least as practical. Alexa will tell you that I’m quite fond of Amazon, but she doesn’t know that I like my local bookstores too and favor them when it comes to new books from my favorite authors. Readers enjoy their books on tablets, phones, laptops, desktops, and eReaders. They check out print books and e-books from their local libraries. Raether’s Enzyme should meet them where they want to read.

The self-publishing ecosystem makes this possible in numerous ways. After research and deliberation, I decided to split my non-Amazon betting by putting the print edition and the e-book into separate channels. Part of this was for eggs-and-baskets reasons. The other was to learn more about these channels for future projects.

Sparking Raether’s Enzyme

IngramSpark, that is. In many ways, IngramSpark is like KDP. Authors upload cover and content files. IngramSpark’s printing arm, Lightning Source, prints copies of the book on demand. KDP is a vertically integrated tentacle of the vast quasi-monopoly that is Amazon, who prints and sells the book. IngramSpark is part of Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor and wholesaler in the United States. In that role, it is the ally, rather than adversary, of bookstores large and small. Adding your book to Ingram’s catalog makes it visible to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and your public library.

As in KDP, after your files are uploaded, IngramSpark guides you through setting the price of your book. This was my first real contact with life outside of the Amazon basin. I learned why paperback books cost what they do. To make money, bookstores need a wholesale discount. IngramSpark recommends 55% off the cover price. When I combined the price I had set for the paperback on KDP with the discount and the cost of production, Ingram calculated that my profit would be negative. I would owe for each copy sold. I needed to raise the list price by…a bit. To maintain the goodwill of the non-Amazon universe, my Amazon price would have to rise to match what I needed to charge to make things work with Ingram.

Bookstores very much want to be able to return unsold books for a refund. Margins are small. They need to manage the risk of stocking new authors. I understand and respect that. Tensile Press (which is me) can’t afford to be on the hook for a big return. Or a multitude of little ones. So, at the very real risk of Raether never appearing on a bookstore shelf, I opted out of offering a return policy.

Smashing all the words

The prospect of plugging into all myriad e-book stores daunted me. There are several outlets that will handle the multiplexing for you. I went with Smashwords. It has a good reputation and I have some pleasant memories of working with (what I think is) its founder, Mark Coker, back at Apple in the 1980s. When you upload to Smashwords, there’s little room for shillyshallying.  You’re either in the pipeline for immediate publication, or you’re available for pre-order. I freaked out. I hadn’t set a date in my mind, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that day. I picked a release date a few weeks in the future. And I found a button on the dashboard to ‘unpublish’ the e-book. I clicked it.

Finger on the trigger

I sat there and asked myself, “If not then, when?” It was 2020. The murder hornets appeared here in Washington in the second act. Chekhov’s Gun required they be used before the curtain fell. Did I want to risk dying in whatever ether, cocaine, and peyote infused madness the 2020 writer’s room had in store without having published one book?

…………………Bang.

The answer was no. I republished on Smashwords with the original release date. I set the release date on IngramSpark. I set the (e-book) release date on KDP. The hammer struck the firing pin. The firing pin hit the primer. The powder began to burn. Raether’s Enzyme was on its way down the barrel and into the world.

Two days later an excited email arrived from one of my beta readers. Raether’s paperback edition was available for preorder on Amazon. After a moment of confusion, I realized that the IngramSpark had pushed the preorder to Amazon. As I write this, I’m working through Amazon’s support network to override that edition with the KDP version. Over the next few days, the e-book preorder surfaced on Apple’s bookstore. Print and e-book on Barnes & Noble. Kobo.

I am committing the quietest, softest, weakest book launch imaginable. I have flouted all the online guru’s advice for building interest. I haven’t sent advanced reader copies to influential book bloggers. I haven’t sought out the online communities where my (potential) audience dwells. I haven’t commissioned reviews to decorate the ad campaign I haven’t even planned. I haven’t raised an army of flying monkeys to trumpet the news to the far corners of Oz. My marketing-fu is rubbish.

Nonetheless, here it goes. There is much left to do before I can at least make an announcement via my limited social media.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

A Dance with Designers

September 23, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

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:

  1. The writer supplies the manuscript, notes about what they are looking for, and examples of relevant cover art.
  2. The designer creates two or more preliminary cover designs.
  3. The writer spends a day thrilled with and fascinated by the designer’s imagination and skill.
  4. The writer agonizes about which design to choose.
  5. The writer picks one design to move forward and writes up their thoughts on the cover.
  6. The designer evolves the cover in response to the writer’s notes and delivers one or more variations of the core cover.
  7. 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.
  8. The writer signs off on the cover design.
  9. 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.
  10. The writer reviews the PDF and responds with any notes and corrections.
  11. The designer updates the PDF in response.
  12. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as needed. (Raether needed due to its formatting extravagances.)
  13. The writer signs off on the interior. The page count is now known and fixed.
  14. Optional: Paperback full cover design. Skip if the project is eBook only.
    1. The writer supplies back cover blurb text and ISBN number.
    2. The designer extends the cover design to include the spine and back cover with barcode.
    3. The writer reviews the full cover design and responds with notes.
    4. The designer updates the full cover design.
    5. Repeat steps c and d as needed.
    6. The writer signs off on the full cover.
  15. 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 was ingesting 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.

A Clash of Copyeditors

June 8, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

Mad scientists must science madly. It is their nature. In my A Game of Edits post, I confessed to not applying appropriate controls to the experimental changes in my writing process between Rather’s Enzyme and The Gray God.

Having learned about patterns of weakness and error in The Gray God via AutoCrit, I unlocked the manuscript for Raether’s Enzyme and applied the tool there. The results were generally good, but I knew that I had introduced at least one new class of error, which I resolved to leave for the freelance copyeditor to find. Mostly this was just laziness my part.

Two for the Price of Two

The next step for Raether’s Enzyme was to send the manuscript off to a professional for copyediting. Years of work as a coder taught me that no matter how good you think your code is, you really should get someone to test it. That someone needs a keen eye for weakness, diligence, persistence, talent, and a very particular set of skills. If you want your software to be worthy of a customer’s time and money, it behooves you to get someone with those skills to challenge your code to be the best it can be.

The written word is like computer code. Errors in syntax and grammar can crash the interpreter in the middle of informing or entertaining the reader. Ambiguous references can leave the reader in an undetermined state. Inefficient use of language can lead the reader to look for a better solution. If you want your book to be worth a reader’s time and money, it behooves you to employ a good editor to spot your surviving errors and suggest improvements.

If one editor is essential and good, would two be better? Surely! I am a novice novelist and Raether is my first novel. There is room for improvement. Enough room that writerly insecurity alone was enough to rationalize hiring more than one copyeditor. I didn’t want to admit that I was acting to quell mere insecurity, so I came up with additional reasons.

  • Redundancy improves robustness. Raether is 114,000 words long. Even the best editors will miss or excuse something in all that text. The more editors you employ, the lower the odds of an error getting past all of them. If one editor fails to deliver for whatever reason—say, a pandemic–the other(s) might still come through.
  • A good editor is hard to find. The internet presents a cornucopia of talented freelancers with solid resumes and glowing testimonials. It might be hard to lose, but how hard is it to win? To find the editor with the skills to polish your book, the diligence to make it happen on schedule, and who you otherwise want to work with in the future. The odds of making that match go up the more editors you work with. (You can also improve the odds via word-of-mouth referral, but that requires having friends who know editors.)
  • Two more people will have read my story. Granted, an editing pass isn’t a normal reading and I’d be paying them to do so, but it still counts. Doesn’t it?

After this, the whole experimental methodology thing began to take a familiar turn away from rigor. Working with gradstudentfreelancers.com had been productive on the (premature) proofreading. The editor had pointed out some copyedit-level errors gratis. I knew he had more to contribute to the project. He would also enjoy a head start to the extent copyeditors must suppress their curiosity as readers about “what happens next?” and he knew the answer.

The search for a second editor led me to reedsy.com. The site features a marketplace of freelance professionals from various disciplines who post descriptions of their backgrounds and selections from their portfolios. Client ratings and testimonials provide additional information. An elegant search feature makes finding the right candidates straight-forward. Finding the right one for the job in this talented pool remains challenging for a noob like myself.

For my first pass, I searched for copyeditors who work on mash-up genre fiction. That produced a nice, small slice of the professional pie. One editor had a background and an eclectic portfolio that resonated with me. We exchanged messages and he cheerfully agreed to provide a sample edit of an excerpt from Raether. The excerpt was a slice from a few chapters with a good mix of dialog and narration. It also featured my which/that error. He returned the sample edit, Raether and my first contact with professional copyediting. He had fixed my which/that and various other minor errors, which was all to the good. He also rather aggressively changed my simple saids and askeds to more descriptive dialog tags.

There is a style schism in the writing world between those who limit dialog tags to said/asked, and those who like to mix in other verbs for more nuanced tone and general variety. In Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, he rules in favor of only using said. Cormac McCarthy declines to use any dialog tags, or quotation marks for that matter. Numerous beloved and successful writers have characters that whisper, grumble, reply, and query. I decided early in the writing of Raether that I would only break with the said/asked camp on special occasions. As a rule, I treated dialog tags as a form of punctuation and used them to slip pauses into characters’ lines and clarify the speaker in scenes where more than two characters were talking.

My initial reaction to the sample edit was: Dude, I wouldn’t allow me to make a stylistic change this sweeping at this late date. I cooled off and realized that his edits were, in their own way, cool. This fellow was engaged in the project on a level where he was creatively making it better. By the lights of his preferred style. It wasn’t my style. If I hired him but told him not to improve my dialog tags, I’d be asking him to fight his preferences and suppress his creativity for the length of the project. I’d be asking him to not do his best work. I declined his offer and revised my search criteria to cover the mystery and thriller genres.

In the interest of efficiency, if not fairness, I approached five new editors with my work proposal. One was no longer available and declined. The remaining four graciously provided sample edits. The number of corrections and suggests varied. Some went light with their virtual red pens. All had useful observations and Chicago Manual of Style corrections. One editor stood out for her ability to both correct the text and suggest improvements without trampling on the story’s voice. She found my which/that, moved the text towards reconciliation with Chicago, made good suggestions, and highlighted patterns of weakness that I had missed in my many passes over the manuscript. She was a good match for the project.

I accepted her offer. We exchanged messages and I briefed her regarding some of the manuscript’s eccentricities. She started the work on schedule, asked a few pointed questions during her edit, and delivered her final edit before the scheduled deadline. During the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. I was (and am) happy with both her work product and with the overall collaboration.

The Double-edit Interferometer

Sending one manuscript to two editors is akin to a double-slit experiment.

Doubleslit3Dspectrum

The interference pattern that emerges when you compare and combine the edits can tell you more about the text and the process than you would learn by looking at only one or either independently. In many places, the editors agree on a change. The editing waves reinforce each other. I don’t recall any cases where they recommended conflicting changes. There was no destructive interference.

The interesting part of the interference pattern broke the interferometer metaphor. Each editor made corrections that the other declined. One enforced Chicago’s deprecation of using capital letters for emphasis. Raether’s narration is sympathetic to the POV character of a given scene. The protagonist mentally capitalizes certain words: the Program, the Look, The Thing on the Screen. That edit lowercases these to align the manuscript with Chicago. The other editor left Megan’s capitalizations alone, but lowercased ‘internet’. It turns out that the 17th edition of Chicago declares that in general use, the Internet is now the internet. I had to buy my own copy of the style guide after searching the Internet internet failed to resolve the dispute for me.

Both editors were generous with their observations and suggestions, bringing complementary strengths to the project. The manuscript is better for their efforts. The strange curves of the story are polished so that the reader’s eyes might glide over them. Any surviving errors are artifacts of my combining their edits or stubbornly resisting their advice.

Raether’s Enzyme is ready to go to the book designers.

I can’t help but think of an old computer science joke:

Every program can be made one byte smaller. There is always one more bug. Therefore, at the end of optimization and debugging, all programs are one byte long, and wrong.

A Game of Edits

March 2, 2020 /

Failing Hard at Experimental Design

When you’re setting up a scientific experiment or exploring an alternative engineering solution, it’s a good idea to fix as many variables as you can so that you can better judge the ones you’re studying. I have utterly failed to exhibit this prudence in the course of writing The Grey God. Many of the writing process variables are in play. Few are fixed. This is not methodical.

  Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo
Drafting Planning Pantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

This post will attempt to tease out the results of my ongoing experimental use of AutoCrit in the self-editing phase of the project.

Gamifying the Editing Process

AutoCrit is a suite of editing and text analysis tools that lives in the Cloud. Its advanced features are accessed via subscription. The free tier includes a text editor that is adequate for composing a novel’s manuscript. Where it gets more interesting is in the ‘Professional’ mode. For $30/month, AutoCrit will dice and slice your text with a variety of statistical and heuristic analyzers and assign your work corresponding quality scores. It will also give you a score relative to your genre and major authors. AutoCrit turns editing into a game.

Gamification is not a new phenomenon. Reframing tasks as games has a long history in education, sales, and other endeavors which include elements of competition or self-improvement. Rewarding people with scores, badges, smiley faces, and thumbs-up add game-like perks to fitness trackers and social media. AutoCrit rewards you with better scores for ‘improving’ your writing.

I put improving in quotes not to disparage what AutoCrit has to offer, but point out that optimizing your score in AutoCrit has notable limitations. The software doesn’t read your story. It can’t judge the depth of characterization, find plot holes, or critique your pacing and structure. What it can do is apply fixed rules and identify patterns that deviate from an analysis published works. It can flag word usage that is considered poor form in commercial fiction.

Working with AutoCrit is like having a precocious six-year-old niece who has taken an interest in your work. You explain to her a few of the rules you’re working with and she takes them to heart. She sits down beside you and starts pointing to the text. “What about that?” “And that?” “Right here, you have an adverb. Adverbs are bad, right?” She really gets into it. You say, “That’s okay, it’s where my character is talking, so it doesn’t need to be right.” She ignores that because she’s on the hunt. You’re just about to politely suggest she go outside and play when she points out something you missed. You realize that what she lacks in nuance, she makes up for in tenacity. Playing the game with her is productive, but it is not without risks.

Applying AutoCrit to The Gray God required exporting the manuscript to a Word .docx file and uploading it into AutoCrit. I parked Scrivener on one side of the screen and the AutoCrit browser tab on the other and worked my way down through the manuscript. The biggest initial finding was that I had an adverb problem. Sure, I didn’t overuse words ending in -ly, but I dropped in ‘just’ all over the place. Things were just outside. Just before. Just it. I used the word in just about every adverbial form it could take. I just didn’t see it until AutoCrit called me out on it and suggested I remove just about a couple of hundred uses. Cleaning that up tightened the writing and improved my score. I got into the game and was happy with the results.

I was so happy that I cracked open Raether’s Enzyme, which had been in lockdown since the proofreader worked on it. The AutoCrit pass took longer than I expected. I corrected passive voice issues. In pursuit of a higher score, I shaved over 3,000 words off the text. The manuscript was leaner and smoother than before. This was good. It was also broken.

The damage resulted from my ignorance conspiring with my greed for a better score. AutoCrit flagged ‘that’ as a (potentially) problematic filler word and recommended an aggressive target for reduction. In the course of lowering my ‘that’ count, I substituted ‘which’ for ‘that’ in numerous places. My score improved. As you might guess, the two words are not entirely interchangeable. I suspected as much and researched ‘that’ vs. ‘which’. Sigh. Yes, there is latitude for using ‘which’ in place of ‘that’, but to be right you should use ‘that’ for restrictive clauses. And you precede ‘which’ with a comma in nonrestrictive clauses. I shouldn’t have made those changes. Now I wonder what else I broke playing the AutoCrit game.

I’ll find out over the next month when the Raether manuscript comes back from the copyeditor. I may reactivate my AutoCrit Pro subscription to see how it scores the changes.

Scribophilia At First Sight

February 17, 2020 /

Putting the ‘Social’ in Anti-Social

Wanda Wilcox: “I can’t stand people. I hate them.”
Chinaski: “Oh, yeah?”
Wanda: “You hate them?”
Chinaski: “No, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.”

– Charles Bukowski via Barfly

It has been said that writing is a solitary endeavor, but very few writers work in total isolation in our connected age. Many writers meet in local critique groups. Others split the difference between being cloistered and interacting with actual people at a fixed time and place by joining online writers’ groups.

My Raether’s Enzyme screenplay was lightly workshopped at the defunct Helium Exchange website*. The novel was written in isolation. For The Gray God, I resolved to experiment with my writing processes. I moved from Word to Scrivener. I employed additional editing tools. And I resolved to join a writing group.

Actually meeting people seemed a bit much and I wasn’t optimistic about the odds of finding a local group that was a good impedance match for my strange signals. I set off in search of an online community to commune with aspiring authors. As you might well guess, the /r/writing subreddit has a great many people to connect with. Oh so very many. Over one million. The signal-to-noise ratio is less than one. Much less. Moving on. WritersCafe has fewer people and a better s/n. It’s free to join, and that may be part of the problem. It attracts all levels of interest and engagement. Its commitment to openness leads to a wild proliferation of ad hoc groups. Finding people with something interesting to say seems to be a matter of luck. Moving on.

Scribophile filters for commitment by operating on a karma economy. To get feedback on your work, you must first provide quality critiques of other writers’ submissions. To keep things flowing and manageable, the text is limited to a few thousand words at a time. The site is well-designed with good tools for inline feedback. There are still myriad groups and plenty of discussion forums to wander around in when you should be writing, but Scribophile offered enough structure and support for me to give it a try.

Editorial Pachinko

The population of Scribophile is self-selecting. The site is open to all experience levels and ambitions. Sign up and you’re welcome to participate. Contrast this to a Masters of Fine Arts program and, as you might expect, you get a wider variation in skill levels and ambitions. We can look at the population in various ways, but let’s look at experience and ambition.

Two ways to dice-and-slice Scribbers

On the horizontal axis, we have ambition. Hobbyists are writing primarily because it is something they want or need to do. They have no expectation of publication but they do enjoy being read and sharing in the writing life. Aspiring Professionals have publication as a goal. Participation in the community is a means to that end. If you asked the population, many or most would describe themselves as aspiring professionals. If you asked us to list the steps we have taken to reach professional status, many or most would have a short list indicative of being closer to the hobbyist end of the spectrum than we’d like to admit.

On the vertical axis, we have experience. Neophytes are new to the craft and are there to learn. Old Oaks have been writing for years, have mastered many aspects of the craft, but since they’re here, they probably haven’t broken through in the publishing world. Neophytes benefit from the oaks’ feedback. Oaks help each other refine their craft and have opportunities to learn from teaching the neophytes. There is virtue in paying forward the efforts of earlier oaks.

Absent access to user surveys and data analytics for the site, I’m going to guess that users are scattered up and down both axes and that the distribution is not a nice bell curve centered in the middle. More likely, it is multimodal.

Scribophile’s karma economy and primary workflow are such that you earn your karma and then launch a piece of your novel into the reviewing spotlight. The reviewers that critique your work (to earn their own karma) can come from anywhere on the graph. It’s like pachinko. You might get lucky. Three karama-hungry old oaks might be looking for work to review when your piece enters the spotlight. Or three (other) hobbyist neophytes might jump on it and give it their best. As with pachinko, success is subject to a complex array of variables that you might hope to control, but chances are it’s really a matter of chance. To get a polished manuscript out of this process, you must either be incredibly lucky or be willing to resubmit every piece of your story through this process enough times to accumulate the experienced critiques and edits they need.

Are you saying Scribophile is foolishness?

No. Pachinko is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s bigger than Las Vegas. As with Vegas, Pachinko and Scribophile provide entertainment to most of their customers. For a minority, pulling the handle or working the karma become addictive goals of their own. Know yourself and know your budget and you’ll be fine.

And the payout on Scribophile’s editorial pachinko is not bad. It’s good. Every story benefits from reader feedback. Learning to weigh and incorporate feedback is a valuable skill for a writer to develop and maintain. Keep your goals in mind, periodically evaluate the effort vs. reward, and Scribophile can be a productive part of your writing process and evolution.

I intend to continue my Scribophile experiment for a while yet. I’ll go back, Jack, do it again…

  • If you browse to www.heliumexchange.com you will discover that garish animated GIF banner ads are alive and well. If that’s your thing, go ahead and click the link.

That Sinking Feeling

October 21, 2019 /

Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and Todd (Jesse Plemons) – Breaking Bad _ Season 5, Episode 14 – Photo Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC

You know the one…

It’s that fishing weight sliding down your throat and landing in your stomach. It’s the one you get when you realize that a part of your story, one which you were quite happy with, was lifted from the fiction of another. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t deliberate theft. The reader will see it and say, “I recognize that! He totally stole that from X.”

There I am, preparing for El Camino by watching the final episodes of Breaking Bad when the badness breaks. Jesse Pinkman has been enslaved by a white supremacist meth gang. His main tormentor is a stone-cold psychopath named Todd. Todd reports directly to the gang’s leader. Todd addresses the leader as “Uncle Jack”.

Doom. On. Me.

I named one of the antagonists in The Grey God Jack Hughes. He is the protagonist’s mother’s brother. There are even a physical resemblance and a nexus to the drug trade. My cunning, ruthless, manipulative character was so heavily, if unconsciously, inspired by the big bad on Breaking Bad that they have the same name. Sigh.

To be fair to Jack Hughes, he’s not a neo-Nazi. He may be a terrible surrogate dad, but he is important to the plot and to Pete. I’m not going to edit him out of the story. I do need to create some space between Jack Hughes and Jack Welker. To start with, Jack Hughes needs a new first name.

The Rules of Names

Character names are crafted. An author can assign a random name as a placeholder, but the reader is due a bespoke name for every character of importance. That doesn’t require the name to be fanciful or even colorful. It means the name has to be right. Or at least not wrong in a way that throws the reader out of the story. It’s important to set reasonable goals.

At this point in my writer-hood, I’m working with the following character name heuristics.

The name should:

  1. Fit the setting. Duh. A modern name in ancient Egypt won’t work.
  2. Match the character’s background. If an Amish woman in the story has a Spanish surname, that’s okay, but the reader may well want some backstory there.
  3. Be distinct from other character names in the story. Unless confusion among Jeff Lebowskis is part of the story, avoid having overlapping names, including Bob/Rob/Robert. I know a family where all the kids’ names start with D and another where they begin with J. I try to scatter names across the alphabet.
  4. Be pronounceable by the intended audience. The reader needs to a least think they’ve got a handle on the name or they’ll stop in their tracks and try to puzzle it out. Westerners are notorious for mangling Asian names.
  5. Sound good every time you use it. Tyrannosaurus Murphy may sound awesome at first, but the reader will tire of it quickly. A name that’s colorful and long is a problem. His friends call him Ty. Tyrannosaurus should be used sparingly.
  6. Not be shared by family or close friends. Even if the character is super-cool. It’s just not worth the hassle.

Working with these guidelines, I’m closing in on a replacement name for Uncle Jack. Progress on this is now imperiled by my desire to write about the adventures of Tyrannosaurus Murphy, PI.

NaNoWriMo PoMo

January 6, 2019 /

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.

The Pfast and the Pluperfect

July 2, 2018 /

Raether’s Enzyme passed a major milestone recently when its corrected manuscript returned from the proofreader. The first post on this blog marked its departure. I am happy to report that the editor did indeed spot remaining errors and called shenanigans on a stylistic experiment that did not pay off. The manuscript is stronger for it. Yay!

Reviewing the marked-up version of the manuscript revealed patterns of error that I will work to stamp out in future projects.

  • Truly embarrassing misplaced apostrophes.
  • Missing question marks.
  • Absent and misused commas.
  • Dropped articles that escaped my eye.

Finding a run of clean pages was a source of joy.

The proofreader identified and began correcting another class of errors. He saw a pattern emerging and began to wonder if I was playing a stylistic game, or if I really didn’t know what the past pluperfect was.

BUSTED. On both counts, really.

I would have lost on Jeopardy! if the clue had been:

“DENOTING AN ACTION COMPLETED PRIOR TO SOME
PAST POINT OF TIME SPECIFIED OR IMPLIED,
FORMED IN ENGLISH BY HAD AND THE PAST PARTICIPLE”

Raether’s Enzyme is written from the subjective third person limited point of view, where the character who is in focus can change between scenes. The narrator takes opportunities to reflect on events in the focal character’s past when those events are relevant to the action of the scene.

Raether imagines itself to be a thriller. Thrillers move relentlessly forward. The narrator’s interest in the characters’ pasts put forward momentum at risk. I had made a pass to purge the pluperfect in an attempt to hide the retrograde motion. I had rationalized this by telling myself that the remembering the narrator was doing on behalf of the characters was portraying the characters’ thought processes in the scene. My illusion of continuous forward motion caught fire in the eyes of an important reader: an editor.

My recent work in the manuscript included unwinding my de-pluperfect-ifying shenanigans. There are other games afoot that will add to your enjoyment without making you wonder what time it is. I am an important step closer to sharing them with you, thanks to my proofreader.

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