Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: The Gray God (Page 1 of 2)

The Gray God’s Countdown

August 5, 2024 /

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

TL;DR

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

Countdown gallery

Behind the scenes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond my camera roll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing in a small venue

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

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

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

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

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

Sticky post

The Gray God’s advent is upon us!

August 2, 2024 /

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

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

Social media “press release” follows:

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

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

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

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

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

Cover by Christian Bentulan
Interior formatting by Duncan Ralston

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

June 27, 2023 /

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

The Fractal Dimension of a Half-built World

March 18, 2023 /

All the world’s a stage

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

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

Genesis Vector

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

Spoiler: It’s science fiction

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

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

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

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

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

So, one more stake in the ground:

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

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

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

Exploring the Trope-iary Maze

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

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

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

Fire and Anvil

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

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

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

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

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

Fits and starts

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

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

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

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

Mapulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long is the coast of Britain?

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

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

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

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

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.

OPERATION: X-RAY

November 3, 2020 /

In all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself.

In the run-up to Raether’s launch, staging and scheduling the e-book was easily done and completed early. The other preparations filled me with so much excitement and terror that I had little time to think about the Kindle edition. If Amazon KDP prompted me to provide X-ray content, I missed it. You may be familiar with X-ray from Prime Video. It will pop up information about who is in a scene in the movie you’re watching. Some clever combination of annotators and algorithms connects the content of the movie to IMDB, which Amazon owns.

X-ray annotations are available for Kindle e-books. They are not folded into the e-book file directly, but live in a database in the Amazonian cloud. Launching the annotation web app is cleverly hidden in the ellipsis menu. Like so.

Launch X-Ray, if you can find it.

I stumbled onto this a week after launch. Given the choice between writing about and around the book vs. trying to figure out how to market it, I took what I thought was the easy road and got to work annotating.

Everything’s automated.

Except the things that aren’t. The system does a decent job of combing the text for character names and specialized terminology. Some of the terms will have Wikipedia content pre-selected. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to visit each and every character and term and:

  1. Write a short character profile or term definition.
  2. Chose a Wikipedia entry to supply the definition.
  3. Exclude the entry from X-Ray.
  4. Realize that this entry is a nickname for a character and needs to be added to that character’s profile as an alternate spelling.

Sample character entry.

I expected Operation X-Ray to run over a couple of sessions in as many days. I was wrong.

Terms real and imagined

Raether is written in close third person perspective with multiple point-of-view characters who come from different backgrounds. The narration uses vocabulary from the POV characters’ worlds without slowing down to explain the terms. It mixes real and fictitious Pacific Northwest geography. It coins new jargon around the recently discovered Raether’s enzyme. The number of people who will get all the references is a demographic of me, because I wrote the story and the story required the research.

I like to think that you can enjoy the story without knowing the details of the Ruger firearms catalog or all the Native American names for Washington’s stratovolcanoes. The story doesn’t hinge on any of these details and provides enough context that you should have enough of the idea to keep reading. X-Ray is there for readers who enjoy stopping to indulge their curiosity. For the real-world terms, the Wikipedia text does a fine job. For the products of my imagination, I provide more details to flesh out the story’s world.

In the current X-Ray, there are 24 custom entries and 163 Wikipedia terms.

Characters central and minor

The core cast of Raether numbers about twenty. There are a great many more secondary and named minor characters. X-Ray’s automated search counted a total of 143. Some of those were false-positives. ‘Roooowf’ is a noise a character makes, not a new character. After coalescing the nicknames and excluding the super-minor characters, the current X-Ray has entries for eighty fictitious people.

The character profiles should enrich the reader’s understanding of the major characters but not reveal anything that would revise that understanding. The text of the novel should be the reader’s guide to the characters. This sets up a balancing act for the X-Ray profiles. They need to be interesting enough to reward the reader, but not reveal secrets. I erred on the side of being shorter and less interesting. X-Ray content can be revised at any time, so I may revisit this in the future.

For the minor characters, I recapped what we already know about them as an aid for readers who might have lost track and explained a few that came up in passing conversations.

Beyond Raether’s X-Ray

X-Ray is a nice supplemental feature that I would like to provide for future books. To make it easier, I’ll need to keep better track characters and terms. In Raether, it was all in my head. I should at least maintain a spreadsheet of who’s who and what’s what. Such accounting will help during rewrites by challenging me to justify keeping minor characters. I’m looking at you, Timothy Wood, Esq. Scrivener has facilities for keeping track of characters built in, so The Gray God will start in a better place when its time under the X-Ray comes.

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.

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