Rum droll, please!

Book 2 of the Idyll Trilogy will drop on June 21! Check out the cover & blurb for THE WILDS!

Walt and Samuel Starboard. Miriam and Virginia Bridge. Four travelers entered the mysterious City-Ship of Marathon, but only three made it out.

Now our heroes are faced with a new, more existential threat. An invader from Mother Earth has arrived on Idyll—an outlaw psychopath who will use Terran technology to establish himself as the planet’s ultimate creator-destroyer.

And to make matters worse—he’s brought company.

To face this ‘outcaster,’ Marathon’s survivors will fight their way through a demolished starship, under the bowels of their planet, across untamed wilds—and into a stark white desert unlike any they have ever imagined. But will it be enough to save their world from certain doom?

Continuing the story started in 2015’s IDYLL, THE WILDS is jam-packed with plasma-gun shoot-outs, a love triangle that spans an ocean, and ‘Lord of the Flies’-style suspense. If that sounds like your kind of character-driven sci-fi goodness, then you should check it out!

 

 

Idyll Chatter: Draft King

Exciting news! Right after Thanksgiving, I finished my first, really-rough draft of Idyll Series: Book 2! And since Idyll Series: Book 2 is a really-rough working title, I’ll announce that the sequel to IDYLL will be called… drum roll… THE WILDS!

So my idea is that all three books in the trilogy will have a long ‘I’ and at least one ‘L’ in their name. See if you can guess the title of Book 3! (No the title is not TITLE, although that does fit the rules).

My hope is to have THE WILDS out by some time in April. Seems like a long time away, but there’s a lot of passages in the rough draft that need some heavy ‘fleshing out,’ before the manuscript can graduate to a true editing/proofing process.

I long time ago, I wrote this post about my rough-draft technique. At the time I called it gap writing—because I write it fast and leave a lot of gaps. Can’t think of the right word? Don’t bother with a thesaurus, leave a gap! Bored by trying to write a description? Leave a gap! Need to do some research? Ain’t nobody got time for that! Leave a gap!

A lot of writers espouse this philosophy of purposely writing a crappy first draft. The point is to get your thoughts down as quickly as possible, to keep your momentum going and to not let any one passage become too precious. Because when you get to the polishing and editing phase, some stuff is going to turn out to be highly expendable.

I spent a long, long time writing and rewriting Idyll, so this gap writing technique has been very useful for me this time around. And that’s for two big reasons:

1) Plotting: When I write as loosely and quickly as possible, then I’m quicker to scope out any plotting dead-ends. I’m a big believer in outlining my stories, but my outlines tend to be very squishy in the middle. And sometimes I don’t spot implausibilities or contradictions in the storyline until I’m in the dead middle of it. With gap writing, I stumble into those plot-holes sooner, and I can take solace that I’ve wasted slightly less time getting to that problem-area than I would have if I had been writing a fully fleshed-out manuscript.

2) Characters: I’m not one of those writers who might say, “My characters speak to me!” or “My characters surprise me!” If my characters come up with a funny line, or they have a eureka moment, then I (their unseen and all-powerful overlord!) will take every ounce of credit for it! With that being said, sometimes I won’t find my perfect voice for a character until I write them in some suddenly seminal scene. And sometimes that scene doesn’t come till the end of the book! With gap writing, I don’t have to kvetch about reworking every previous conversation to match the character’s new voice, because all those passages are fairly fluid anyway.

PS: I think gap writing is also pretty similar to writing in ‘story beats,’ which is a technique used by the Self-Publishing Podcast peeps. David Gaughran explains excellently in this post.

Idyll Cover Sketches

Here are two cover sketches I did, representing my two ideas for the IDYLL Book 1 cover.

Cover Sketch 1:

This was my initial concept, the idea that I had in my head for most of the time that I was writing. Four riders in the distance, climbing a ridge that eventually resolves itself into the silhouette of a sleeping woman (Alma Starboard) under a shroud.

The pros: I liked the idea of this being a soft, dream-like cover, which might help set up the idea the Starboards and the Bridges eventually begin to question their own reality.

The cons: It’s not super-dynamic, and it doesn’t give you much of a sense of the protagonists.

Then there’s Alma. Would the viewer realize she’s there? Is she sleeping or is she dead?  Plus, Alma’s profile and the shroud merging with a grassy landscape would have been a serious pain to Photoshop, and make it look right. I’m still not sure that most people see the upside-down blue face in the cover of Line of Descent, in the half-a-second that they might spend looking at it. I didn’t want to create the same issue for myself again with this cover.

 

 

Cover Sketch 2:

So I tried to make something more ‘in-your-face.’ I started off with the four travelers standing together, holding whatever, looking tough, directly into the ‘camera.’ But I decided it made more sense, and would add more action, if they were on horses. The idea was always to have Samuel in the front. I felt like I needed to imply there was a primary protagonist to the book, even if some readers would decide Walt and Sam are co-protagonists.

The terrain in this sketch is far more rugged than the final art. But you have to work with what Photoshop gives you.

In the end, I thought this layout had more of a movie-poster feel to it more of a sense of the four main characters taking charge of their situation. I think it’s bolder, overall. And I hope that means it’s more likely to grab a reader’s attention—and their imagination—right off the bat.

Another Idyll sketch.

 

 

To the ends of the Earth

What is it lately with all the apocalypses? Everywhere you look in pop culture, someone’s trying to survive one. There’s your garden-variety plague apocalypses (Station Eleven). There’s your zombie plague apocalypses (Walking Dead, World War Z). Comedic apocalypes (Last Man on Earth). A capital-A Apocalypse (the villain from the upcoming X-Men movie). HBO apocalypses (The Left overs), celestial apocalypses (SevenEves), and apocalypse remakes (Fury Road).

Why are we so obsessed with the world ending? There’s a theory out there that says that the post-apocalyptic genre taps into a deep desire to return to our primal roots—and not necessarily in a good way. If the society’s infrastructure crumbles, then all social conventions go out the window. And then its totally acceptable to kill strangers. In fact, in the case of a zombie plague, it’s downright pragmatic.

I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far, that all post-apocalyptic stories are excuses for us to vicariously satisfy our bloodlust Besides, I think we’re probably just as bloodthirsty now as we were twenty or thirty years ago. So why are post-apocalyptic so overwhelmingly popular now? Why is Kansas’ governor officially declaring October zombie preparedness month? Why are Zombie Runs and Zombie Paintball so popular? Why is ‘Doomsday Preppers’ a thing?

It’s not hard to figure out why movies in the 1950s featured atomic monsters like Godzilla or Them!. (Not ‘them,’ ‘Them!’) Back then, nations were legitimately scared of being wiped off the map by nuclear war. Compared to the real fear of a nuclear holocaust, ‘It Came From Beneath the Sea,’ or ’The Giant Gila Monster’ seem downright cozy.

So what’s zinging our zeitgeist in 2015?

How about the fact that we’re just too damn connected? Facebook, Skype, texts, emails, tweets, photo streams… We are inundated with enough messages and info to choke the most robust of data plans. Thank goodness for those of us with phone phobia, the only means of communication that seems to be going extinct are actual phone calls. Still, it’s becoming a bit alienating as constant contact replaces human contact.

For many Millennials, who have grown up in a world of Google searches, push notifications, Netflix queues, and geofencing, the idea of all those connections suddenly ceasing probably seems equally fascinating and horrifying.

So what are we going to do about it? Move into a solar/wind powered cabin, somewhere off the grid? Actually it would be far easier to download The Dog Stars to our phone and visit the post-apocalypse whenever we like—in short escapist bursts—between checking Tinder.

PS: I guess I should complain about the ubiquity of post-apocalyptic stories, since I just contributed to the genre myself. (Try Idyll for an apocalypse on another planet!)

PPS: I just finished Peter Heller’s ‘The Dog Stars,’ so I’m hoping to write a review in about a week.

State of My Writing, Spring 2014

It’s time to dust off the portable hard drives and those nearly useless 16MB memory cards. Time to  email attachments to myself. Time to start stashing files in the cloud. It’s back-up time!

As of right now, I’ve finished the 4th (and hopefully final) major redux of TURNING and the 7th (and hopefully final) redux of IDYLL. Whew, what a relief! I started the first version of Idyll in February of 2006! The four main characters and the setting have remained mostly unchanged in eight years. Everything else has changed drastically and often. Right now I want to sit on both stories to plan a potential roll-out in late 2014, early 2015. This is because:

1) I’m skeered.
2) Both books are being reviewed by Beta-Readers
3) I want to absorb as much as I can on the subjects of publishing e-books, marketing e-books, building my platform, etc.
4) It’s a very busy time with my job and attempting to sell our house
5) I’m beta-reading my wife’s new WIP
6) I’m skeered.

And there’s another exciting reason! Only exciting to me probably! I’ve begun humping away on a sequel to Idyll! Three weeks ago, I was one paragraph away from finishing a final revision on a cool short story, when the urge to start on the sequel overtook me. For a long time, I’ve had a rough idea of where I wanted to take the characters in Idyll—their course for a second and third book. But in early May I began to really think about what would happen in Book 3 of the series. I think I came up with a great story—I can see the characters evolving to these great places, and now I can’t wait to write them.

Hopefully Idyll’s first sequel won’t take another eight years to complete. I think I can realistically shoot for eight months. Part of my plan of attack is a tactic I’m calling “gap writing.” I’ve heard in the past that as some writers go through their first draft, they’ll write as fluidly as they can, and leave blanks if they can’t come up with the perfect adjective, or if they don’t want to stop to look up a particular fact. I’m taking that rapid-burst technique a step further: sometimes I won’t even bother to write down proper names. I’m skipping straight to the verbs and their objects. We’ll see, as tactics go, if this is more of a Pickett’s Charge. So far, when I’m on a roll and really enjoying myself, the full sentences seem to flow unbidden from my keyboard. In fact after one particularly fleshed-out, detailed paragraph, I had to stop and remind myself that this is just a first draft, and everything I write could change, so I don’t want to spend too much time on it now. The goal is to end up with a intensely descriptive outline that lays out each chapter, clause-by-clause. Description…Action…Reaction…Description…Metaphor…Dialog…Action… All muscle and bone, but no sinew.

My hope is that I can have Book 2 finished so that it could drop 2-3 months after Idyll is released. That means I could have three novels and one short story on the market by March or April of next year! Of all the self-publishing advice I’ve read, the tip that makes the most sense to me is “Write, write, and write some more. Don’t stop with one book.” The most successful authors have multiple items on their Amazon author pages, so that they can leverage the success of one book to help boost the others.