Ripples in Speculative Fiction

I have been purposefully neglecting a number of things on the publishing side of the business over the past eight months and it has thoroughly come back to bite me in the posterior.  I was drafting MK2 with a ton of momentum and, dare I say, enjoying myself. Why stop doing the fun stuff for the drudgery? This is the equivalent to staying indoors to play video games for eight months while neglecting your yard. Guess what happens when you finally emerge into the light?

On the plus side MK2 is 75% done and I am itching to start writing act three and wrapping it up. It’s that very itch that forced me to stop and take care my proverbial front yard. I was at a good stopping point and decided to use that itch as motivation to get through the less pleasant stuff of running a publishing business. I was hoping for a day or two delay, maybe a week.

One month later, I think I’m finally ready to start drafting again. It all started innocently enough with some weird emails I was getting from newsletter hosting service. I noticed over the course of months that when they emailed me to notify me of new signups, several people would sign up more than once. I scratched my head and went on happily drafting.

When I finally signed into the newsletter host, I saw the truth. They had changed the terms of their free plan to be less than 500 subscribers with no automation. I had 1800. People were signing up once, wondering where the link to the free story was, and then signing up again when it never came. And thus started a month-long saga.

First, I’m not opposed to paying for a service, but this is thread-bare, lone-author publishing endeavor. The hosting provider wanted $100 a month at my subscriber count. That’s my entire budget for a non-publishing year, and aside from the automation, I send one campaign email about once a year. So, no.

I found another provider that meets my needs, but now I have to update all the newsletter sign up links on my website and in all my books. Tedious, but not difficult, right? Well, mostly right. Back to that thread-bare, lone-author part. I had a website admin manage my website for years—it was a skill I really didn’t want to have to learn and was happy to outsource it. Alas, inflation being what it’s been, prices rose to the point that I couldn’t afford it anymore.

The problem is that the website was built back around 2015, it’s almost ten years old with as custom tools. It was built with PHP 5, but now we’re on PHP 8. I’m sure the developer know how to deal with all this. Me? Took me much longer. The website was never really down, but the ability to update it behind the scenes is where the problem lay. At any rate, I got it working again. I won’t go into the details, but it was very much like whack-a-mole. And I’m not going to claim I understand it. My goal was to get it back to serviceable and its there.

I’m hoping I can keep it limping along until I’m ready to release the MK series at which point I will need a more thorough website refresh. But for now, I can get back to drafting—after I clean up my office of course.

Happy New Year! I meant to get this posted in January, but this is close enough.

I spelled out my 2024 targets in this post where I also looked back at 2023. They were:

1. Edit character arc in the second half of MK1.
2. Edit first act of MK2.
3. Write 2-3 short stories exploring off camera events to better understand them.
4. Write first half of the second act of MK2.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that I did pretty good. Once I write down my yearly targets, I rarely, if ever, go back and revisit them. I never find myself in a limbo moment with writing where I am wondering what I should work on and how that fits into my overall goals, so I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that I normally hit pretty close to the targets I laid out.

I accomplished all but #3. I did not write any short stories set in the series world to flush out more detail–although, I still like that idea. I did, however, participate in Codex’s 2024 Weekend Warrior contest where I ended up writing 6 new flash fiction pieces and even sold and had one published. So, that’s at least tangentially related.

In truth, 1, 2, & 4 took up the majority of my time. Particularly #4. I didn’t think that was going to happen, but the writing sped up quite a bit in the fall and I made it!

I also read 25 fictions books and 10 non-fiction books in 2024. Hmm … looking over the list of both, I didn’t have any that stood out to me as particularly notable. I think that’s the first time that’s ever happened. It could be because 6 of the fiction books were in one series and 12 were in another so that didn’t leave a lot of room for broad sampling.

For 2025, the target is simple: Finish MK2. Stretch goal would be by July and then edit and write some of those short stories. But I need to get a move on on these novels so I can start pushing them out there in the world so the focus has to be on: Finish. The. Novel.

I have started drafting again on MK2. I am not quite matching the drafting speed of last fall, but I’m not that far off either. I even have a clear picture of what needs to happen and some sequencing, but as is often the case this time of year, writing time is hard to come by with one-off tasks that pop up around the new year, but more on that later. For now, I am going to go try and wrap up a chapter on the novel before heading to bed.

Well, I missed September, October, and November regular updates, but it was for a good cause—I rode a wave of momentum and wrote up to the halfway point of MK2. I struggled with the first third of the first half of the second act. It took me five painful months to get through that part, but the last two-thirds of that section flowed fast over the next three months. It went so fast and flowed so smoothly, that I was unwilling to take a break to write a blog update and take even the slightest momentum hit.

I would’ve liked to keep the momentum going into the second half of the second act, but as if often the case for pantsers and my writing process, I now need to slow down to get an idea of where to go next. I have solid handles on the two main protagonists, but, as usual, it’s the antagonist off screen that I need to figure what they’re up to and how that will intersect with the main storylines.

I started writing MK2 in July 2023 and set a goal of completing the zero draft in two years, which would put it at July 2025 (seven months away!). I’m not sure how achievable that is anymore—I’ll have to see how the next few months shape up. If I can keep up the writing speed I had through September-November once I start drafting again, then it’s possible. If not, then my fall-back position is to write up to the third plot point by July and finish it by end of 2025.

One thing that has helped the writing speed is all the work I put into building a series bible. It’s super helpful to remember character characteristics, settings, descriptions, etc. It makes editing ten times easier and helps the story feel more flushed out when I can look up details and drop them in confident they’re consistent with earlier parts of the story. The only drawback is keeping the series bible regularly updated—that’s often what I chose to do instead of writing a blog post when I wasn’t drafting the last few months.

I’ll update how 2024 went writing wise next time and layout some 2025 targets. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to report that I’m drafting again by then or at least close to starting to draft.

I have been nose to grindstone trying to get to the midpoint of MK2, which is why I haven’t updated the blog in a little while. But while that was happening, I had a story released in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. It’s a flash piece titled The Kaiju and the Pink Backpack. It was a lot of fun to write and I hope you check it out!

Whelp, despite my best efforts, that epistolary section that was boring to write, was boring to read too.

via GIPHY

So, I cut the section by about 50-60% and cleaned it up quite a bit to smooth out the edges. My whole “I think this does something different” might’ve been true, but I think I would’ve lost a lot of readers in this section. I’m going to have a character sum up the important bits the reader would’ve gleaned otherwise.

On the plus side, I should get back to drafting prose tomorrow; on the negative side I lost three months to this one section. The epistolary section amounts to ~5k words which is about 2-3 weeks of my normal drafting speed when writing prose. So, this was a rather large hit to my timeline.

Of course, my timeline is already generous—I think it’s going to be years before all three books are ready to publish. I had hoped to finish book 2 by Summer 2025, which could still happen, but I would need some serious bouts of inspiration coupled with solid butt-in-chair time—increasingly difficult to come by as children grow, day job demands increase, and MS fatigue sucks away endurance.

But I get to start drafting prose again—that’s the fun part. We’ll see how the next month goes.

Well, I didn’t write a blog update in May or June but for slightly different reasons. My drafting of the first half of the second act of MK2 was going smoothly about until the second week of May. I know it was the second week of May because there’s a noticeable and consistent dip in my word count tracker. I hit an epistolary section of the novel (a multi-day hospital report) and decided I need to write the whole thing and then down select from there.

If that weren’t bad enough, it was/is boring to write. This is normally a big red flag for writers: if you’re bored writing it, readers are going to be bored writing it. But this is an exception (I think—at least, I’m pretty sure) for two reasons. The first is that report writing is dry, technical, third person writing. It’s just very different than prose and it’s in the medical field with which I’m not very familiar, so it’s slow going. And slow going always is a struggle for me. I’ve always likened writing to riding a bike, the faster you go, the more momentum you have and easier it is. So slow going always feels wobbly and sputtering to me.

The second reason I’m not too worried (at least not yet) about being bored writing this section is, when I go back and read it, I rather like it. I’m not bored reading it and I think it brings an interesting insight into the character. I also know the role it plays in the larger story and I think the epistolary section does something different than I normally see in epistolary sections in prose novels, so I find that exciting.

I am, however, still writing this section. The end is in sight, but it is taking forever. The writing is slow and I missed more days than usual this past June. So as a result, I missed my weekly wordcounts for most of the weeks in June, but not by much–I was still pretty consistent.

Hopefully, the next time I blog I will be able to write this epistolary section is done and I’ll also cover why I didn’t have time to blog in June and missed more writing days than normal. Until then!

As is typically my case, as soon as I swear I’m not going to work on something and the mental weight of that lifts, I find myself twiddling my thumbs and think I’ll just work on it a little bit. So naturally, I finished the edits of Act 1 of MK2 and started drafting again.

The edits went faster than I thought. I mapped out the interlude chapters and figured out how to weave in (and figure out) all that pieces that are happening off camera. I then sat down and started writing again quite unexpectedly—I don’t know why it always surprises me when I do start drafting again. I think it’s because I always feels like I want to be writing but there are always impediments standing in the way such as work, life, edits, or things to figure out in the novel.

But I started drafting again! I keep track of word counts when I draft and from that I can see that I finished drafting Act 1 of MK2 on Dec 23, 2023. So, it’s been close to four months since I was drafting and the writing muscles feel a little stiff and sluggish getting going. But I know how to deal with that at this point: routine. Set a daily word count, and them make sure you hit it. That’s what I’ve done and MK2 is off to the drafting again.

Life has been busy. March is time of year I get a set of MRIs done for my MS and as a consequence, it tends to come with rash of doctor’s appointments. The neurologist is like the captain of the team, and then there’s a bunch of other specialists I see for symptom control. At any rate, all those appointments tend cluster together around this time of year (and the fall). And if there weren’t enough, my youngest daughter has developed a demanding health condition that is affecting life for us all as we try and get our hands around it.

All that to say, I actually did better than I thought this past month on the writing goals given all that. I finished all the Weekend Warrior stories and got them out on submission, and I finished editing the first act of MK2. It was pretty rough—all my zero drafts are on the first pass—but, all in all, not terrible. The main character arc continues to give me trouble, but I’ve decided I’m overthinking it and I’m just going to have fun and let it flow. It’ll be years at this rate before any of this ready anyway, so I mind as well enjoy it as much as I can while it’s all mine.

I now need to sit down with all those handwritten edits and work through them in the digital manuscript, but that is actually a pretty high level of effort and something I like to focus on and do as quickly as possible to keep the story in my head as much as possible. But I just don’t have the time with life stuff right now to dedicate to that. So, the edit’s are sitting on my desk when I’m ready for them. I’m sad at the loss of momentum, with my MS brain I will have forgotten much when I finally get back to it, but there’s nothing for it.

So, no real writing goals this coming month except to get a handle on life stuff.

You know, I kinda hate/love this time of year and I think I forget that every year. Every January/February there’s an extra layer of stress on top everything and I find myself pulling my hair out in exasperation through these two months. Why? Performance reviews are due at work, taxes are due, and inventory is due at work as well. All are very tedious, unpleasant tasks.

But then, it’s also ski season! This year I went to Crested Butte & Telluride for my solo trip (pics below) for 3 days at Crested Butte and 4 days at Telluride. It was incredible and I am very, very relieved it went so well.

We went on a family trip to Whistler the week before Christmas, but we got a bad roll of the dice and had 40 degrees and raining almost the entire time we were there. It wasn’t as bad once you got up past mid-station, but much of the mountain was closed and the snow was very wet and heavy. My leg got fatigued on the very first run on the very first day and I was pretty despondent about it. I was only able to ski 3-5 runs a day. I was so upset that I came close to canceling the Crested Butte/Telluride trip and calling skiing done in my life, chalked up to a casualty of MS.

I am so very, very happy I didn’t! I’m learning snow conditions and trail length make a big difference for my leg and skiing experience. Crested Butte and Telluride were amazing. Crested Butte had shorter trails that were better for my leg and I had two days of fresh powder at Telluride, which is nothing short of magical.

The icing on the cake was that I was able to know out the performance review for my team, finish edits on MK1, and participated in Codex’s Weekend Warrior contest both weekends (write a 750 flash piece in a weekend for 5 weekends in a row). The contest is a great idea/story generator and I’ve gone on to sell three of the five stories I wrote for it last time. I think I should be able to sell some this time (fingers crossed). I also finished inventory before I left, and almost done with taxes. So, all those unpleasant tasks are almost over.

I’m now getting back to editing act 1 of MK2 with an eye to then turn around and write some short stories from other characters POVs to help fill in some details for myself. There’s a lot going on off camera in MK2 and as a discovery writer it’s hard for me to know what that is until I write it. They could end up as chapters in MK2, short stories in expanded world collection, or forever sit on my hard drive. The final product isn’t what’s so important here, but the journey of story discovery along the way.

My goal for February is to clean up the Weekend Warrior stories, get them out on submission, and put a solid dent in editing MK2.

Pictures from Crested Butte. The trail is Rambo, the steepest in North America! Pictures do not do it justice (I did not go down it). I wanted to look down it from the top, but it can only be accessed by extreme terrain, which with my leg I will not attempt.

Pictures of Telluride. Absolutely gorgeous. Fresh powder! And the trees are the type of skiing I love to do.

Well, I went back and looked and apparently I didn’t set any 2023 targets, which looking back was probably a good thing. I had enough on my plate this year adjusting to life with MS, other life stressors, and a busy day job. So, not having a targets hanging over my head becoming stressors instead of motivators was a blessing in disguise.

But I still had a pretty good writing year in 2023. I sold three stories! The first sales in eight years and one of them was turned into audio (my favorite format). So that was definitely a highlight. I edited MK1 (again) and wrote the first act of MK2 (more on that later). I also wrote a series bible for MK1 that has already proven its weight in gold. And I read 15 fiction books and 6 nonfiction books. These seem low, but I read The Count of Monte Cristo and Don Quixote which took me longer to get through. Of the 15 fiction books, my favorites were The Count of Monte Cristo and Murder on the Orient Express.

Writing the first act of MK2 has been challenging for a couple reasons. First, it’s a big honking space opera and there’s a lot going on off camera with side characters that I haven’t worked out yet–so it’s hard to know how to weave that all in. The second is that I’ve had a really hard time getting a handle on the main character’s character arc in the second book. It’s only recently that I’ve figured out why.

I realized on one of my editing passes of MK1 this past year that the main character’s character arc didn’t fit neatly into MK1 and that it was going to be split over multiple books. I recognized that the climax of MK1 was really the midpoint of the character arc, but what I didn’t recognize until recently (although in retrospect should’ve been obvious) was that meant some of the characters interactions were incongruent in the second half of MK1. Basically, the steps the character needs to go through from the midpoint to the third plot point in a character arc were shoved in the wrong place between the first act and the midpoint of a character arc. It resulted in some weirdness and made it hard to figure how to develop the character in the first act of MK1.

So my targets for 2024 are tied to these recent revelations:
1. Edit character arc in the second half of MK1.
2. Edit first act of MK2.
3. Write 2-3 short stories exploring off camera events to better understand them.
4. Write first half of the second act of MK2.

No reading goals this year. I don’t feel I need them anymore—reading is now pretty integrated into my daily life.