Ripples in Speculative Fiction

I unexpectedly got some great news this past week: The Solid-State Shuffle squeaked through the first winnowing round in the inaugural Self-Publishing Science Fiction Contest (SPSFC)!

For those that don’t know about the contest, 300 self-published science fiction books are going to be whittled down to just one over the course of a year by a group book bloggers and judges with bragging rights and a pretty cool trophy to boot. The first round saw the 300 books divvied up to 10 teams who read the first 10-20% of the 30 books assigned to them and then voted on the top ten books to move to the next round. Those ten books will then be read in their entirety and the top 3 will move out to the semi-finalist round.

I’m super excited I made it out of the first round! Honestly, that’s as far as I dared to hope, so whatever happens after this point is all gravy. There’s a lot of great self-published fiction out there and I knew the competition was going to be fierce. I’m also aware that Isa is a polarizing character, people either love her or hate her, there doesn’t seem to be much in between. She grows and softens as the series goes on but there aren’t enough pet-the-dog moments in the first book to foreshadow that. This showed up in the comments the review team left about novel, which I’m really grateful for. It’s something they didn’t have to do.

The Solid-State Shuffle was one of the 30 books assigned to the team lead by Tar Vol, who has been blogging about the SPSFC on their Tar Vol website. The way the contest is structured, reviews at this point are not required so the fact that Tar Vol is doing this out in the open is very much appreciated and also the only way I was aware that The Solid-State Shuffle had moved on to the quarter-finalist round. Thank you for blogging all the results!

I am quite content to have made it this far and I look forward to watching the contest and discovering new books in the months to come regardless of whether The Solid-State Shuffle advances or not.

Turns out, no, I cannot force myself to take a break. I maintained my streak going all the way back to 2020 and still made significant progress—so, yeah? I’m not sure how I feel about that to be honest. On the one hand, I’m happy the streak was maintained and even happier about the progress made, but on the other hand, I was flirting with burnout.

It seems to be the hardest lesson to learn, when to recognize signs of burnout and then what to do about it. In this case, simply giving myself permission to take a couple days of rest was enough. As soon as I decided I wasn’t going to work on the novel that day, I would suddenly find myself with a free 15 minutes and think, “I’ll just go look at it,” and then end up with solid progress made. So—I’m still not sure what the lesson is there. I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out.

via GIPHY

In regards to the novel, I’m past the midpoint and currently sitting at ~63% complete of the zero draft. I actually have a pretty solid idea of from the 75-100% mark. But actually closing that gap from the 63% mark to the 75% is still somewhat opaque. I was writing a chapter were a lot finally starts to click into place for the characters and realized I didn’t remember what character knew what and when they learned it, so I opted to stop and go into an editing phase to get a handle on that.

I’ll probably spend the rest of October doing that and start drafting again in November. Based on these latest developments, I’m aiming to finish the zero draft by the end of January 2022.

So, I think I have the thousand-foot view? That’s been the problem with this novel the whole time. I can’t keep anything in my head for any amount of time.

I spent most of August and close to 7k words brainstorming and writing down notes, but even after all that time, I don’t have everything I worked out memorized. But I am confident I must have worked it out, since I started drafting again a couple days ago. I’m still trying to find my rhythm again. I have a clear idea what needs to happen (and more importantly why) in the next few chapters but I’m still having problem getting going, building narrative momentum.

I think part of the issue is, I have a streak going all the way back to early 2020 of working on writing every day. That’s over a year long, which is great. But now I’m starting to think, a break might be in order. I have lots of other things outside of writing that vie for my attention, such that, lately, it feels like I come to my writing time as a box to check, rather than a period of fun to have. This is most notable when as soon as I hit the designated word count for that day, I often stop and move on to something else.

Not sure what to do about that. On the one hand, I have the streak and I hate losing momentum. On the other hand, I don’t really have momentum right now. Should probably take a break ….  Now to see if I can actually force myself to do that.

Writing is hard.

The novel hasn’t quite ground to a halt, but the gears are definitely giving a horrible screeching as it lurches it ahead. The second half of the second act is usually the hardest part for me to write, or at least takes the longest as I try to piece everything together. But I’m running into that problem in the first half of the second act with this novel.

The reason is pretty clear, from a series perspective, this novel is where everything in the previous four books needs to come together, so it’s equivalent to the second part of the second in a novel. There are a lot of threads to tie together that need to be self-consistent with the previous novels. Even though I reread those novels before starting, I finished writing book 4 almost four years ago (and I wrote all four in row) and it’s been difficult to keep all the threads in my head all this time later.

This has resulted in at least one continuity error that needed to be clipped out and smoothed over, and a sputtering pace where I figure out a sequence for a couple chapters and then have to switch to brainstorming to figure out where to go next.

And now I’m currently at the point right before the midpoint, which is an important part of the novel. It’s the part where a big event launches the characters into the second half of the novel, where they switch from trying to figure out what’s going on, to actively solving the problem. So, to write the midpoint properly, I need to know where to launch them to.

I actually have a strong idea of the midpoint, but I need to have a better handle on the bigger picture to layer things properly. So, I’ve stepped back and started outlining from the thousand-foot view. I don’t know how long this detour will take, but I am determined to stay in this phase as long as it takes. The novel is currently sitting at 30k, which I estimate is about 40% of the way through. I’m hoping once I have the thousand-foot view outline, the pace will pick back up and be done by end of the year or shortly after.

Well, reality set in much faster on Sunken City Capers Book 5 (SCC5) than I was expecting. Drafting speed has slowed down to a more normal pace, but the real hiccup was I made a continuity error that I didn’t catch for three chapters. This is the equivalent of having a character sprinting in chapter five while having broken a leg in chapter four.

Oh, well.

Good thing I tend to alternate between editing and drafting, so at least I caught it before the book was done drafting. The fix forced me to reevaluate the plot and what I thought was the midpoint, I think would be better served as the third plot point (75% mark in a novel).

I ended up having to edit two of those chapters and throw one completely away. But I’m sitting at 21k, which I guesstimate is about one third of the way through. I have a very clear idea of the next sequence and a good idea of the midpoint, so I think drafting speed will pick up again in July.

My target is to write up to or start the midpoint sequence by the end of July, which would be about another 10k. I expect things to slow then as I figure out how to get from the midpoint to the third plot point. That part of the novel always tends to be the slowest for me to draft.

Now that reality has set in, I think the end of September for finishing the zero draft may be aggressive, but not yet out of the realm of possibility.

I started drafting in mid-May the fifth and final book the current arc in Sunken City Capers. It’s been oddly therapeutic to write it, like it’s been this unfinished thing hanging over my head for years.

Drafting speed is pretty high right now and I’m sitting at ~15k words in about three weeks. I guesstimate that 15k is about 25% of the novel. I suspect this rate of drafting to continue to about the 50% mark (since I have a clear idea of the midpoint), but then it will probably slow down as I step back and figure out how to close out the rest of the novel.

Taking all that into account, I think I’ll finish the zero draft by the end of September. After that, I’m not sure when it’ll be ready to publish. I will have to edit (which I think will take a two to three months), but then I have line up all the publishing gears which is unpredictable this far out based on other people’s availability.

My best guess would be sometime in 2022 Q2 or Q3 for the final Sunken City Capers to hit the market. I can’t wait for it to be done!

April was a month of surprises for me—good ones. First, I finished both short stories in the MK1 world. Second, both short stories came in under 5k words. This is huge for me. I have a terrible time writing short and almost everything I write ends up longer than I expected. Novelette (7.5-18k) seems a more natural length for me. So, to have two stories below 5k to submit is amazing.

There are a lot more markets to sell short stories to at 5k than at 8k+. Which was another surprise for me. I haven’t submitted a short story to a market in over 5 years. 5 years! I had switched back in 2016 to writing novels (I have written 5 in that time), so it’s not like I’ve been idle or giving up writing. But it did surprise me to realize it had been that long since I had been submitting.

Now with the two 5k stories and the 8k novelette I wrote a couple months back, I have some pieces to put into rotation and I’ve already submitted them to some markets. Should be an interesting few months submitting them around (fingers crossed!).

But now that that’s all wrapped up, I’ve decided to turn my attention back to Sunken City Capers and write book 5 to close out that series. I’ve done a little bit of brainstorming and I have a vague idea of where I want everyone to end up, but no idea how to get there. That’s okay though, when it comes to Isa and Puo, that’s the fun part and they always surprise me. For now, I’m doing a re-read of the series and once that’s done I’ll start brainstorming in earnest with an eye to begin drafting.

I just finished the first-pass edits of the 150k beast I’m labeling MK1 for now. I’m pretty pleased with it, but there is a lot of things that still need to be gone back through and filled in. Things I haven’t figured out yet, and likely won’t until the second or third book.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to ignore all common-sense advice and write this series in its entirety before beginning to either seek publishing or publishing it myself. I’m a discovery writer, so it isn’t until something is complete that I can see the forest for the trees and connect everything properly. I’m well aware how this is discouraged if you either want to be traditionally published (eh), or want to write quickly and publish at a regular rate to build up a following (eh, I can’t write that fast anyway with my other life commitments). So, I’m going to take my time and enjoy the process.

For now, I’ve set aside MK1 for a cooling off period. I’ll pick it up again when I start to think about writing book 2, which I’m not sure when that will be. I’m going to transition to writing two short stories set in MK1 world to flush out some events and characters and then I’m seriously toying with picking back up Sunken City Capers and writing book 5, the final one. There’s been some good traction there and growing interest. My only hesitation is then that requires be step away from the MK series for a bit.

But, for once, this is a good writing problem to have, having more than one project you’re excited about to pick what to work on.

February turned out to be my best writing month since February 2016, exactly five years ago. I wrote 24k words for the month and finished the zero draft of my current WIP. I started writing this novel in October of 2018. By that count, it took me 2 years and 4 months to complete the zero draft. That’s the longest it has ever taken me to write a story (by a lot), but honestly, seeing the length of time written down—it doesn’t look that long. This novel was a beast to write–it felt like much longer than 2 years and 4 months.

I basked in the accomplishment of finishing for several days and then set about figuring out how best to begin the arduous task of editing the beast. I promptly got overwhelmed. The novel is a 150k words with multiple POV’s with epic scale—it’s a lot for me at this stage of my writing career. I can’t keep the whole novel in my head at once. I began to worry that I would forget things, or get stuck in an endless edit loop where I was constantly editing the back-half without remembering the first-half and then switching, and always having a nagging feeling I’m forgetting something and then switching back ad nauseam.

Eventually, I collated all my edit notes into one document, organized that document and printed that out. I have no doubt I’m going to forget stuff and that I probably have many edits ahead of me before I feel like it’s ready to be set aside for a new project, but the saying by G.K. Chesterton “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” gave some motivation to get started.

I don’t know how long it edits will take, but I’m hoping by the end of April I can shift to writing the epilogue and some short stories set in that world. But we’ll see!

I had a pretty solid start to the year writing-wise. I started the third act of my WIP and wrote the first third of it, along with two interlude chapters for about 14k for the month, which is pretty solid for me. I happy with a 10k month when drafting. I also had a Bookbub for The Solid-State Shuffle in mid-January that went better than expected and I’m quite pleased with the results. I have some plans for later in the year to promote Sunken City Capers further.

So, my 2021 targets:
1. Finish current novel (this includes drafting and at least the 1^st whole pass novel revision)
2. Write one short-story/novelette set in novel world.
3. Create and maintain a series bible
4. Start either novel #2 in current series or Sunken City Capers #5
5. Read 10 nonfiction books

I think I’ll be done drafting the current novel by the end of March, but I expect revisions to take several months. I want to get it into as close a state as possible to done and then trunk it for a bit to get a fresh perspective on it. That’s part of the purpose of target #2, a bit of a palate cleanser. I like using shorts to flesh out characters and go deeper into the backstory. They may never see the light of day, but they do give much greater depth to the novel.

I expect while working on the edits of the novel, I will start to create and maintain a series bible. When the novel is so large and you expect to have multiple novels, it helps to create a cliff notes version of the series to look up quickly: what color eyes does that character have? When did the main protagonist come into contact with this important object? I already have a large body of work in this area—it’s just an absolute mess. I dumped things in the scrivener research section with only a haphazard attempt at organization. The novel has grown so large, that now it annoys me and I know it’s only going to grow, so I need to impose some structure.

I’m hoping to have targets 1-3 wrapped up by mid-third quarter and then use the fourth quarter to start the next big project. I’m not sure which project that will be yet. I am encouraged by the traction Sunken City Capers is currently having, and if it continues, it may make sense to move up finishing that series in my queue of projects.

And as before, I need to be intentional about reading non-fiction books. I’m already on track to read three this year, so I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to get to ten if I remain mindful about it.

Here’s to hoping 2021 doesn’t turn out like 2020!