Ripples in Speculative Fiction

Well, it’s the last day of 2025 and I wanted to give an update before the new year for my own posterity, since I’m pretty sure I’m the only one that reads this thing. I had a rather hilarious conversation with my wife where I mentioned my blog and she asked in the most incredulous voice, “You still do that?”

Yes, yes I do. Oh, well. I think I’ve stated before I like doing this blog even if no one reads it, since it lets me go back and review progress made over time.

I did not finish part IV and therefore book 2 before the end of the year. But man am I close. One more chapter! That’s it. Probably another 3-6k (a mere 1.5-3% of the book left). Not sure how long it will be until I get in there and start writing it. But all the characters are where they need to be, the protag and antag forces are necked down in a small defined space and headed toward each other on a collision course. Whee! All I need to do is bring them together and see what happens.

My writing speed always picks up at the end as I get excited to wrap things up. This time was no different and I had my best two writing months in November and December this year in terms of word count. I expect that speed to continue into the new year.

I probably only need another week and the last chapter will be done. I will still have to write an epilogue, but that may come much later. I didn’t write the epilogue to book one until I had already deep into writing book 2. Then of course comes the edits. I’ll edit part IV by itself, and then the whole novel together before going right into drafting book 3. I am hopeful that by maintaining a series bible and editing the different sections a bit more thoroughly as I went this time will help ease the pain.

Maybe I’ll start drafting book 3 by April? That seems a good goal. Next time, I’ll look back on 2025 targets and how I did, and outline 2026 targets.

Well, I missed another blog update for September. Once again, I was in the heat of drafting and opting to use all my writing time to try and get to a natural stopping point.

I am still at 75% on MK2 by the way I count things. I break up the MK novels into four parts and I’ve written (and edited!) parts 1-3. But I also include Interlude chapters between the major parts. It’s a way to visit with other characters and give depth and reader awareness to other things that are happening behind the scenes that the main characters may not be present for or have visibility into.

I actually rather enjoy writing the Interlude chapters—I think because it adds a depth and richness to the story and helps me flush out what’s happening. I spent most of my time between the last blog post and this one writing three interlude chapters that ended up totaling around 12k words which is a lot for Interlude chapters—but so much was happening!

I had to weave through a new thread between Parts 2&3 and 3&4 and that took most of the time to flush that out. All new characters, all new settings, and I had it to tie it all in with the wider story. It took a bit to come together, but I am quite pleased.

Once I hit publish on this blog post I am going to start drafting Part IV. I had estimated I needed another 30k words to wrap it up and at 10k words per month that puts in me finishing up around  January. I had hoped to finish it before the end of the year, but the Interludes took longer than anticipated. I may still be able to wrap it up by years end. We have time off around Thanksgiving and Christmas and the end of novels tend to write faster for me as I get motivated to wrap it up.

The problem, of course, is that I am a pantser. I make it up as I go. I have no idea how this novel ends. But it’s never stopped me before (although it has slowed me down). There’s only one solution to that—butt in chair time.

Time to land this plane.

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.