Picking up where I left off the last time, I finished up the read through and editing pass for the Mystery/Romance on the 16th. I'm giving it a month's rest so I can look at it with fresh eyes.
I woke up one day and had an idea for a story set on a space station in the outer solar system. It would be a mystery/suspense type of thing, I think. I started doing research. There's enough of a timeline to do at least two books. The station has to be built. It probably needs a shakedown cruise to Mars to get the bugs worked out. I have multiple distinct time periods: construction, shakedown cruise, journey to the outer system(six years) and then what happens after it gets there. There's a lot to work with depending on what I want to do and think I can do. These would probably be short novels, but that brings up an idea about doing shorter books that needs a future post of its own.
However, instead of going straight to the space station books, I've somehow ended up working on the sequel to Messengers. The prologue begins within days of Call to War then jumps two or three months ahead to Afton wanting to sign a peace treaty with B'vellah. Maybe a few months later Etan and Kayley's wedding would take place. As mentioned in the last book, at some point a war breaks out.
I've already been writing the prologue the events of which seem pretty much set in stone. It's too big for a normal prologue. Maybe I'll divide it into something like Part I. I'm not sure of all the plot yet. Marion is one of the main characters. Afton's sons will play a larger role. The reason I barely mentioned them in Messengers is because I didn't think of them until the end then had to go back and add them in, but by then it was too late for them to be a real part of the series. Oops.
Some things will take place on earth, but I'm not sure how much. A future book about Calliope has events that take place on earth. I need to figure out how to keep that discrete from the sequel.
Anyway, I'm out of time. The next little while should be working on the sequel to Messengers.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Moving Right Along
I clicked the New Blog button and was presented with a screen for creating another blog. It wasn't what I expected. I wonder how many people need multiple blogs or have time to write for each of them. But anyway.
So far, this has been a hard year in a lot of ways, but I'm making progress. I'm 105.75% of the way through the rough draft of the current book. I went a little over the word count, but that's okay. It gives me flexibility in what to trim down. The rough draft is finished. Yay! This book is one I mentioned before that was a bit of a break from Messengers. It's a mystery/romance or a romantic mystery. It's set in a small, fictional town in South Carolina far from the beach but near a lake. There's a murder, but it's not really a whodunit type of murder mystery. It's a Christian inspirational cozy sort of thing, although I really need to look up the exact definition of what constitutes a Christian cozy book before I try to call it that.
I'd have been done sooner, but I had to do a lot of research into police procedures. That took longer than I thought and kind of dragged on. The vast majority of it never made it into the book. Actually, it's almost invisible in the sense that the actions of the police take place mostly off stage. I needed to know how the police interact with suspects and how they investigate and such in order to make the detective and the police department believable instead of ridiculous. That reminds me. Did you know the police department and sheriff's office are different entities and have different jobs? I didn't! That's what I get for never having pursued a life of crime. I've never been arrested, so I had a lot to learn about how a jail works and all that. The result of the research is that the police in the book do their jobs, but I don't explain why they do certain things.
The next step is to go over the rough draft and proofread and edit and knock it into shape. I'm not sure how long that will take, hopefully a week or two if I don't find any massive structural flaws. I did a certain amount of editing and proofreading along the way. After that I want to put it away for a month and let it grow stale so I can see it with "fresh" eyes and find all the hideously embarrassing things I missed during the first edit. However, there's some good news. Somebody on a writers forum I occasionally visit posted a link to a cheap, professional editor. I'm not rich, but I think I'll be able to try them out with this book. I'm excited about that. Part of my research aside from the police stuff was to read some books on the market today and get a general feel for what's out there. Too much of it needed more editing. It wasn't that the writing was bad. It was a polish thing. Some of it needed some major work, but there's one guy in particular who does a good job but needs that last little bit of polish to push him over the top. He's not the only one, of course, but he stood out because his stuff is good enough that I read more than one of his books. I don't want to put something out there that's "almost good enough" but falls short on silly little things.
I know I don't blog a lot. I try to wait until I have something to say instead of just slapping something up. Now that things are going faster, I should have more to say. Like what will I be doing in that month I'm letting this book rest? Working on the next one, but that'll have to wait for another day.
So far, this has been a hard year in a lot of ways, but I'm making progress. I'm 105.75% of the way through the rough draft of the current book. I went a little over the word count, but that's okay. It gives me flexibility in what to trim down. The rough draft is finished. Yay! This book is one I mentioned before that was a bit of a break from Messengers. It's a mystery/romance or a romantic mystery. It's set in a small, fictional town in South Carolina far from the beach but near a lake. There's a murder, but it's not really a whodunit type of murder mystery. It's a Christian inspirational cozy sort of thing, although I really need to look up the exact definition of what constitutes a Christian cozy book before I try to call it that.
I'd have been done sooner, but I had to do a lot of research into police procedures. That took longer than I thought and kind of dragged on. The vast majority of it never made it into the book. Actually, it's almost invisible in the sense that the actions of the police take place mostly off stage. I needed to know how the police interact with suspects and how they investigate and such in order to make the detective and the police department believable instead of ridiculous. That reminds me. Did you know the police department and sheriff's office are different entities and have different jobs? I didn't! That's what I get for never having pursued a life of crime. I've never been arrested, so I had a lot to learn about how a jail works and all that. The result of the research is that the police in the book do their jobs, but I don't explain why they do certain things.
The next step is to go over the rough draft and proofread and edit and knock it into shape. I'm not sure how long that will take, hopefully a week or two if I don't find any massive structural flaws. I did a certain amount of editing and proofreading along the way. After that I want to put it away for a month and let it grow stale so I can see it with "fresh" eyes and find all the hideously embarrassing things I missed during the first edit. However, there's some good news. Somebody on a writers forum I occasionally visit posted a link to a cheap, professional editor. I'm not rich, but I think I'll be able to try them out with this book. I'm excited about that. Part of my research aside from the police stuff was to read some books on the market today and get a general feel for what's out there. Too much of it needed more editing. It wasn't that the writing was bad. It was a polish thing. Some of it needed some major work, but there's one guy in particular who does a good job but needs that last little bit of polish to push him over the top. He's not the only one, of course, but he stood out because his stuff is good enough that I read more than one of his books. I don't want to put something out there that's "almost good enough" but falls short on silly little things.
I know I don't blog a lot. I try to wait until I have something to say instead of just slapping something up. Now that things are going faster, I should have more to say. Like what will I be doing in that month I'm letting this book rest? Working on the next one, but that'll have to wait for another day.
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