Now that the latest B'vellah book is out, I've been working on getting the book after AoE, the next book, ready to write. I didn't do anything on AoE this week like I thought I might. I mentioned I might put it up as a pre-order, but I want to go through the first chapter in light of the editor's advice and fluff it up a bit with more description. I may do one more pass through the entire book checking for skimpy prose. Plus, I needed a little break and had too much to do.
Messengers isn't very commercial. It's a bit of a niche concept. AoE and AoM, the book after AoE, should be more commercially appealing. Messengers is very Christian/Messianic with a lot of paraphrased verses and Biblical themes. AoE and AoM will have Christian characters with Christian morals and values but not be allegories the way Messengers is. My hope is that Christians will like them for the positive message and a general audience will like them for the story without being too put off when something spiritual shows up.
AoE and AoM are set in the near future after the collapse of the dollar but when society is recovering. The setting will be somewhat influenced by Biblical prophecy but won't be an attempt to portray what the future would be like during the Tribulation or anything like that. One example is that people buy and sell with RFID tattoos, but it's not the mark of the beast yet. I use the concept without the real context. An intelligence assessment I saw a while back predicted the U.S. would divide into 5 or 6 countries after a crash of the dollar. Based on that and current reality, Texas is part of Mexico. Idaho potatoes are an import product, the west coast is its own nation, etc.
In the books people can experience virtual reality with helmets and haptic equipment like they do today or get cranial implants. AoE is about a girl trapped in a virtual reality spy game, when her implants are blocked from logging her out of VR. AoM is about her dad, who plays a detective online but then has to solve a real crime using his game-learned skills. I'm still developing the story for that. It finally occurred to me how the main character can discover a clue the police missed. That was very important. They can only go over what's in their reports. If something is overlooked and didn't get into the reports, they don't know it's not there. One clue will be like that and open up a new line of investigation.
This week I spent three nights transcribing a story structure workbook into a file I could print and fill out. The book is 139 pages but has a lot of empty space and colorful yet unnecessary prose whose only purpose is to help fill out the page count. I was able to edit it down to 39 pages that include all the checklist questions and extra exercises while keeping all the necessary and useful prose. I still have a lot of empty space to answer the questions, some of which will have no answer because they're multiple choice questions that have only one answer for a given story. It was a lot of work that I hope will help me flesh out future books and brainstorm plot twists and turns.
So, that's the state of the books. Something I need to think about is whether to try to get an agent for AoE. I really could use a professional editor to do that, but I can't afford one right now. It's not an absolute requirement. It would just help a lot and could make the difference in selling the book or not. Something else to think about is whether to start fresh with a pen name. I have reasons to do it and reasons not to.
Have a great weekend.
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