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I finished the rough draft of The Lonetracker Chronicle just an hour or two ago. Now, there’s plenty left to do. It’s an unedited masterpiece and by that I mean it’s a masterwork of misplaced commas, typoed words, broken continuity, and boring narration. I’m taking a few weeks off to get some reading done, enjoy the summer, maybe visit a few friends and then it’s on to the editing. I feel like I’m only maybe twenty percent done with the whole pen to published process, but I’m past that first big hump. It feels pretty great.

The Lonetracker Chronicle is a science fiction story built around the apocalypse that nearly destroyed humanity in the early 22nd century.  Mankind survived and even made it into space, but even two hundred years later the scars of the great apocalypse run deep.  For history professor Arrek Borthwait, his own scars run even deeper.  Invited to critique a movie depicting the apocalypse, he finds his own past has come around in the person of Sengal Tariff, the movie’s director and an old nemesis.

That’s all I’m going to put out for now.  I still need to write out the back blurb text and get together a suitable query latter for when that time comes.  For now though, whew!  Both very happy and very tired.

I’m over two thirds done. I’ve got around ten chapters left.

The end is always the worst. Starting out the ideas are fresh. If it doesn’t work, so what, it was fun to play around with. A hundred thousand words later the doubts are a little more poignant. It’d be a shame if the last few months were really just ‘practice’. Is each chapter effective? Is the story effective? Is it entertaining? I keep saying that’s a job for editing, but there’s only so much that can be salvaged. Is the story any good? We’ll see…after I finish it.

It is a cool feeling though to almost have a manuscript done. A hundred thousand words printed feels hefty no matter what font you use. There’s a sense of accomplishment in holding a brick of paper that has your own words on it.

The next few weeks will be interesting. Once I actually get the whole thing done I’m taking a few weeks off. I’ll be reading the last couple of years worth of Nebula and Hugo award winners as well as The Secret Atlas trilogy by Michael A. Stackpole. I might also pick up some more research books on future technologies for my story. Once I’ve, hopefully, mostly forgotten what I’ve written it’ll be editing time. And well, that’ll be the summer. Cheers!

May 1st. March might welcome in spring but the flowers wait till May. It’s a good time to get outside and hike, play some tennis, do absolutely anything except for sit inside writing…

Which is why I’m happy I’m just over half done. I’ll hopefully have finished a rough draft by September. I’ll be looking to edit it until the end of the year and then make 2010 the year of publishing. These schedules of mine never seem to survive contact with whim.

I’m still enthusiastic about the story overall, probably because I’ve changed the plot around a dozen times already. It’s become a lot faster than my outline and so I’ve had to expand a number of sections. A few characters have popped out of nowhere and now they need some developing too. This has lead to a lot of rough chapters not much better than a lengthy outline and continuity errors abound at this point, but I’ve been taking notes. The editing process is already piling up tasks.

The second half promises to be even harder. The tension is really starting to build on a few characters, but it won’t be a graceful road to the end. And then, of course, I have to end it. That’s the monkey that rides my back for the first 90,000 words. The outline was meant to tie everyone’s story down nicely, but then the outlined changed, so the ending has to too. I’m not sure I’m prepared for that just yet.

So, that’s the update. It’s coming along. The most interesting part has been the different direction my research has gone. Most people do their research and then write a story around it. I prefer to write the story, leave things loose enough that I can change things as necessary, add in the research that I think will add verisimilitude, and then tighten the plot around that. So far I’m looking at a small library of physics books that I’ll need to get through before the real editing can begin.

Another update soon!

It’s important. It’s just a shame that it’s so hard. Writing is an art not a science, but editing is even more capricious. I’ve taken bad stories and edited them into something interesting, but I’ve taken rather clever stories and made them into dreck just the same. Editing is a difficult, time-consuming, and horribly subjective process that make or ruin any writing.

It may be subjective, but it’s not without rules. Below are a handful of websites with suggestions on editing. Some of them are well-known and fairly. (Less is more) Others are far more obscure. (Don’t norminalize your verbs).

10 Tips For Effective Editing

Improve Your Writing With These Editing Tips

How to Edit your Own Writing

And a few tips of my own:

Change the font on your manuscript so it looks different: It helps you read writing you are already intimately familiar without filling in the gaps with what you remember.

Reverse Outline: Go through a story or chapter and create an outline of the major points. Match this to your original outline to see if you said more or less than what you intended.

Keep Revisions: Keep saved versions of older edits. Feel free to tear your writing apart since you can always look back at what you had.

Good luck!

Recently I’ve taken to exploring micro-fiction, defined by me, as complete stories less than 1000 words. I was initially skeptical about either writing or reading anything of that length. Writing fiction that short has certainly been very difficult. You really have to narrow down your focus on exactly what you want to say, exactly what character you want to portrait, and exactly what story you want to tell.

Entirely separate, I created a twitter account. Twitter is a social news and messaging sites. You can update it (create twits) over email or text message. People who subscribe to your twitter get these messages instantly. It’s been used in the past for on-the-spot reporting, especially of tech conferences and political events.

It wasn’t long before I considering combining this ‘new’ type of fiction with this new technology.

However, the average twitter message is less than twenty words. Even with a succession of twits, fiction would be limited to maybe 100 words. I initially wrote off twitter as a new and novel means of delivering stories, but the idea remains intriguing. It would certainly be a good way of enticing readers with a first paragraph or summary, but I feel there may still be a use for it as the means of delivering complete stories, it just remains to be seen what enterprising author can manage to write entertaining vignettes of that length.

I currently have a twitter name, but no stories to release. I’m trying to drum up some discussion of the idea though. I may write something soon. I’ll make sure to post the relevant information whenever that project (one of ever so many) comes to fruition. In the mean time, what are everyone’s thoughts on this?

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=twitter&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8